Emergency Help for gas furnace?

My buddy has gas furnace that is eating transformers, anybody know anything about them and what could possibly cause this?

It's a well-mcclain and they installed a transformer and it got burned up in 18 seconds.

If you're famialiar with these units PM me.

any generic xformer that smokes in 18 secs, its gotta be a short somewhere

sounds like a dead short on 24v side get your cont. tester out and start looking ,are you sure it's a furnace

Is it possible it's getting 220v instead of 110v?

18 seconds is a long time for a 220/110 issue I think. a mere 1-3 seconds would be more likley for a high voltage issue. the 24 volt side is prolly where a short is. measure the resistance in each circut, also for continuity .

what model mc clain?

Well they "fixed" it for the time being, not sure what they did but it's not permanent. It was for an apartment which was what the emergency was. Looks like they'll have someone come in this week to really fix it.

Thanks.

A pine branch fell on my friend's service entrance wires once and broke the neutral wire in two. With no neutral to the house, a bunch of transformers blew, including one on the furnace.

In a separate incident, an electrician had done some wiring at her house during the construction of her addition;
I stayed out of the way during that circus of incompetency. Later I tapped into a 110v junction box to power her furnace and a few components blew immediately. The "electrician" had rewired the junction box to carry 220v, with no indication of it on the white neutral wires. I inadvertantly ran 220 to the furnace. I took something for granted, that's the way it always goes.

Richard S. wrote:Looks like they'll have someone come in this week to really fix it.

If you find out what the problem was, post it so we'll all learn from it.

1. Make sure the replacement transformer VA rating is equal to or larger than the orginal transformer.

2. Consider fusing the secondary side. You can buy transformers with a built in circuit breaker. Inline fuses work just as well and are cheaper than transformers.

3. Check for shorts and voltage backfeed on the secondary. This winter I had an instance where a squirrel chewed the insulation off of some wires. The 110v line touched the 24v control wire. Burned out the transformer, control board and thermostat in a flash.

4. Check the thermostat. Could be it has a problem.

good luck.