The natural gas furnace has everything most homes need in a heating system. It heats the whole home from a central location, it connects to the gas line available for most homes to access, and it does not cost an arm and a leg to run. Furthermore, today’s gas furnaces are safer than they have ever been before.
However, there is still a small risk when running any natural gas appliance of the dangerous byproducts of combustion leaking into a home. Perhaps the biggest risk with a furnace is a cracked heat exchanger. This is the component that allows heat to transfer to the air moving through your home, so shouldn’t the furnace shut off if the heat exchanger is cracked? Is this really something to worry about?
A heater seems like a relatively easy piece of equipment to deal with. Yes, it has confusing moving parts and usually a gas ignition system, but these are all things your installer hooked up at installation, and that you generally don’t have to worry about. All you do is turn up the thermostat and wait for the magic to happen.
Throughout its life, 
Furnaces of the past had a lot of issues in terms of home safety. Unfortunately, it was once all-too-common for a fire to break out due to a furnace malfunction, or a carbon monoxide leak to make people ill. Today, as you might expect, modern engineering has led to a much safer furnace.
Think about the last time you had to repair a car at an inconvenient time. You might have been driving when a maintenance light turned on, or you may have heard an odd sound right before a big trip. Afterward, you may have realized that preventative maintenance could have saved you the trouble.
You don’t always know something is wrong with a system or a part of your property until it’s too late. For example, you might not know a tire has gone bad until it blows out while driving. You may not realize the roof is developing a leak until it rains. These are things you want to prevent as much as possible, and for the most part, you can. Most people take their cars into the mechanic for regular inspections and tune-ups and many clean out their gutters while checking for leaks in the spring and before storms.
