Carrier's manual defines 14 in one line — "Ignition lockout. Control will auto-reset after three hours. Refer to #34" — because 14 carries no diagnosis of its own. The diagnosis lives in 34: flame proving failed, from a coated sensor, a shut gas valve, low pressure, a dead ignitor, or a bad valve. Fourteen just tells you the furnace has stopped volunteering to try.
Use the three hours well. Confirm the gas shut-off at the furnace is open (fourteen often follows other work — a water heater swap, a meter change — where the valve got closed and never reopened). Check the filter. Then decide: when the board retries, watch one cycle through the sight glass if you can do it safely from outside the cabinet — does the igniter glow? Does flame appear and die? Those two observations, told to a technician, are worth real money.
Code 14: Ignition lockout
Homeowner checks
The lockout version of code 34 — the furnace tried, failed to prove ignition, and shut down. Auto-resets after three hours.
From the table: Two-digit status codes — short flashes, then long flashes — source: Carrier 58YAV Service section - status code table (read the document, fetched 2026-10-30). Covers: Carrier 58-series and their Bryant/Payne twins. First digit = number of short flashes; second digit = number of long flashes. Code 33 is 3 short, pause, 3 long.
The one thing not to do
Cycling power skips the three-hour wait. It also erases the stored code and lets a furnace with a genuinely failed ignitor or valve hammer through fresh retries all night. One power-cycle after the basics is a legitimate test. A rhythm of resets is not.
Homeowner checks — the safe list:
- Thermostat set to Heat, and set a few degrees above the room temperature.
- The gas shut-off valve at the furnace: handle in line with the pipe means open. If it is off, that is your answer — and ask yourself why it was off.
- Air filter: pull it and look. A matted filter causes more furnace faults than any broken part.
- One reset is fair: power off at the switch for 30 seconds, back on, and watch what it does. If it locks out again, stop resetting it — the code is telling you something real.
The two rules that outrank everything on this page.
1. Smell gas? Stop reading. Leave the house and call your gas utility or 911 from outside. No code is worth diagnosing through a gas smell.
2. Never bypass a safety switch — no jumping a pressure switch, no taping a limit, no propping a rollout. Those switches are the only thing between a furnace fault and a fire or carbon-monoxide problem. This library explains codes; it does not teach repairs inside the cabinet.
One honesty note before the tables: codes change between control boards, sometimes inside the same brand and the same decade. Every table below names the board and the manual it was transcribed from. The chart glued inside your own blower door is the final word for your furnace — if it disagrees with this page, believe the door.