Derek Cole explains that a burning smell from your furnace's electric heat strips is dust burning off after months of sitting unused. It's harmless, he says, because a real fire hazard would trip your breaker. Run the heat early in the season to clear the dust before you need it.
So it has gone from, I don't know, March, April. So March, April till now without running heat strips, without running heat. So what happens is dust builds up on those electric wires, and once those are activated, it burns it off. Therefore, you get a burning smell. So that is what you're getting in the house. Usually it's nothing dangerous. Now, if it was dangerous, it would obviously be too much for the wiring and trip the breaker and be a safety hazard. So if none of that is happening, then it's probably just burning off the excess dust from not being used. So that burning smell— when we come out and do a maintenance, we activate the heat strips this time of year to get out of the way. So that really first cold night, if you haven't used it already, you won't have that problem. But if you've already used it, obviously you're having that burning smell. And so that's what that is. It's not a huge deal. It just smells like something's burning and you're like, is something on fire? And it's not. That make sense?
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