How To Light A Gas Heater

It’s starting to get cold outside. Whether you heat your whole home with wall furnaces, or just use them for your garage, you need to make sure you know how to light a gas heater. It’s always important to be careful when you are dealing with gas and fire!

My house is super old, as in built in 1940. Yup, she’s in her 70’s and has lots of quirks. Or maybe we should call them wrinkles if we’re sticking with the old woman analogy. When we first moved into our fixer upper we became aware of the fact that the furnace was totally shot.

Because the furnace was so old it would have cost thousands just to have a company custom make one of the pieces that we were sure was broken. And then there was still no guarantee that it would work.

We don’t have money to gamble, so we started to explore other options. Although my house does have an authentic coal shoot we weren’t interested in that as a heating source haha! Buying a new furnace was also out of the picture. So we moved on to wall furnaces.

We actually already had one from the 70’s in the basement (relatively young compared to the house haha). I still remember how excited I got when my dad managed to get it going. He informed me that the one wall furnace in the basement would keep my pipes from exploding. That sounded fantastic to me, especially since I don’t know the first thing about fixing busted pipes!

That first winter we also added another wall furnace to the main level. (We as in my dad doing all the work while I pretended to hand him tools). We still use plug in space heaters in some of the rooms on really cold days, but over all these wall furnaces do an amazing job at keeping all of us warm. Especially given the fact that most of my walls don’t have any insulation.

Every summer we turn off the furnaces. And every winter it is a challenge to get them back on again. Especial the one from the 70’s. So I begged my dad to start filming some how to videos. Because I’m pretty sure that I’m not the only homemaker out there who doesn’t know one end of a pipe from the other 🙂

Without further ado, here is how to light a gas heater. As an added precaution I’d recommend that you make sure that you have a working carbon monoxide detector set up before you start this project. Also, neither Modern Homemakers, nor Tony Lomelino can be held responsible if you come to any harm from trying the tips in this video. It’s always safest to have a professional deal with dangerous things like gas and fire.