Furnace Repair & Installation in Everett, WA
Gas and electric furnaces repaired, replaced and installed across Snohomish County and North King County — by the one person who quotes the job and then does it.
ExactAir repairs, replaces and installs gas and electric furnaces across Snohomish County and North King County. Rylan answers his own phone from 7 AM to 8 PM, seven days a week, you are shown the part that failed before anything is quoted, and the quote is free and in writing rather than a number produced at the kitchen table.
A straightforward, customer-first process
Diagnose & explain
We find the real cause, show you the failed part, and quote the repair before any work begins.
Repair or replace — your call
We present honest repair-versus-replace math and let you choose the path that fits your home and budget.
Safety verification
Every gas job ends with a combustion and carbon-monoxide safety check before we consider it done.
Everett's heating problem is not that it gets very cold. It is that it stays cool and wet for months — many houses here run the furnace from October well into May, and a good share of the housing stock was built long enough ago that the equipment has been replaced at least once already. Furnaces here die of run hours, not of cold snaps, which is why the first genuinely cold weekend of the season produces a week of no-heat calls from equipment that had been marginal since March.
That is worth knowing because it changes what to do about it. A furnace making a new noise in September is a cheap problem. The same furnace in the third week of December is an expensive one, and by then every contractor in Snohomish County is booked. If yours did anything odd last winter, this is the month to have it looked at.
Furnace repair in Everett: what usually failed
Most no-heat calls in Everett come down to a short list, and it is worth knowing it because the list runs from very cheap to very expensive and a homeowner cannot tell which one they have from the thermostat.
A hot-surface igniter cracks and stops glowing. A flame sensor picks up a film of oxide, stops proving flame, and the furnace lights for a few seconds and then shuts down — over and over, which is the fault people describe most often. On a 90%-plus condensing furnace the condensate drain or the trap blocks and the pressure switch refuses to let it start, which is a drain problem wearing a switch's clothes. A run capacitor weakens and the blower will not come up to speed. An inducer motor gets noisy months before it quits. A filter nobody has changed in a year chokes the return badly enough to trip the high limit, which looks exactly like a dying furnace and is a cheap part.
And then there is the one that is not a repair. A cracked heat exchanger is a combustion safety problem, not a comfort problem: it is condemned, shut off, and red-tagged, and no amount of wanting it to be otherwise changes that. It gets shown to you before that conversation happens.
Every visit works the same way — find what actually failed, show it to you, put the cost of fixing it next to the cost of replacing the unit, and let you pick. Nobody at ExactAir earns a commission on the answer, because there is nobody at ExactAir except Rylan.
Furnace installation in Everett — what the day actually involves
A furnace installation is mostly sheet metal, venting and gas, and only a little bit of furnace. That is the part quotes tend to skip, and it is the part that separates a good install from one that whistles, short-cycles, or never quite heats the back bedroom.
It starts with a load calculation rather than a look at the badge on the old unit. Oversizing is the default failure in this trade: a furnace with more output than the house needs satisfies the thermostat fast, shuts off, and does it again twenty minutes later, which gives you hot-then-cold rooms, more wear, and worse humidity control. The right size is usually smaller than what came out, because the old one was oversized too.
Then the physical work. On the older Everett housing stock the existing plenum and transitions almost never fit a modern cabinet, so they get fabricated on site to tie the new unit into the trunk you already have — that is genuinely most of the labour on a like-for-like swap. Gas line sizing gets checked against the new input rating rather than assumed. If the new unit is a 90%-plus condensing furnace, the old metal flue is abandoned and it vents through PVC to a new outside penetration, and it needs a condensate drain with a trap that will not freeze or back up. Electrical gets its own attention, a filter cabinet goes on if there is room for one, and the thermostat gets wired and configured for the equipment that is actually there rather than left on the old settings.
It finishes with commissioning: gas pressure set, temperature rise measured against the manufacturer's spec plate, airflow checked, combustion verified, and the system left running while somebody watches it complete a full cycle. Then the permit inspection.
Rylan holds a general contractor's licence as well as a refrigeration journeyman's licence, so the mechanical permit is pulled by the person doing the work rather than subcontracted or quietly left off the quote. The permit is written into the quote up front — it is a real line item, not a surprise at the end.
Gas or electric — and why it changes the answer
Everett has both, often on the same street, and the two are different enough that a quote for one tells you very little about the other.
A gas furnace is combustion equipment. It has burners, an igniter, a flame sensor, a heat exchanger and a flue, which is why it needs a combustion safety check and why a heat exchanger fault ends the conversation. It is also, at current rates, usually the cheaper thing to run on a cold morning.
An electric furnace has none of that. It is a blower and a stack of resistance heat strips with sequencers, and its failures are electrical: a burned-out element, a failed sequencer, a tripped limit. There is no combustion to check and no carbon monoxide risk, which makes it simpler — but resistance heat is the most expensive way there is to make heat, so an electric-furnace house is usually the strongest case on the block for a heat pump, where the same electricity moves several times as much heat as it makes.
That is a genuine recommendation and not an upsell: if you have electric heat strips and a working duct system, the heat pump conversation is worth having before you spend money replacing the strips like for like.
What a furnace replacement costs
I do not put prices on a webpage, because your house sets the number. I walk the house, run the load calculation, and give you a free written quote with good, better and best options side by side. These are the systems I install most:
- Ameristar 80,000 BTU 80% gas furnace, like-for-like replacement
- Free written quote after a site visit
- A/C coil added during a furnace install (makes the system heat-pump ready)
- Free written quote after a site visit
- Honeywell S1200 smart thermostat
- Free written quote after a site visit
- Ecobee Smart Thermostat Premium
- Free written quote after a site visit
- Air Scrubber UV whole-home purification
- Free written quote after a site visit
- Mechanical permit
- Free written quote after a site visit
What sets the price is your house. Venting, gas line, electrical, and whether the existing plenum and transitions can be reused or have to be fabricated are what move the number, and on an older Everett house that is where the work is. The site visit produces the real figure, in writing, before anything is ordered.
There is a 5% discount for active military, veterans and first responders, and financing is available.
The equipment, named
ExactAir installs American Standard and Ameristar furnaces — the same family — with Honeywell and Ecobee controls. Ameristar covers the straightforward like-for-like replacement; American Standard is where the two-stage and variable-speed equipment lives, and it is what goes in when a house has rooms that never quite match each other.
One Everett customer described the system that went into her house in her own words on Google: “They installed a variable-speed American Standard heat pump along with a Platinum variable-speed, two-stage American Standard furnace, and the system has been incredible.” That is what a two-stage furnace is for — it runs long and quiet on the low stage most of the winter and only calls for full output on the handful of days that actually need it.
— Paula Allen, Google review
See a whole-home furnace and heat pump system we built in Everett
A tune-up in September is a different job to a tune-up in January
Not because the work changes, but because of what it is for. Before the season it is preventative and there is time to order a part. In the middle of the season it is triage.
The visit covers the burners, the igniter and flame sensor, a heat exchanger inspection, blower and airflow, gas pressure, the condensate drain on a condensing unit, and a combustion safety check. The specific things it catches are real and unglamorous: a flame sensor that is about to start dropping out, a filter already choking airflow, a drain starting to block, and combustion that has drifted out of specification since the last visit.
A customer put the useful part of it plainly on Google: “He took the time to properly clean and inspect our older furnace, explain everything clearly, and make sure the system was operating safely and efficiently.” An older furnace is not automatically a replacement candidate. Some of them have another five years in them, and being told so is a legitimate outcome of the visit.
— Kamin Rondeau, Google review
Who turns up
ExactAir Home Comfort is one person. Rylan Utter quotes the job and Rylan Utter installs the job, and there is no commissioned salesman in between and nobody to be handed off to.
The phone is answered 7 AM to 8 PM, seven days a week, and the number on this page is his cell rather than an answering service taking a message for Monday. Furnaces do not fail at noon on a Tuesday; they fail on cold, damp evenings and at weekends.
What our customers say
- ★★★★★
“I honestly can’t say enough good things about this company. From the very first conversation, I felt like we were dealing with people we could genuinely trust — and that alone is huge when it comes to HVAC and plumbing work.”
Paula Allen · Google review
- ★★★★★
“I am extremely satisfied with ExactAir. Most other companies have expensive quotes and used high pressure sales tactics. Rylan was able to immediately set himself apart with genuine conversation and upfront expectations and pricing.”
Alex Gebhart · Google review
- ★★★★★
“Over the past couple of weeks we have used ExactAir for both an emergency call out as well as a new furnace installation. My wife and I were very impressed with the way Rylan communicated with us as well as his technical knowledge and skill.”
Geoff Parkins · Google review
Furnaces & Heating FAQs
No-heat calls are prioritised through the heating season, and the phone is answered by Rylan himself from 7 AM to 8 PM, seven days a week. Call and you will get an honest answer about when he can be there rather than a window promised before anyone has looked at the schedule.
A well-maintained gas furnace typically lasts 15 to 20 years here. Because our heating season is long, annual maintenance makes a meaningful difference in both lifespan and efficiency.
For most Everett homes, yes. Upgrading from an older 80% furnace to a 95%+ model meaningfully lowers gas bills over our long heating season. We show you the payback math so you can decide.
Warning signs include a yellow flickering burner flame, soot, unusual smells, or symptoms of carbon monoxide. We inspect the heat exchanger during every maintenance visit and on any suspicious repair call.
If the unit is under about 12 years old and the repair is minor, repair usually wins. For older systems facing a major component failure, replacement is often the smarter long-term choice. We lay out both numbers.
Yes. We repair and maintain electric furnaces and air-handler heat strips in addition to gas systems, and can advise on whether a heat pump upgrade would lower your bills.
You call Rylan directly — the number on this page is his cell, not a dispatch queue, and it is answered from 7 AM to 8 PM seven days a week. ExactAir is a one-person shop, so the person who picks up is the person who will be standing in front of your furnace and the person who quotes the work.
It depends on your house, and Rylan quotes it for free after a site visit. What changes the price is the house itself — venting, gas line, electrical, and whether the plenum and transitions can be reused or have to be fabricated. That is settled at the site visit and written into the quote before anything is ordered.
Yes, and Rylan pulls it himself rather than subcontracting it or leaving it off the quote — he holds a general contractor's licence as well as a refrigeration journeyman's licence. The mechanical permit is written into the quote up front, and the job goes through inspection and final approval. Furnace work is combustion work, which is exactly why the inspection matters more here than almost anywhere else in the house.
Furnaces & Heating across our service area
We provide furnaces & heating throughout Snohomish and King counties. Find your town:
Areas we serve for furnaces & heating
Everett and the towns around it, south into King County and across to the Eastside. Each area page covers what that town's houses actually need — and who is turning up, which is the same person every time.
Ready to upgrade your home comfort?
Honest pricing, straight answers, and no high-pressure sales. Get your free quote from Rylan, the owner — the person who quotes your job is the person who installs it — plus a 5% discount for military, veterans & first responders.