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Comment by mikeyouse | Hacker News Reader

Modern furnaces are weirdly sensitive to ‘clean’ AC power. Mine won’t work on bad non-inverter backup generators and interestingly to me, doesn’t work on non-bonded (ground-neutral) power from an inverter generator. Had to chop the cord off a drill and build a bonding plug last winter when I finally figured out why it wouldn’t run.

https://rvelectricity.substack.com/p/diy-generator-bonding-p...

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My furnace is protected by an old school fast-acting fuse. One day it blew and at first I thought it was an anachronism from the house's original wiring but then realized it's intentional - the standard breaker upstream of it is not fast enough. Not clear if it mainly protects the blower fan motor or the circuit board - I suspect it's the motor. At least one other fan motor in the house got fried previously.

I think the quality of your power is determined mainly by the size of the transformer serving your neighborhood as well as the presence of noisy heavy power equipment like AC with poor/no soft starters or big brush motors among the consumers. It's noticeably worse on our street compared to where we previously lived.

Breakers are there to protect the in-wall wiring, not the connected equipment.

I discovered the same thing a few months ago with my home's furnace (which was a bit of a shock, because one reason for picking natural gas is so you can still have heat when the power is out). It runs just fine on a pure sine wave inverter though.

Could it be that it directly uses AC for flame rectification and gets confused with ugly waveform?

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