Misleading Boiler Error Message

February 6th, 2022
house
This morning we woke up to a cold house and a sad furnace:

The furnace is a Burnham Alpine 150 (ALP150BW-4T02) that we installed in Fall 2015, not long after we bought the house. No issues before this. It had a diagnostic ("Limit String Status") where it explained why it was refusing to start:

This initially looks like two faults: one with the Condensate Float Switch (ours doesn't have Thermal Link or Burner Door sensors) and then one with the Gas Press Switch / Low Water Cutoff / Flow Switch / External Hi Limit. But checking the manual it says:

Interlock input limit items are wired in series. Items down stream of the open limit will also appear as "open" (measure zero volts). When the first item in the string is resolved (repaired, or fixed) the down stream items will also be fixed.

There's also a diagram to illustrate:

This tells us there is one thing wrong, and it is in the condensate system, right? Unfortunately, no. After getting a plumber out, it turned out that the problem was actually with the previous sensor, the Auto Reset Hi Limit. I'm not sure how a sensor fails in a way that the fault appeared to be at the next sensor in the string, but that's apparently what happened.

While I'm frustrated with the diagnostic, I'm glad we have heat again!

Comment via: facebook, lesswrong, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

I have a baby

I am pleased to announce the existence of the newest and smallest effective altruist, Seretse Benjamin Brennan.

via Thing of Things November 2, 2026

“We should be more ambitious with the software we build”

Since early this year, Michael Malis (of pgrust) has been showing me interesting things he's done and saying [W]e should be more ambitious1 with the software we build There is, understandably, a lot of skepticism about projects like pgrust because there…

via Posts on October 24, 2026

Was the HuggingFace hacking incident scheming?

In July 2026, internal OpenAI agents hacked HuggingFace (HF) in order to figure out how their evaluation grader works. This involved a thousand agents coordinating on an improvised message board to carry out an elaborate sequence of exploits. A later grou…

via Victoria Krakovna October 18, 2026

more     (via openring)