We’ve had our Polaris high efficiency hot water heater active for about 10 months now. Yesterday morning I heard a loud popping sound from the basement, and a few hours later Shanna was complaining about not having any hot water.

I went downstairs and the unit was flashing once, indicating that there was a problem with the pressure switch. This was on Sunday, and of course their support line is not open on Sunday, so we were without hot water and heat (the Polaris powers our only source of heat, radiant tubing) for the day.

I called this morning, was on hold for about twenty minutes, and then got a woman who took down my information, and told me that the Commercial department would handle this, and that they would call me back. I had called the commercial number, but for some reason got transferred to the residential line.

Anyway, I waited for a couple hours, never got a call from commercial dept, so I called back the commercial line, and got a nice gentleman (I believe his name was Tom). I told him again the symptoms, that the blower was constantly on, and that the indicator light was flashing once.

He told me to open the right control panel, grab a screwdriver, take the blunt end of it, and tap the upper left corner of the ignition control board. I thought he was kidding. He wasn’t. To solve the issue, he actually wanted me to bang this control board with a screwdriver, which would shut off the blower.

It worked. Strange. Apparently their original control board wasn’t big enough to support an adequate sized electrical component, so if the voltage dropped a little bit, it made the pressure switch go wonky.

They are now overnighting me a new board that fixes this issue, and the guy threw in a new igniter as well, which he told me tends to fail after 3-5 years.  Of course I had to pay for the overnight shipping charges, around $30.

It sucked that I couldn’t get that information on Sunday though.