8 ms·

My furnace went out during the 2025 holiday and I couldn't get an appointment with a repair person for 2 days. It was getting very cold in my house so I went in

My furnace went out during the 2025 holiday and I couldn't get an appointment with a repair person for 2 days. It was getting very cold in my house so I went into my attic and made several videos of the furnace attempting to start and gave it to gemini. It diagnosed the issue immediately and had me spin one of the components (a small exhaust fan) while the furnace tried to fire. It came on immediately. I had to do that several times, but it worked until the HVAC service showed up.

alberth 3mo ago
Do you mind explain more. Did you just prompt to Gemini what was happening, did you give Gemini photos of Furnance, etc?
- gwbas1c 3mo ago
  > and made several videos of the furnace attempting to start and gave it to gemini I assume recorded videos and uploaded them in the Gemini phone on their app; and then probably said "what's wrong?" Gemini is very good at those kinds of things. I recently got some ratcheting straps and needed to use them, but at the time I didn't know what they were called, so I didn't know what to search for on Google. I opened the Gemini app, pushed the button to take a picture (just like in text messages,) and included a message that was similar to "what is this and how do I use it?"
- andrewthornton 3mo ago
  Yes, here is my prompt. It also contained a video: "I have a furnace that will not heat when I reset the power to this unit. It makes some noise within its fan system for about three or four minutes and then I get an error light. Can you help me figure out what may be wrong here?" This prompt is not the best but I was freezing and in my attic.
tonyedgecombe 3mo ago
I've been fitting a kitchen and chatGPT has been useful to bounce ideas off and resolve issues. Of course if IKEA's documentation wasn't so sparse I wouldn't need it but that's another story. I guess I'm seeing similar benefits to a novice programmer. Professionals would scoff at my work but they are expensive and difficult to work with. Meanwhile I'm getting the job done. On the other hand I'm not touching AI for any development work. I'm too worried about my skills atrophying or not properly learning anything new.
- rustyhancock 3mo ago
  Ikeas instructions are such an oddity. It feels like there is precisely enough information to deduce each step. But only just enough miss one clue and you have something on upside down on step 7 that you won't notice until step 37. I feel whoever makes them could probably make a wicked NY Times Crossword puzzle.
  - baq 3mo ago
    IKEA instructions are the best in the industry - so imagine what the other companies are giving out. They’re also actually good if you know to follow them exactly: double check every side, every hole, every screw and you won’t go wrong.
    - deleted 3mo ago
      [deleted]
    - tonyedgecombe 3mo ago
      So far I’ve found several mistakes, instructions that relate to no longer available items and a couple of ambiguities. They may be good for the flat pack industry but they are a long way from perfect.
ssl-3 3mo ago
That's pretty great. (Though that's also the kind of hands-on troubleshooting step/fix that a person could just google for and find pretty easily back before the internet got all fucked up.)
- Cheetah26 3mo ago
  Your parenthetical really describes my experience with AI searches. 5+ years ago I could find most things within one or two quick searches, now it takes so many that of course I'm going to reach for AI because that's the only way to get back to my baseline efficiency.
  - ssl-3 3mo ago
    I learned to troubleshoot furnaces late one cold night in 2004 using Google, while a worried wife and a couple of sleeping kids loomed over me like a dark cloud. I learned what thermocouples are, what they do, how they work, and how to test them; all of which was new to me. A few hours later I bought one from the Ace Hardware a few blocks away and fixed the furnace with confidence. And that was awesome. Thanks, Google! :) I don't know where the change happened. It certainly wasn't overnight. Where Google used to be magical and other search engines quickly improved, it all kind of turned into shit. It really seems that I was getting better, more-direct results from Altavista 30 years ago than I do with top-flight search engines today. (That's a deliberately low bar, chosen because Altavista wasn't even intended to be "good" back then. I mean, it started as just as a side project at DEC to demonstrate that their Alpha hardware was able to index the entire World Wide Web.) So lately, I've been doing the same thing as you: I'm increasingly using ChatGPT to do this basic fact-finding stuff. In this way, it mostly operates the search engine for me, but it lets me drill down through a sea of terrible search results to find something useful fairly quickly. It's still not great -- I still have to reject mountains of bullshit. But it's better than alternatives, and I can reject the bullshit with conceptual descriptions instead of trying to get Google to do what I need it to do (what it used to do). It feels all wrong using an LLM to do this stuff, but whatever. I'm still getting stuff done.
  - fuckinpuppers 3mo ago
wombat-man 3mo ago
Oh yeah. I can't remember which LLM, but one helped me repair my dryer.
buckle8017 3mo ago
Gemini almost killed you. The exhaust blower not working triggered a safety that prevented the furnace from firing. Spinning it bypassed the safety. You likely inhaled a lot more carbon monoxide than you know.
- philipkglass 3mo ago
  From the description I thought that a degraded capacitor or lack of lubrication made the blower not start on its own, but the blower (and the whole furnace) would work if given a manual startup spin by hand.
- kunjanshah 3mo ago
  https://www.covenantairesolutions.com/post/what-is-a-furnace-inducer-motor-a-quick-guide https://www.covenantairesolutions.com/post/what-is-a-furnace... “At its core, it's a small motor with a fan attached that has one primary job: to vent harmful exhaust gases out of your home before the burners ever kick on. This is the very first step in the heating sequence, and it's non-negotiable for a safe startup.“
  - Izkata 3mo ago
    The original comment was unclear whether the fan kept spinning while the furnace was running, or if all it did was bypass the safety and the fan didn't continue to spin while the furnace ran. They clarified in their response it kept spinning.
    - MPSimmons 3mo ago
      It seemed obvious to me that this was bearing stiction and that manually rotating it during the start allowed the fan to spin on its own after that, but I could be wrong and maybe the fan was dead entirely?
      - modriano 3mo ago
        Yeah, that would be my assumption too (based on my admittedly incomplete personal experience where I got my furnace running by manually spinning my draft inducer motor, which kept spinning). As exhausting the combustion products is a critical safety feature, I would be surprised if any furnace was designed such that it could possibly keep running if the draft inducer motor stopped. It seems like it would be trivially easy to make a circuit such that gas valves could only open if the draft inducer motor + fan wasn't spinning.
brntheater 3mo ago
Had something similar this week. Gas dryer started, but wouldn't heat. Gemini suggested it's often a thermal fuse. Took off the back panel and uploaded a photo to Gemini. It pointed me to the fuse (e.g. "the white rectangle above the blue and red cords") and walked me through testing it. Not only that, but it also linked me to the part I needed after I provided the model number of the dryer. Finally, it recommended cleaning out the vent as the fuse likely blew because heat wasn't venting properly. After a thorough cleaning of the exhaust and a $5 fuse the dryer is working fine.
- semiquaver 3mo ago
  I can (honestly) tell that exact same story, except offset by three years so it was before AI and I did the same exact steps and had the same insights except with Google results instead of an LLM providing the key unlocks.
  - QuercusMax 3mo ago
    ...and now you probably won't be able to find that info with regular Google and HAVE to use Gemini.
jodacola 3mo ago
Very similar thing this week, and an interesting story to go along with it! I called my normal HVAC company for my rental home because the tenant reported the AC wasn't cooling the house. When I called, I got one of the latest AI voice assistants to help me, and it was an awful experience and I ended up not hearing back after the assistant told me the office would call me back. So, I went over to the house and used ChatGPT to help me diagnose the issue by taking some photos of the compressor panel outside. It walked me through what to check, I provided some diagnostic codes I witnessed... and it walked me through the very simple repair of replacing the $25 capacitor. It was going to cost me almost 4x that just for the service call to diagnose what was wrong in the first place. So, the weird experience was: Gen AI made me lose trust in my normal HVAC company, and more Gen AI basically allowed me to replace my HVAC company and do the repair myself all in one day.
- userbinator 3mo ago
  Even before AI, YouTube was full of videos on these topics.
  - fn-mote 3mo ago
    The bar for finding them is higher, though. Tbh, I think people feel more comfortable asking an AI. Even though I “know” it’s all smoke and mirrors, I still prefer the human-like interaction to the grind of watching video after video and building my own understanding. OOPS… there you see how it’s going to end. I’m the meatspace button-pusher.
  - ben_w 3mo ago
    When I was a kid, if I didn't know how to spell a word and asked the teacher, a common answer was to tell me to look it up in the dictionary. As words in a dictionary are sorted alphabetically rather than phonetically, this is unhelpful. YouTube videos have the same kind of problem, in that you can only easily find the video explaining which dielectric unions suit your problem when already know what those are (to use an example that I had to ask ChatGPT for because I have no plumbing experience even if I did know about galvanic corrosion and therefore immediately understood why they're important once I saw the name).
dgemm 3mo ago
Similar - had an HVAC tech out to diagnose mine (some intermittent electrical problem was killing thermostats randomly) and since it was intermittent they couldn't figure it out. I ended up using Gemini to narrow down a list of potential problem components and just replacing them all which fixed the issue. Kind of a superpower to turn anyone with a bit of tech inclination and problem solving skills into an HVAC tech - not a very good one, but one with enough motivation to get the results you need
- ericmcer 3mo ago
  Same story, ended up just need to replace a fuse and clean out some filters. I hate to be a "tech elitist" or whatever, but goddamn it seems like software is one of the most learning intensive careers you can pick. A little dabbling around the house has made me an amateur plumber/HVAC/handyman/gardener/etc. I should have gone into a trade, just for the comfort of having a skillset that doesn't need to be updated every 3 months. I guess my brain plasticity will thank me.
joescharf 3mo ago
Also similar - our Tesla Solar stopped producing (again). 3 week wait for service tech. In the meantime I had Claude probe the inverter, find endpoints for retrieving status, re-setting AFCI and Modbus TCP (for HA monitoring), etc. Claude was able to obtain installer mode access through a review the javascript bundle. I had Claude turn all this into an iOS app, which I used to gather data to diagnose the issue over the next week. Had Claude summarize the findings into a PDF that I provided to the Tesla Solar service rep, which in the words of said rep was very helpful.
userbinator 3mo ago
but it worked until the HVAC service showed up. Did you attempt to prompt it further into figuring out the actual problem, or know what they did to actually fix it? My bet is on a bad starting capacitor for the motor --- something that's a relatively cheap and quick repair.
- oceanplexian 3mo ago
  I installed 4 mini splits with it two years ago and they are still working great and blowing ice cold air. It walked me through measuring refrigerant, subcool and superheat, pulling the vacuum, brazing the lines, exactly what tools to buy, I even input the numbers from the meter and it told me how much to add and so on. And this was with GPT4 or something far less intelligent. In the past I tried to learn this stuff but the HVAC community are massive gatekeepers and try to hide information behind paywalls or spread FUD even though anyone could do it with the right tools and a little bit of knowledge.
- conductr 3mo ago
  Pretty much any motor having this symptom I swap a new capacitor in just to check before even calling a technician. I always just keep a spare on hand for my hvac and pool equipment.
namanyayg 3mo ago
I have a similar story with my washing machine repair. I went through 2 service technicians not being able to diagnose it. Gpt did it and I told the 3rd what to do and it worked.
goalieca 3mo ago
That’s an old trick I learned when I googled “my furnace won’t start” back in the day. Didn’t have to make videos. Just scrolled a few handyman sites.
hammock 3mo ago
Sounds like a blown capacitor
AlwaysRock 3mo ago
Yup. ChatGPT has become Chat General Contractor at my house. I am moderately handy. But talking through a project with an llm before I start it has been great at helping me evaluate its difficulty level, rough estimate of how long it will take, to dos and not to dos, and helping me get unstuck or fix a mistake. And frankly its convinced me several times that I should just hire someone to do x instead of trying to do it myself. The alternative is watching youtube videos which are almost always diy people who try to tell you that you can do everything yourself.
itstriz 3mo ago
Another home improvement example for me: my washing machine stopped spinning. I looked online for the machine manual but couldn't find it with basic search. I had ChatGPT Pro search for the repair manual (for service technicians) and help me troubleshoot my problem. It found a PDF of the manual somewhere and pointed me in the right direction to start diagnosing. Between reading the manual and prompting for extra help, I was able to pinpoint the area of the issue, and found that a belt had come off from a wobbly pulley wheel. Tightened up the wheel, put the belt back on and fixed it (at least for now).
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
amboo7 3mo ago
Same happened to me. I only had to ask the service where to tap exactly.

alberth 3mo ago

Do you mind explain more. Did you just prompt to Gemini what was happening, did you give Gemini photos of Furnance, etc?

gwbas1c 3mo ago
> and made several videos of the furnace attempting to start and gave it to gemini I assume recorded videos and uploaded them in the Gemini phone on their app; and then probably said "what's wrong?" Gemini is very good at those kinds of things. I recently got some ratcheting straps and needed to use them, but at the time I didn't know what they were called, so I didn't know what to search for on Google. I opened the Gemini app, pushed the button to take a picture (just like in text messages,) and included a message that was similar to "what is this and how do I use it?"
andrewthornton 3mo ago
Yes, here is my prompt. It also contained a video: "I have a furnace that will not heat when I reset the power to this unit. It makes some noise within its fan system for about three or four minutes and then I get an error light. Can you help me figure out what may be wrong here?" This prompt is not the best but I was freezing and in my attic.

tonyedgecombe 3mo ago

I've been fitting a kitchen and chatGPT has been useful to bounce ideas off and resolve issues. Of course if IKEA's documentation wasn't so sparse I wouldn't need it but that's another story. I guess I'm seeing similar benefits to a novice programmer. Professionals would scoff at my work but they are expensive and difficult to work with. Meanwhile I'm getting the job done. On the other hand I'm not touching AI for any development work. I'm too worried about my skills atrophying or not properly learning anything new.

rustyhancock 3mo ago
Ikeas instructions are such an oddity. It feels like there is precisely enough information to deduce each step. But only just enough miss one clue and you have something on upside down on step 7 that you won't notice until step 37. I feel whoever makes them could probably make a wicked NY Times Crossword puzzle.
- baq 3mo ago
  IKEA instructions are the best in the industry - so imagine what the other companies are giving out. They’re also actually good if you know to follow them exactly: double check every side, every hole, every screw and you won’t go wrong.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  - tonyedgecombe 3mo ago
    So far I’ve found several mistakes, instructions that relate to no longer available items and a couple of ambiguities. They may be good for the flat pack industry but they are a long way from perfect.

ssl-3 3mo ago

That's pretty great. (Though that's also the kind of hands-on troubleshooting step/fix that a person could just google for and find pretty easily back before the internet got all fucked up.)

Cheetah26 3mo ago
Your parenthetical really describes my experience with AI searches. 5+ years ago I could find most things within one or two quick searches, now it takes so many that of course I'm going to reach for AI because that's the only way to get back to my baseline efficiency.
- ssl-3 3mo ago
  I learned to troubleshoot furnaces late one cold night in 2004 using Google, while a worried wife and a couple of sleeping kids loomed over me like a dark cloud. I learned what thermocouples are, what they do, how they work, and how to test them; all of which was new to me. A few hours later I bought one from the Ace Hardware a few blocks away and fixed the furnace with confidence. And that was awesome. Thanks, Google! :) I don't know where the change happened. It certainly wasn't overnight. Where Google used to be magical and other search engines quickly improved, it all kind of turned into shit. It really seems that I was getting better, more-direct results from Altavista 30 years ago than I do with top-flight search engines today. (That's a deliberately low bar, chosen because Altavista wasn't even intended to be "good" back then. I mean, it started as just as a side project at DEC to demonstrate that their Alpha hardware was able to index the entire World Wide Web.) So lately, I've been doing the same thing as you: I'm increasingly using ChatGPT to do this basic fact-finding stuff. In this way, it mostly operates the search engine for me, but it lets me drill down through a sea of terrible search results to find something useful fairly quickly. It's still not great -- I still have to reject mountains of bullshit. But it's better than alternatives, and I can reject the bullshit with conceptual descriptions instead of trying to get Google to do what I need it to do (what it used to do). It feels all wrong using an LLM to do this stuff, but whatever. I'm still getting stuff done.
- fuckinpuppers 3mo ago

wombat-man 3mo ago

Oh yeah. I can't remember which LLM, but one helped me repair my dryer.

buckle8017 3mo ago

Gemini almost killed you. The exhaust blower not working triggered a safety that prevented the furnace from firing. Spinning it bypassed the safety. You likely inhaled a lot more carbon monoxide than you know.

philipkglass 3mo ago
From the description I thought that a degraded capacitor or lack of lubrication made the blower not start on its own, but the blower (and the whole furnace) would work if given a manual startup spin by hand.
kunjanshah 3mo ago
https://www.covenantairesolutions.com/post/what-is-a-furnace-inducer-motor-a-quick-guide https://www.covenantairesolutions.com/post/what-is-a-furnace... “At its core, it's a small motor with a fan attached that has one primary job: to vent harmful exhaust gases out of your home before the burners ever kick on. This is the very first step in the heating sequence, and it's non-negotiable for a safe startup.“
- Izkata 3mo ago
  The original comment was unclear whether the fan kept spinning while the furnace was running, or if all it did was bypass the safety and the fan didn't continue to spin while the furnace ran. They clarified in their response it kept spinning.
  - MPSimmons 3mo ago
    It seemed obvious to me that this was bearing stiction and that manually rotating it during the start allowed the fan to spin on its own after that, but I could be wrong and maybe the fan was dead entirely?
    - modriano 3mo ago
      Yeah, that would be my assumption too (based on my admittedly incomplete personal experience where I got my furnace running by manually spinning my draft inducer motor, which kept spinning). As exhausting the combustion products is a critical safety feature, I would be surprised if any furnace was designed such that it could possibly keep running if the draft inducer motor stopped. It seems like it would be trivially easy to make a circuit such that gas valves could only open if the draft inducer motor + fan wasn't spinning.

brntheater 3mo ago

Had something similar this week. Gas dryer started, but wouldn't heat. Gemini suggested it's often a thermal fuse. Took off the back panel and uploaded a photo to Gemini. It pointed me to the fuse (e.g. "the white rectangle above the blue and red cords") and walked me through testing it. Not only that, but it also linked me to the part I needed after I provided the model number of the dryer. Finally, it recommended cleaning out the vent as the fuse likely blew because heat wasn't venting properly. After a thorough cleaning of the exhaust and a $5 fuse the dryer is working fine.

semiquaver 3mo ago
I can (honestly) tell that exact same story, except offset by three years so it was before AI and I did the same exact steps and had the same insights except with Google results instead of an LLM providing the key unlocks.
- QuercusMax 3mo ago
  ...and now you probably won't be able to find that info with regular Google and HAVE to use Gemini.

jodacola 3mo ago

Very similar thing this week, and an interesting story to go along with it! I called my normal HVAC company for my rental home because the tenant reported the AC wasn't cooling the house. When I called, I got one of the latest AI voice assistants to help me, and it was an awful experience and I ended up not hearing back after the assistant told me the office would call me back. So, I went over to the house and used ChatGPT to help me diagnose the issue by taking some photos of the compressor panel outside. It walked me through what to check, I provided some diagnostic codes I witnessed... and it walked me through the very simple repair of replacing the $25 capacitor. It was going to cost me almost 4x that just for the service call to diagnose what was wrong in the first place. So, the weird experience was: Gen AI made me lose trust in my normal HVAC company, and more Gen AI basically allowed me to replace my HVAC company and do the repair myself all in one day.

userbinator 3mo ago
Even before AI, YouTube was full of videos on these topics.
- fn-mote 3mo ago
  The bar for finding them is higher, though. Tbh, I think people feel more comfortable asking an AI. Even though I “know” it’s all smoke and mirrors, I still prefer the human-like interaction to the grind of watching video after video and building my own understanding. OOPS… there you see how it’s going to end. I’m the meatspace button-pusher.
- ben_w 3mo ago
  When I was a kid, if I didn't know how to spell a word and asked the teacher, a common answer was to tell me to look it up in the dictionary. As words in a dictionary are sorted alphabetically rather than phonetically, this is unhelpful. YouTube videos have the same kind of problem, in that you can only easily find the video explaining which dielectric unions suit your problem when already know what those are (to use an example that I had to ask ChatGPT for because I have no plumbing experience even if I did know about galvanic corrosion and therefore immediately understood why they're important once I saw the name).

dgemm 3mo ago

Similar - had an HVAC tech out to diagnose mine (some intermittent electrical problem was killing thermostats randomly) and since it was intermittent they couldn't figure it out. I ended up using Gemini to narrow down a list of potential problem components and just replacing them all which fixed the issue. Kind of a superpower to turn anyone with a bit of tech inclination and problem solving skills into an HVAC tech - not a very good one, but one with enough motivation to get the results you need

ericmcer 3mo ago
Same story, ended up just need to replace a fuse and clean out some filters. I hate to be a "tech elitist" or whatever, but goddamn it seems like software is one of the most learning intensive careers you can pick. A little dabbling around the house has made me an amateur plumber/HVAC/handyman/gardener/etc. I should have gone into a trade, just for the comfort of having a skillset that doesn't need to be updated every 3 months. I guess my brain plasticity will thank me.

joescharf 3mo ago

Also similar - our Tesla Solar stopped producing (again). 3 week wait for service tech. In the meantime I had Claude probe the inverter, find endpoints for retrieving status, re-setting AFCI and Modbus TCP (for HA monitoring), etc. Claude was able to obtain installer mode access through a review the javascript bundle. I had Claude turn all this into an iOS app, which I used to gather data to diagnose the issue over the next week. Had Claude summarize the findings into a PDF that I provided to the Tesla Solar service rep, which in the words of said rep was very helpful.

userbinator 3mo ago

but it worked until the HVAC service showed up. Did you attempt to prompt it further into figuring out the actual problem, or know what they did to actually fix it? My bet is on a bad starting capacitor for the motor --- something that's a relatively cheap and quick repair.

oceanplexian 3mo ago
I installed 4 mini splits with it two years ago and they are still working great and blowing ice cold air. It walked me through measuring refrigerant, subcool and superheat, pulling the vacuum, brazing the lines, exactly what tools to buy, I even input the numbers from the meter and it told me how much to add and so on. And this was with GPT4 or something far less intelligent. In the past I tried to learn this stuff but the HVAC community are massive gatekeepers and try to hide information behind paywalls or spread FUD even though anyone could do it with the right tools and a little bit of knowledge.
conductr 3mo ago
Pretty much any motor having this symptom I swap a new capacitor in just to check before even calling a technician. I always just keep a spare on hand for my hvac and pool equipment.

namanyayg 3mo ago

I have a similar story with my washing machine repair. I went through 2 service technicians not being able to diagnose it. Gpt did it and I told the 3rd what to do and it worked.

goalieca 3mo ago

That’s an old trick I learned when I googled “my furnace won’t start” back in the day. Didn’t have to make videos. Just scrolled a few handyman sites.

hammock 3mo ago

Sounds like a blown capacitor

AlwaysRock 3mo ago

Yup. ChatGPT has become Chat General Contractor at my house. I am moderately handy. But talking through a project with an llm before I start it has been great at helping me evaluate its difficulty level, rough estimate of how long it will take, to dos and not to dos, and helping me get unstuck or fix a mistake. And frankly its convinced me several times that I should just hire someone to do x instead of trying to do it myself. The alternative is watching youtube videos which are almost always diy people who try to tell you that you can do everything yourself.

itstriz 3mo ago

Another home improvement example for me: my washing machine stopped spinning. I looked online for the machine manual but couldn't find it with basic search. I had ChatGPT Pro search for the repair manual (for service technicians) and help me troubleshoot my problem. It found a PDF of the manual somewhere and pointed me in the right direction to start diagnosing. Between reading the manual and prompting for extra help, I was able to pinpoint the area of the issue, and found that a belt had come off from a wobbly pulley wheel. Tightened up the wheel, put the belt back on and fixed it (at least for now).

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

amboo7 3mo ago

Same happened to me. I only had to ask the service where to tap exactly.