Short answer: if you smell gas or a carbon-monoxide alarm sounds, get out and call from outside. Otherwise check the thermostat, the furnace switch and breaker, the filter and the door panel, and note the blinking code. Still no heat? Call a business with an active Oregon CCB license: 155 are registered in Clackamas County alone. Find them by town.
Two signs that mean stop, not troubleshoot
A rotten-egg or sulfur smell. Leave the house and call your gas utility from outside. That is a possible gas leak, not a furnace problem.
A yellow flame instead of blue, soot around the furnace, or a carbon-monoxide alarm. Shut the furnace off, ventilate, make sure your CO detectors work, and get it inspected before running it again. Incomplete combustion can put carbon monoxide into the house.
Staying warm until it is fixed: the CDC’s carbon-monoxide guidance is never to heat a home with a gas stove or oven, and never to run a generator, grill or camp stove indoors or in a garage.
Five-minute checks
- Thermostat on HEAT and set above room temperature; fresh batteries.
- Power. The switch on or beside the furnace (it looks like a light switch) and the breaker at the panel.
- Filter. A clogged filter overheats the furnace and trips its high-limit switch, which reads as “blows cold” or “short-cycles.”
- Door panel fully seated — a safety switch stops the furnace if it is loose.
- The blinking light. Most furnaces flash an LED on the control board. Count the blinks and read the legend on the inside of the door. Note the code; it tells a technician exactly where to start.
Step-by-step versions: furnace won't turn on, blowing cold air, short cycling, pilot or igniter won't stay lit.
What a technician will actually look at
If the checks above do not fix it, the usual suspects on a gas furnace are the igniter, the flame sensor (often just dirty), the pressure switch and high-limit switch, the blower motor and its capacitor, and the control board. On an older furnace with a standing pilot, the thermocouple. Knowing the names does not make it a DIY job — gas components are professional work — but it lets you follow the diagnosis and ask what was measured.
Before you pay the diagnostic fee
- What is the diagnostic fee, and is it credited against the repair?
- What is your CCB number? Check it while you are on the phone.
- Will you quote the repair in writing before doing it?
- What is the warranty on the part and on the labor?
- If you recommend replacement instead, will you put the repair price and the replacement price side by side?
Where do you find a licensed furnace contractor near you?
Any business with an active Oregon CCB license, a bond and liability insurance can do the work. The state record lists 155 heating, cooling and mechanical businesses registered in Clackamas County, 104 in Multnomah County and 91 in Washington County. By registered city (where the license is held, not where they work):
| City | Licensed businesses | Licensed 10+ years | Local guide |
|---|---|---|---|
| Clackamas | 20 licensed | 16 | Clackamas furnace guide |
| Happy Valley | 11 licensed | 4 | Happy Valley furnace guide |
| Milwaukie | 13 licensed | 8 | Milwaukie furnace guide |
| Oregon City | 19 licensed | 8 | Oregon City furnace guide |
| Gladstone | 3 licensed | 2 | Gladstone furnace guide |
| Damascus | 14 licensed | 4 | Damascus furnace guide |
| Gresham | 20 licensed | 11 | Gresham furnace guide |
| Portland | 78 licensed | 35 | — |
Each local guide has the full list for that city, who issues the permit there, and what to do tonight if the heat is out. This site is not an emergency line and dispatches nobody: for same-day help, call a licensed contractor directly. For quotes that can wait a day, the quote form is pre-filled for a furnace repair.
What does a furnace repair cost?
This site has found no published repair-price range for the area that it can verify, so it gives none rather than repeat a number nobody can check. What decides the bill is the part and the time, and you can control the process: ask the diagnostic (service-call) fee before anyone comes out, ask whether it is credited against the repair, and get the repair price in writing before the work starts. If the answer is a replacement, the published 2026 replacement ranges are the comparison.
Repair, or replace?
There is no honest rule of thumb that fits every furnace, and this site will not invent one. What you can do is make the comparison fair: get the furnace's age from the data plate, list its repair history, and put a written repair price next to a written replacement price for the same house. The published 2026 replacement ranges are here.
One thing you may be told during that conversation is that Oregon now requires a heat pump. It does not, for replacing an existing system — the 2026 provision applies to new dwellings with split-system air-conditioning, and the state's own summary says so. The furnace replacement guide covers what a proper install includes.
Nearby
Local pages, each with the CCB-licensed heating and cooling contractors registered in that city:
Sources and how this page was researched
Who: written and checked by Mark Griffin for Direct-Me LLC, the publisher. Neither is an HVAC contractor or technician, and nothing here comes from inspecting anyone’s equipment. What the page adds is the primary documents, read and dated:
- Licensed contractors: the State of Oregon’s CCB Active Licenses open data (data.oregon.gov, dataset g77e-6bhs), state copy dated 13 September 2026, pulled 23 September 2026, filtered to 1,042 heating, cooling, mechanical, refrigeration and sheet-metal businesses. Every count on this page is computed from that file when the site is built; none is typed in by hand. A general contractor who also installs furnaces will not be in the filter.
- Costs: Angi (Portland) and Costadia (Portland, 2026), verified 23 September 2026. No source publishes a town-level figure and no repair-price range could be verified, so this page gives none.
- Code: Oregon Building Codes Division, First-Stage Heat Pump — 2026 ORSC Provisions Summary, quoted verbatim, read 23 September 2026. Its effective date has not been re-confirmed since; call the Building Codes Division (503-378-4133) if a date matters to your project.
- No-heat safety: the standard CDC carbon-monoxide prevention advice, cited by name (the CDC page was not re-fetched for this update). The gas-smell and CO-alarm steps are the standard leave-first, call-from-outside advice, not taken from a document re-read for this update.
No contractor, manufacturer or program pays to appear or to be mentioned. Found an error? Send it with the source; the page is corrected and re-dated.
Sources. Cost ranges are quoted from the published 2026 guides named on the cost page (Angi Portland; Costadia Portland 2026), as verified there on 23 September 2026. Incentive figures and equipment conditions are from Energy Trust of Oregon information sheets PI 0320I v2026.5 and PI 0320I-HP v2026.4 (both revised 9 September 2026), IRS guidance on Public Law 119-21, and Oregon Department of Energy program pages, as verified on the rebate page. Code language is quoted from the Oregon Building Codes Division technical summary First-Stage Heat Pump — 2026 ORSC Provisions Summary. License facts are from the State of Oregon CCB Active Licenses open dataset g77e-6bhs. This page is general information, not a bid, a code ruling or tax advice.