Gas Furnaces and Condensate Pumps

     My parents grew up in houses heated with coal.  The thing with coal was that every few hours you had to shovel some more black nuggets into the fire if you wanted to stay warm.  You couldn't stray far from home in the winter.  If you did, the pipes might freeze when the fire burned out.  Coal was dirty stuff.  The corner of the cellar that held the coal bin was covered in black dust.  Disposing of coal ash was tricky.  You couldn't compost it with garden waste or spread it on the lawn as you could with wood ash.
     My parents' home was heated by an oil burner.  I always felt sorry for the poor oil delivery guy who had to come to us in the coldest weather.  His job was probably worse than working at a gas station in the winter.  The burner needed annual cleaning and maintenance, a job that left my father's hands, clothes, and sometimes even his face, filthy.  Our system was a hot water system.  Every room had lengths of copper pipes through which hot water traveled, radiating heat as it went.  Valves opened making a plinking sound each time heat was delivered.  That was a nice sound.  After about thirty five years, the minerals in the circulating water that came from our well deteriorated some of the copper pipes.   A number of pinholes developed that sprayed water.  My parents were in for a few cold hours while the heater was shut down, pipes were drained, and repairs ensued.
     I had electric baseboard heating in my first house.  Everybody warned me it would be expensive, but the house was well insulated and I was happy with the thermostat set at 68° in the main rooms, so I never felt the need to complain about the bill.
     Electric baseboard heating meant that House Number One didn't have ductwork.  I didn't have central air conditioning.  I had window units.  By the time I moved on to House Number Two, my area of Hainesport had gas lines.  I was moving up in the world with my gas furnace and central A/C.
     The thing with high efficiency gas furnaces is that water condenses during their operation, and that water has to drain away somehow.  In some houses, the water is routed into a floor drain and gravity takes care of the problem.  That's not the case here.  My furnace's waste water collects in the reservoir of a condensate pump.  When the reservoir fills to a certain level, the pump switches on and blasts the water up through the ceiling, across a section of the unheated attic, down through the laundry room wall, and out through the washing machine drain.
     Even though the water's exit route is wrapped with insulation and even though the tubing is pitched downhill as it runs through the attic, the line can and did freeze with our recent cold temperatures.  From December 26, 2017 through January 8, 2018, the daily high temperature never went above 32°.  The average high during this fourteen day period was 23°.  The average nighttime low was 11°.  A frozen condensate line meant the heater stopped running.  It was really cold in here on the morning of December 31st.  Really cold.
     We feel proud of ourselves because we diagnosed the problem and dealt with it.  Because we didn't call for service, we didn't get a great, big bill.  We knew it had been cold for a good long while.  We knew that a frozen line was a possibility.  A frozen line would shut down the pump which would shut down the heater.  The other possibility was that the pump was kaput.  Since we didn't have an ohmmeter to test the pump's various electrical connections, and since we didn't want to dismantle the pump's connection to the heater, we decided to unplug the pump and manually empty the reservoir.  The second the water level dropped below the pump's float, the heater began to run.  As long as we emptied the reservoir regularly, the heater would function.  We figured that we would plug in the pump when the line thawed.  If it started up, hooray, problem solved.  If it didn't, it was time to call the HVAC guy and buy a new pump.  How would we know if the line was thawed?  It was wrapped in spongy, black insulation and secured with black tape.  I put a bowl of water in the attic.  It promptly froze solid.  When the water in the bowl thawed, I reasoned that the drain line would have to be clear.  On January 13th, after three days of a high temperature around 60° and after two days of the ice in the bowl returning to a liquid state, I plugged in the pump, and all was well.

     If you are the kind of geek that likes looking at temperature records, go to Weather Underground:

https://www.wunderground.com/

This is a condensate pump. 

You pop out a little cap to empty the water reservoir.

This is the condensate line that goes into the attic.

This is the end of the line where it dumps into the washer drain.

This is the $12.99 pump, bought at Lowe's, that got us through this record setting cold snap.