MADISON (WKOW) – With temperatures dropping fast, heating technicians have been working around the clock.

“It’s been very busy,” said Jim Nickols, owner of Leading Edge Heating and Cooling. “Your furnace could go out in the middle of the night. You can’t wait. The temperatures in the homes drop rapidly this time of year in this time of cold.”

With the extreme cold temperatures coming this week, Nickols says your furnace might have trouble keeping up.

“The harder you work your furnace, the more it runs, the more runtime, the more likely it is to have some failure,” he said.

Temperatures will be getting so cold that Nickols says they’ll be beyond what most furnaces are designed to handle.

“The designed temperature on a furnace is 10 degrees below 0,” he said. “So it is pushing the maximum capacity of the furnace.”

When that capacity gets pushed, Nickols says you’ll notice it in your home.

“It’s possible that if you normally set your house to 70 or 72, it might not reach that on that really cold spell coming up,” he said. “It might be a degree two or less than that.”

Nickols says there are simple fixes to a lot of common problems.

“I would check the filter,” he said. “I would check the drain line. I would make sure their venting outside is cleared off, especially with the snowfall coming tomorrow.”

But if the vents in your home aren’t producing heat at all, don’t wait.

“If you notice your house is starting to cool off, don’t procrastinate,” Nickols said. “Go ahead and get the call out right away because your house will drop very rapidly.”