You drive a few miles to save two cents a gallon on gas. You switch your accounts to a bank paying one percent more on Money Markets, but you don’t think twice about the money that your old outdated furnace is wasting. If your furnace is 10-20 years old, you could be spending twice as much to heat your home. Today’s furnaces are up to 95% efficient. Compare that to your old furnace and your looking at substantial savings!
But it’s not that simple. When buying a new furnace, make sure its heating capacity is appropriate for your home. If the insulation and/or windows in your home have been upgraded since the old heating equipment was installed, you can probably use a much less powerful furnace. Oversized furnaces operate less efficiently because they cycle on and off more frequently; in addition, larger furnaces are more expensive to buy. That’s why when you choose Comfy Heating & Air Conditioning Inc.; we perform an in-depth heat loss analysis of your home to size your new heating equipment properly.
How it works
80% or 90%
A standard furnace, with an AFUE of 80 to 85 percent, has only one heat exchanger to extract the warmth produced by the gas burner. As the AFUE indicates, only 80 percent of the available heat is circulated back into your home – the rest turns into water vapor that’s exhausted outdoors through the flue pipe.
In a high-efficiency furnace, with an AFUE of 90 percent or higher, a secondary heat exchanger will evaporate that water vapor a second time to pull out nearly all the available heat. If you invest in a 96 AFUE furnace, only four percent of the available heat is wasted.
Forced-air furnaces manufactured 20 years ago had AFUE ratings of 60 percent or less. And if your home still has an old “gravity-flow” furnace with no blower fan, more than 70 percent of the heat can be wasted.
New furnaces will also have other energy-smart features like electronic pilot light ignitions, sealed combustion units and vent dampers.