Hello,

Today, I noticed that I have a puddle of water outside my furnace.
After closer investigation, it seems that the leak is coming from the
inducer.
It seems that this must have been going on for a while, because there
is a
lot of surface rust on all metal below the inducer. Also, when the
furnace shuts
off, I can see water dripping down into the bottom of the furnace.

I don't really know how the inducer works, but I have disconnected
all the hoses and poked around, and when I disconnected the hoses
from the trap (I think that is a trap), water came GUSHING out of the
hoses.
This only happened one time. I tried it a few hours later (when the
furnace
was leaking again), and it didn't happen again.

This makes me think that the trap is messed up? But how does
the trap break, there are no moving pieces? Could it get clogged? I
took it off and ran water through it, and it seems to not be clogged.

Do I need that trap? Can I just take the two hoses that go into the
trap and tee them into the drain hose?


What else could be wrong? (in case the trap is not the cause)?
The inducer is a swirlwind, and the age of the whole furnace is circa
1991
or so.

Thanks in advance

One more item about my problem:

The hose from the exit of my trap connects to a PVC pipe that finally
ends
up in the floor drain. I just noticed that there are air bubbles
pushing through
the water that is trapped in the exit hose. (The trap is mounted on
the side of
the fan housing in the bottom of the furnace, and the hose leading from
the
exit to the PVC is almost horizontal - maybe only a one inch drop with
a
horizontal run of about one foot until it connects to the PVC.)

I put a drip pan into the bottom of my furnace to temporarily catch
water
until my problem is fixed. After doing this, I took the exit hose off
of the
PCV and put it into the drip pan which had collected a lot of water,
and sure
enough, it is blowing bubbles into the drip pan. Is that correct? I
would think
that a trap is supposed to stop exactly this from happening...


Also, I just noticed that there is a small leak from where the inducer
is bolted
to the sheet metal of the furnace (on the bottom left side). About one
drop per
10 seconds is coming out of there. That explains the rust in that
corner of the
sheet metal. Does the inducer have a replaceable gasket? Is it
supposed to be
getting this full of water? There are two hoses into the black plastic
cover of
the inducer. One seems to go from the bottom of the fan into the
inducer, and the
other hose goes from the bottom right side of the inducer into the
trap. Both hoses
have water going though them, so it seems to be working correctly.
(nothing is plugged).
The hose from the fan into the inducer hardly has any water in it, but
a lot of air
flows out of it when disconnected, so it seems OK...

Can anyone help? I suppose I should just call someone to come fix it,
but after reading
a lot of other posts, it seems many people are getting screwed by
people that don't
know how to fix this sort of problem. At least if I can get some info
ahead of time, I will
know what to expect to hear...

Um. Thanks Bubba.

Anyhoo. Yes, you need the trap (don't want exhaust in the house, do
you). No it shouldn't leak. Yes, a lot of water is normal. I don't know
about bubbles -- mine doesn't. Sounds like you had a leak (still) and a
clog (maybe gone now).

-Kevin