HVAC Repair in Belleville, IL
Homes here need heat from October through April and cooling from May through September. If your system quits, tell us what it's doing and a licensed contractor who covers St. Clair County will get in touch.
Tell us about the job
It takes about a minute.
Belleville asks a lot of your system, in both directions
Your furnace works October through April here, and on nights that drop to 26°F it cycles on and off for hours at a time. Each start is a strain on the igniter and the ignition control board. When one of those parts wears out, the furnace stops lighting and the house goes cold. Most homes in the area heat with gas, so that burner and igniter are doing the work most winters.
Then summer turns it around. Afternoons near 87°F push the air conditioner to run long stretches to keep up, and that kind of load wears on the compressor and the run capacitor that starts it. Wind is part of the picture too. St. Clair County has logged 84 damaging wind events over the past ten years, and wind can knock branches into a condenser or twist the unit on its pad. Add in the power outages that come with winter storms, nine of them here since 2015, and a system that was already working hard can come back to a hard restart or not come back at all.
- 7 months
- October through April, your system heats
- 5 months
- May through September, it cools
- 26°F
- the average winter night it heats against
- 87°F
- the average summer afternoon it cools against
NOAA nClimDiv, 1991–2020 normals
A new furnace and air conditioner would cut about $130 a year off heating and cooling for a typical St. Clair County home.
Estimates for a typical St. Clair County home, compared with an older unit built to the previous federal minimum, from EIA household energy data, Illinois fuel prices and NOAA climate normals. Your home will differ.
Repair makes sense when one part has failed.
Replacement makes sense when the furnace's heat exchanger is cracked, the air conditioner's compressor has failed, or repairs keep coming.
In Illinois, HVAC licensing for homes is left to the cities and towns.
In St. Clair County, whether a contractor needs a local license depends on which town the house is in. Some towns require HVAC contractors to hold a local license, others don't license the trade at all, and unincorporated parts of the county may not have any local rule in place. There's no state board or statewide list behind any of it, so wherever a record exists, it sits with the city or village hall, not the state.
On a repair job, the part that matters most is the gas connection, since a bad one is the dangerous part of the work. Whether that gets checked comes down to the same local rule as the license, town by town, with no state HVAC license standing behind any of it.
Source: Illinois General Assembly
- Why is my heat not working?
- Start with the thermostat. Make sure it is set to heat and set above room temperature, since a setting bumped a degree or two can look like a dead system. Check your breaker panel next, since a tripped breaker will shut the furnace down with no warning. If the thermostat has batteries, swap them out. When those check out fine and you still have no heat, the igniter or the flame sensor is often the reason a gas furnace will not fire, and that is a job for a contractor to diagnose.
- Why is my system running but not cooling the house?
- Check the air filter first. A filter clogged with dust blocks airflow across the coil, and a coil that cannot pull enough air across it will not pull heat out of your house either. Next, look at the outdoor unit and clear away any leaves, grass clippings, or mulch stacked against it, since it needs open air around it to work. If the filter is clean and the outdoor unit is clear and the house still is not cooling, the system is likely low on refrigerant or the coil itself has iced over, and both call for a contractor to look at it directly.
- What can I check before calling for HVAC repair?
- Check the thermostat settings, the batteries in it, and the breaker for the system. These cause a surprising number of no-heat and no-cool calls, and they take a minute to check yourself. After that, check the air filter and replace it if it is visibly dirty, since restricted airflow can look like a bigger problem than it is. If everything there checks out and the system still is not working right, tell the contractor what you already checked. It saves time on the visit.