On Feb 9, 2008, at 5:40 PM, Marcel Duchamp wrote:

> Nate Duehr wrote:
>>
>>
>> Yeah and then you get the idiot engineer who designed the control
>> board for my Carrier furnace.
>
> Why do you blame the engineer for doing his/her job? That engineer
> didn't think that one up; marketing did.


Marketing had control of the 20 or so codes that the control board can  
flash when it's in trouble?

I seriously doubt it.

The design flaw is that the control board has about 20 failure codes  
that can be flashed, but ALL of the different sensors that can stop  
the firing of the furnace (flue pressure switch, flame and flame  
escape sensors, etc) ALL cause the control board to flash ONE code...  
"31".

So if you get a code 31 from a Carrier furnace, all you know is that  
ONE of the MANY sensors tripped it.

It would have been VERY VERY VERY easy to design it such that it would  
flash separate code numbers for each sensor... or if they had to, "31"  
and then another number for the sensor number.

The design sucks.  Ask any furnace technician.

The troubleshooting steps for a code "31" are to test EVERY SINGLE  
SENSOR manually.   And here's a microprocessor driven board sitting  
right there flashing it's dumb message the whole time.  It's not  
effectively any better than a single "warning" light.

Most of the other cause codes are things that simply won't happen in  
the real world very often, but the cause codes will be "nice to have"  
if they do.  But to have the furnace controller monitor a number of  
sensors and then not tell you WHICH sensor tripped it off-line, is  
just dumb.

And no way is that a Marketing decision.  LEGAL decision, maybe I  
could see... if they don't want unqualified non-technicians working on  
the furnace, they might have been trying to purposely obscure the  
faults.  But why bother having codes for 20 others, and not the common  
sensors if that's the case.

Nope -- easier to attribute it to stupidity than malice.  It's just a  
dumb design.

--
Nate Duehr
nate@natetech.com



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