My furnace went out during the 2025 holiday and I couldn't get an appointment with a repair person for 2 days. It was getting very cold in my house so I went into my attic and made several videos of the furnace attempting to start and gave it to gemini. It diagnosed the issue immediately and had me spin one of the components (a small exhaust fan) while the furnace tried to fire. It came on immediately. I had to do that several times, but it worked until the HVAC service showed up.
Very similar thing this week, and an interesting story to go along with it!
I called my normal HVAC company for my rental home because the tenant reported the AC wasn't cooling the house. When I called, I got one of the latest AI voice assistants to help me, and it was an awful experience and I ended up not hearing back after the assistant told me the office would call me back.
So, I went over to the house and used ChatGPT to help me diagnose the issue by taking some photos of the compressor panel outside. It walked me through what to check, I provided some diagnostic codes I witnessed... and it walked me through the very simple repair of replacing the $25 capacitor. It was going to cost me almost 4x that just for the service call to diagnose what was wrong in the first place.
So, the weird experience was: Gen AI made me lose trust in my normal HVAC company, and more Gen AI basically allowed me to replace my HVAC company and do the repair myself all in one day.
With AI you just don't get the full service of a professional HVAC guy though.
Like the time I had one of the bigger shops in town come by to get a quote for replacing a dual stage fan motor on an AC. The tech asked me if I'd like them to replace the contactor while they were in there because it is a part that often fails. I asked what a contactor was and he explained it. "Oh, like a relay?" I asked. I told him to quote the cost for "replacing the contactor, while they're already in there."
He quoted me $400 for the contactor, $750 for the fan. The contactor itself I later found out was was $7. I literally laughed in his face when he said that.
So, like I said, you just aren't going to get professional level assistance from an AI. Thankfully.
To end the story: one of the other guys I called for a quote on fixing this unit repaired it for free; the unit was still under warranty and it was fully covered. The original installer of this $12K unit was refusing to return my calls. Another "Not gonna get pro level service from an AI" story.
Yeah, and with 95% of those videos, there'll be something they gloss over which I don't understand; or I'll have a concern which they don't address; or, conversely, they'll assume that their target audience was born in the 15th century, and spend 20 minutes building up the context, when what I really needed was about 12 seconds.
With an AI, I can say "I don't understand that part, can you explain more?" Or "what about this concern I just thought of", or "I already know almost enough about this, I just need this one gap filled in." It's an objectively better experience.
When I was a kid, if I didn't know how to spell a word and asked the teacher, a common answer was to tell me to look it up in the dictionary.
As words in a dictionary are sorted alphabetically rather than phonetically, this is unhelpful.
YouTube videos have the same kind of problem, in that you can only easily find the video explaining which dielectric unions suit your problem when already know what those are (to use an example that I had to ask ChatGPT for because I have no plumbing experience even if I did know about galvanic corrosion and therefore immediately understood why they're important once I saw the name).
Tbh, I think people feel more comfortable asking an AI. Even though I “know” it’s all smoke and mirrors, I still prefer the human-like interaction to the grind of watching video after video and building my own understanding.
OOPS… there you see how it’s going to end. I’m the meatspace button-pusher.
Had something similar this week. Gas dryer started, but wouldn't heat. Gemini suggested it's often a thermal fuse. Took off the back panel and uploaded a photo to Gemini. It pointed me to the fuse (e.g. "the white rectangle above the blue and red cords") and walked me through testing it. Not only that, but it also linked me to the part I needed after I provided the model number of the dryer. Finally, it recommended cleaning out the vent as the fuse likely blew because heat wasn't venting properly. After a thorough cleaning of the exhaust and a $5 fuse the dryer is working fine.
I can (honestly) tell that exact same story, except offset by three years so it was before AI and I did the same exact steps and had the same insights except with Google results instead of an LLM providing the key unlocks.
I've been fitting a kitchen and chatGPT has been useful to bounce ideas off and resolve issues. Of course if IKEA's documentation wasn't so sparse I wouldn't need it but that's another story.
I guess I'm seeing similar benefits to a novice programmer. Professionals would scoff at my work but they are expensive and difficult to work with. Meanwhile I'm getting the job done.
On the other hand I'm not touching AI for any development work. I'm too worried about my skills atrophying or not properly learning anything new.
It feels like there is precisely enough information to deduce each step. But only just enough miss one clue and you have something on upside down on step 7 that you won't notice until step 37.
I feel whoever makes them could probably make a wicked NY Times Crossword puzzle.
Similar - had an HVAC tech out to diagnose mine (some intermittent electrical problem was killing thermostats randomly) and since it was intermittent they couldn't figure it out. I ended up using Gemini to narrow down a list of potential problem components and just replacing them all which fixed the issue.
Kind of a superpower to turn anyone with a bit of tech inclination and problem solving skills into an HVAC tech - not a very good one, but one with enough motivation to get the results you need
Also similar - our Tesla Solar stopped producing (again). 3 week wait for service tech. In the meantime I had Claude probe the inverter, find endpoints for retrieving status, re-setting AFCI and Modbus TCP (for HA monitoring), etc. Claude was able to obtain installer mode access through a review the javascript bundle. I had Claude turn all this into an iOS app, which I used to gather data to diagnose the issue over the next week. Had Claude summarize the findings into a PDF that I provided to the Tesla Solar service rep, which in the words of said rep was very helpful.
I have a similar story with my washing machine repair. I went through 2 service technicians not being able to diagnose it. Gpt did it and I told the 3rd what to do and it worked.
Did you attempt to prompt it further into figuring out the actual problem, or know what they did to actually fix it? My bet is on a bad starting capacitor for the motor --- something that's a relatively cheap and quick repair.
(Though that's also the kind of hands-on troubleshooting step/fix that a person could just google for and find pretty easily back before the internet got all fucked up.)
Your parenthetical really describes my experience with AI searches. 5+ years ago I could find most things within one or two quick searches, now it takes so many that of course I'm going to reach for AI because that's the only way to get back to my baseline efficiency.
I learned to troubleshoot furnaces late one cold night in 2004 using Google, while a worried wife and a couple of sleeping kids loomed over me like a dark cloud. I learned what thermocouples are, what they do, how they work, and how to test them; all of which was new to me. A few hours later I bought one from the Ace Hardware a few blocks away and fixed the furnace with confidence.
And that was awesome. Thanks, Google! :)
I don't know where the change happened. It certainly wasn't overnight.
Where Google used to be magical and other search engines quickly improved, it all kind of turned into shit.
It really seems that I was getting better, more-direct results from Altavista 30 years ago than I do with top-flight search engines today. (That's a deliberately low bar, chosen because Altavista wasn't even intended to be "good" back then. I mean, it started as just as a side project at DEC to demonstrate that their Alpha hardware was able to index the entire World Wide Web.)
So lately, I've been doing the same thing as you: I'm increasingly using ChatGPT to do this basic fact-finding stuff. In this way, it mostly operates the search engine for me, but it lets me drill down through a sea of terrible search results to find something useful fairly quickly.
It's still not great -- I still have to reject mountains of bullshit. But it's better than alternatives, and I can reject the bullshit with conceptual descriptions instead of trying to get Google to do what I need it to do (what it used to do).
It feels all wrong using an LLM to do this stuff, but whatever. I'm still getting stuff done.
> and made several videos of the furnace attempting to start and gave it to gemini
I assume recorded videos and uploaded them in the Gemini phone on their app; and then probably said "what's wrong?"
Gemini is very good at those kinds of things. I recently got some ratcheting straps and needed to use them, but at the time I didn't know what they were called, so I didn't know what to search for on Google. I opened the Gemini app, pushed the button to take a picture (just like in text messages,) and included a message that was similar to "what is this and how do I use it?"
Yes, here is my prompt. It also contained a video: "I have a furnace that will not heat when I reset the power to this unit. It makes some noise within its fan system for about three or four minutes and then I get an error light. Can you help me figure out what may be wrong here?" This prompt is not the best but I was freezing and in my attic.
Can you elaborate? I interpreted the same as the other comment that the blower fan just needed a hand start and kept going after the furnace started up. What you're saying only makes sense to me if the spinning the fan by hand allowed the furnace to start by bypassing the safety at startup, but wouldn't that mean that if the exhaust fan was stopped during normal operation (blockage etc) that the furnace would just keep going, dumping CO into the home?
I was spinning it in reverse actually, but it would be enough to start the exhaust blower. It would also re-start pretty well for ~6 hours. It was probably the bearing. Also FWIW I have multiple carbon monoxide/air quality monitors and nothing tripped or alarmed.
From the description I thought that a degraded capacitor or lack of lubrication made the blower not start on its own, but the blower (and the whole furnace) would work if given a manual startup spin by hand.
Wonder how many AI deaths have occured that we dont know about(since they presumably died). With the adoption numbers we are seeing it much have happened already.
I'd be surprised if it was less than hundreds, or more than hundreds of thousands.
High hundreds of thousands feels like the upper limit before it would show up in statistically noticeable changes in patterns of deaths in some demographic.
High hundreds of individuals would still be "one in a million fatal errors over a few years", which seems better than I'd expect given I've personally had ChatGPT tell me that Solanum nigrum berries were "black tomatoes" (they're not usually fatal, but are a bit toxic, and no I did not eat them).
The most interesting part is that there is no direct line between someone's accidental death and a chatbot giving life-threatening advice.
Imagine one of the models that has "accidental-deaths-via-bad-advice" just slightly turned up, with the model-provider's intent being to kill 5% more people per year.
If you're paranoid (or a hawk), imagine a Chinese LLM that only offers fatal advice when queried English, or an American LLM that only offers fatal advice when queried in Chinese. Or American and Russian models which only offer up fatal advice when queried in German, Finish, or Danish.
“At its core, it's a small motor with a fan attached that has one primary job: to vent harmful exhaust gases out of your home before the burners ever kick on. This is the very first step in the heating sequence, and it's non-negotiable for a safe startup.“
The original comment was unclear whether the fan kept spinning while the furnace was running, or if all it did was bypass the safety and the fan didn't continue to spin while the furnace ran. They clarified in their response it kept spinning.
It seemed obvious to me that this was bearing stiction and that manually rotating it during the start allowed the fan to spin on its own after that, but I could be wrong and maybe the fan was dead entirely?
Yeah, that would be my assumption too (based on my admittedly incomplete personal experience where I got my furnace running by manually spinning my draft inducer motor, which kept spinning).
As exhausting the combustion products is a critical safety feature, I would be surprised if any furnace was designed such that it could possibly keep running if the draft inducer motor stopped. It seems like it would be trivially easy to make a circuit such that gas valves could only open if the draft inducer motor + fan wasn't spinning.
