QUESTION FROM Kimberly

I recently moved into a home built in the 70's. Has a gas fireplace insert. We have been in for a week now. The room where the fireplace is has no furniture it it so there really has been no traffic except my husband and I opening and closing the blinds in that room. The other day, we went for a walk and came back 20 minutes later to find the fireplace fan on. We hadn't touched the fireplace since we moved in. I emailed the previous owner and he said that has never come on by itself in the 20 yrs they lived there. Now, I did have the blinds open and it was about 7:30 ish when the sun is streaming in the front windows. It is possible, even though I am not aware of a thermostat on it that the fan came on automatically ? Otherwise my husband thinks someone came in the house while we were on our short walk. The fire wasn't on, just the fan. I hope there is an explanation for this. The previous owner said someone would had to have activated it but I was in that room before the walk and would have heard the fan noise.

ANSWER FROM HOME-WIZARD

Dear Kimberly:

Yes, this sounds very odd indeed.

First, I would doubt that just sunlight coming in through the windows would be enough to raise the temperature of your fireplace sufficiently high enough for the fan thermostat to turn on.

A couple of thoughts on things that you might check:

1) Since this is a new house to you, is it possible that there is an external control switch for the fan that you might have turned on/off as you left the house thinking that it was a switch for something else?

2) Is there a thermostat that controls the fan? Could this thermostat have been set too low, or be faulty, and this be what caused the fan to come on?

3) When you can back and the fan was running, how did it turn off? Did it go off on its own, or was there a switch that you used? Could this switch be faulty?

4) The last thought is the possibility that the fan itself is faulty, and that it may have been in the "on" position, but stuck from turning on. And then when you, for example, shut the door on your way out, it may have been enough to jar the fan and get it to turn on.

Hope this is helpful.
Home-Wizard.com