Furnace repair inBurnaby

The Heights and Capitol Hill: systems at the end

Burnaby's post-war neighbourhoods have a specific heating profile, and it's arriving at a specific moment.

Houses built in the ⁨1940s–60s⁩ have typically been through two furnace replacements — an original, a mid-efficiency unit somewhere around the 1980s or 90s, and in many cases a high-efficiency replacement in the 2000s. That last one is now fifteen to twenty-five years old, which is exactly the window where repairs stop being worth it.

What that means practically: in these neighbourhoods, a furnace call is more often a replace-or-repair conversation than a straightforward fix. We'll do the repair if it's the right answer — a flame sensor on a twelve-year-old unit is a flame sensor. But if you've had two breakdowns in two winters on a twenty-year-old furnace, we'll say so and give you both numbers rather than fixing it again.

⚠️ A cracked heat exchanger ends the conversation entirely. That's a carbon monoxide risk, and the unit gets shut down rather than repaired. We check for it as a matter of course on any older unit.

The towers: probably not a furnace

Metrotown, Brentwood, Lougheed and Highgate suites are generally heated by electric baseboards, fan coils fed by a building system, or increasingly a heat pump.

If your suite is cold, the first question is whether the equipment is yours or the building's. Several suites cold at once means the building's plant, and that's a call to your property manager rather than to us — though we work on building systems too, and property managers are welcome to call.

Edmonds, South Burnaby and the 90s stock

Newer systems, more straightforward repairs, and the units installed with the original construction are now reaching twenty-five to thirty years old — the point where parts availability starts to be the constraint rather than the fault itself.

The baseboard conversion question

Burnaby has a substantial amount of older apartment and townhouse stock heated by electric baseboards, and it comes up constantly: is it worth converting?

Honest answer: a ductless mini-split is usually the better move than trying to add ductwork. Baseboard heating is expensive to run and provides no cooling, and installing ducts in a building that has none is rarely economic. A mini-split heats efficiently, cools in summer, and doesn't require tearing anything apart.

In a strata, it needs approval for the outdoor unit — and some buildings prohibit them. Worth checking your bylaws before pricing anything.

Gas permits are issued by the City of Burnaby, not Technical Safety BC. Technical Safety BC: Jurisdiction

Installing, modifying or upgrading any part of a gas system in a single-family or duplex dwelling requires a City gas permit. City of Burnaby: Residential Trade Permits