What To Look For

There are three important factors to consider when selecting a new furnace. First is size, which is determined by the amount of heat needed to heat your home or business. The second factor is efficiency, measuring how much of the heat actually gets transferred to the air in your house versus how much gets wasted up the flue or chimney. The third is called single stage, two stage, variable speed, or modulating furnace. The last is the largest change in our industry. With today's new products we can deliver the absolute best in home comfort.

Size

You've probably heard numbers such as 100,000 BTUs, 80,000 BTUs and so forth. Natural gas and propane furnaces are rated in BTUs which stands for British Thermal Units. These numbers rate how large the furnace is and how much gas it will burn. The larger the space is, the larger the furnace needs to be. Manwill's sales consultants and service personnel have been trained to calculate the proper size furnace for any environment. Undersizing a furnace has it's obvious disadvantage, it will run constantly but not keep the house warm. On the other hand, an oversized furnace will run very short cycles but burn a large amount of gas in each short cycle. This results in higher heating bills and excessive high and low temperatures in the house, making your home very uncomfortable. A properly sized furnace will save you money on gas, plus assure you of the personal comfort you expect.

Efficiency

Be sure to consider the furnace's efficiency. You'll soon become familiar with efficiency ratings such as 80%, 90% and up to 96% fuel efficiency. The best way to describe fuel efficiency is: if you purchase $100.00 worth of gas, with an 80% efficient furnace you would receive $80.00 of the heat generated by the gas into your home and you would loose the remaining $20.00 up the flue or chimney. However, with a 95% efficient furnace you would get $95.00 of heat into your home and only loose $5.00 of heat out the flue. Many older furnaces (built prior to 1990) have an even lower efficiency. Some are as low as 50% efficient although the majority of the older furnaces are 65 to 70% efficient.

When sizing a furnace, we consider how much heat is actually transferred into your home. To do this, you calculate the input rating on the furnace by the efficiency. For example: a 25 year old furnace, 100,000 btu with a fuel efficiency of 65% will put 65,000 btu's into your home (100,000 x .65 = 65,000 output). In this case, you could replace that furnace with a 70,000 btu (considerably smaller than the previous 100,000 btu furnace) with a fuel efficiency of 95% and actually put more heat into the house. 70,000 x .95 = 66,500 btu. Now you can burn 30% less gas and still provide the same amount of heat to your home - keeping warm and comfortable while preserving our environment and your pocketbook.