How to destroy a forced air funace

[joycem10]

Not sure if this is the best forum...

Can anyone give any advice on what steps can be taken to ensure a forced air furnace fails? Nothing overt like smashing the thing with a baseball bat. Im looking for more subtle and hard to indentify means. The furnace in question is a 30 year old natural gas fired forced air funace.

 

[Cutlass]

the fan is on an electric motor, usually behind a filter. remove the filter and pump a lot of dust, like the contents of a vacuum cleaner, into the motor as it's running and it will eventually fail.

 

[Onionsoilder]

the fan is on an electric motor, usually behind a filter. remove the filter and pump a lot of dust, like the contents of a vacuum cleaner, into the motor as it's running and it will eventually fail.

That will do it. I have to wonder why exactly you would want to (unless your warranty is just about to expire or something like that), but I won't ask questions.

 

[History_Buff]

Turn the thing off, then see if you can find any of the wires leading to the fan motor. Cut one of those with something jagged; wire-cutters will make it obvious.

 

[ainwood]

I suggest that you reconsider this. Frigging with anything involving natural gas and combustion is not the most sensible thing to be doing. Intentional sabotage could inadvertently bypass the very minimalist safety shutdowns etc.

 

[civ_king]

I hope you don't kill your self in the process
what about a lot of NG too much build up could severely damage it (and a chance of damage to ther thing in the vicinity

 

[nonconformist]

I for one want to know why

 

[joycem10]

I for one want to know why

For a novel.

One of the ancillary characters is a scam artist. His wife wants to buy an old Victorian house because she loves the style, she eventually talks him into it. The place is a money pit and hes looking for ways to update cheap. He buys a home warranty and trashes some of the fixtures to get them replaced for new (Usually a warranty company will replace old stuff rather than look for new parts when the original equipment is old enough.) It has to be natural gas due to the setting, and it has to be twenty-thirty years old to qualify for replacement.

He stuffs a peice of plastice from a baby bottle in the dishwasher motor to get it to fail. He overflows a toilet to get new flooring. He runs the builtin micro with metal in it. Im torn on the furnace. He either runs current through the motherboard or works the filter idea someone mentioned above.

Eventually he gets bagged for insurance fraud, because of the furnace.

 

[Cutlass]

One of my neighbors asked me to look at why her furnace wasn't working. It was because the filter hadn't been changed in 10 years or more and the the fan motor had so clogged with dirt and dirt and cat hair that it couldn't turn any longer. So that can fake reality pretty well.