Furnaces and heat pumps both provide the same service. They heat your home. Some homeowners like to stop there and call it quits, but those homeowners either have excess money where they’d rather pay someone else to take care of the rest, or they’re paying for more repairs than they should. Many people in our area, however, want to make the most educated decision possible at the lowest cost—and for that, you’ll need some advice.
While furnaces and heat pumps do the same job, the way they do their job is incredibly different. Depending on your climate, the fuel you have access to, and the type of home you own, these systems will provide many different levels of satisfaction. While heating in San Ramon, CA might not be the biggest priority of the year, finding the most cost-effective solution for cold and rainy weather should definitely be up there.
Power or Efficiency
While this might be a more difficult decision for our neighbors up north, there’s not much of a point to having an extremely powerful heater in our area. While we do like to have our homes nice and cozy for the rainy cold that sometimes rolls in, we don’t need heavy-duty equipment like a boiler. That being said, the most important thing to look for in our area is a heater that can provide low costs and efficiency while heating our homes.
Heat Pumps
Heat pumps are an incredibly efficient solution to our heating and cooling needs. Instead of creating heat through the burning of fuel or heating of coils, heat pumps use refrigerant much like an air conditioner, to draw heat from outside and bring it indoors using electricity. The fact that this system only moves heat from one location to another instead of creating heat means that the system runs at an extremely low fuel cost—since you’re only paying for heat to be moved from one place to another!
While the initial installation price is a good deal higher than a furnace, the savings that you can receive definitely make it worth it. Also, a heat pump has a reversal switch, which means you can use it to cool your home in the hotter months as well! So, if efficiency and versatility are high on your list of priorities, a heat pump is perfect for you!
Furnaces
While they don’t sound as exciting or interesting as heat pumps, there’s a good reason why furnaces are the most common type of heater in the country. Furnaces can run on either electricity or natural gas, providing a clean-burning solution to your heating needs. Many furnaces these days have an AFUE efficiency rating of over 95%, which means the fuel to heat ratio is almost 1:1! In English, that means you’re getting more heat out of the same amount of fuel than you used to with older models.
Furnaces are cheaper to install than many other heaters and they’re reliable. If you’re just looking for a quality solution that doesn’t involve air conditioning as well, then a furnace might be perfect for you!
Make sure to have the best team in the area hook you up with your heating solution. Call Comfy Heating & Air Conditioning Inc. today!