What to Do When Your Furnace Dies During a Chicago Polar Vortex

First: Rule Out a Safety Emergency

Before anything else, make sure you're not dealing with a gas or carbon monoxide hazard. If you smell gas, hear a hissing sound, or a carbon monoxide detector is alarming, leave the house immediately and call 911 or your gas utility from outside. Do not flip switches, relight anything, or restart the furnace.

Carbon monoxide is colorless and odorless, which is why a working CO detector on every level of your home is essential in a heating climate like ours. If anyone feels dizzy, nauseous, or confused, treat it as a medical emergency and get outside into fresh air.

Quick Checks You Can Safely Make

If there's no safety hazard, a few simple checks resolve a surprising number of no-heat calls — and cost you nothing before a technician arrives:

• Thermostat: Confirm it's set to HEAT and several degrees above room temperature. Replace batteries if the screen is blank.
• Power: Check that the furnace switch (it looks like a light switch near the unit) is ON and that the breaker hasn't tripped.
• Filter: A severely clogged filter can trigger a safety shutdown. If it's filthy, replace it and try again.
• Gas: Make sure the gas valve serving the furnace is open and other gas appliances are working.
• Condensate: On high-efficiency furnaces, a frozen or clogged condensate line can shut the system down.

Protect Your Home From Freezing While You Wait

If the furnace won't restart, shift your focus to keeping the house and its plumbing as safe as possible until help arrives. During an extreme freeze, this can prevent thousands of dollars in burst-pipe damage.

• Open interior doors to let what warmth remains circulate through the home.
• Open cabinet doors under sinks on exterior walls so warm air reaches the pipes.
• Let faucets on exterior walls drip slightly to relieve pressure in the lines.
• Close off unused rooms and gather everyone into one central, well-insulated space.
• Use blankets and layers — and check on elderly neighbors who may also be without heat.

What NOT to Do

In a cold emergency it's tempting to improvise heat, but some methods are genuinely dangerous. Never use a gas oven, range, charcoal grill, or an unvented portable heater to warm your home — these are leading causes of carbon monoxide poisoning and house fires every winter. If you use an electric space heater, keep it well away from anything flammable and never run it on an extension cord or leave it unattended.

When to Call for Emergency Heating Repair

If your quick checks don't restore heat, don't keep cycling the furnace — call for professional service. During a polar vortex, no-heat calls are a genuine emergency, especially for homes with infants, elderly residents, or anyone with a medical condition, and for any home where pipes are at risk.

Polar Refrigeration & Air Control answers 24/7 with a 60-minute call-back and same-day dispatch whenever weather and volume allow. Our technicians carry the parts behind the most common winter failures — igniters, flame sensors, control boards — so many homes have heat restored on the first visit. And because we check combustion and venting safety on every repair, you can trust the fix is safe, not just fast.

What Our Technicians See on Polar Vortex Calls

On the coldest nights we run back-to-back no-heat calls, and the pattern is remarkably consistent. Most are a failed hot-surface igniter, a flame sensor coated in residue, or — on high-efficiency furnaces — a condensate line that froze because the drain pitch was wrong at install. These are quick fixes when a technician carries the parts, which is why we stock them on the truck all winter.

The failures we take most seriously are the ones a homeowner can't see: a cracked heat exchanger or a blocked flue. Both can push carbon monoxide into the living space, and both are why we run a combustion and venting check on every no-heat repair before we hand the furnace back to you — even at 2 a.m.