Home Improvement Articles & Gardening Tips

High Efficiency Gas Furnace

A high efficiency gas furnace may seem fairly expensive, but as this article explains, it may well be worth it ...

Recently, we bought a high efficiency gas furnace. We hadn't meant to. We hadn't even  thought about high efficiency furnaces. We had simply called to have our old furnace cleaned in preparation for the winter. When the heating and cooling technician arrived, he was positively shocked. Apparently our furnace was a dinosaur. He showed me our flame tubes, crusted with debris. He showed me the sickly, yellowish light which they made, instead of the healthy blue one that indicated good combustion. He showed me the miserably low temperature in the plenum. This thing was not safe for our family, he said, as it could be releasing incompletely burned gases into the house as we spoke. A new high efficiency gas furnace seemed the only way to go.

Well, a high efficiency gas furnace is expensive – well over a thousand dollars, all told. And there are other things to consider as well. A new furnace, even a top of the line high efficiency gas furnace, is usually made with a substandard filter. This ensures that, within a year or two, debris is crusted up inside the furnace and in the heating ducts which run through the house. Therefore you have to get it serviced and cleaned, and its lifespan is severely decreased. This is a godsend for the after market furnace business which makes a fortune every year simply cleaning out vents and servicing decaying furnaces.

So a high efficiency gas furnace wasn't good enough. Not without a new filter to go with it. And then there was the matter of the duct system. Apparently, the ducts which went under the crawlspace were so degraded and full of holes that dirt, mold, and whatever other unmentionable matter lingered in that dank recess had been being pulled up in to the house for years. It is no wonder that we all suffered so much from allergies during the winter season. I can't even imagine what we must have been breathing. So, not only did we need a new high efficiency gas furnace, but we needed to have the whole underside of the house strung with ducts.

While they were at it, they recommended new insulation as well. Not only was the insulation practical, making sure that the heat from the high efficiency gas furnace made it into the house instead of radiating under, but it would protect the ducts as well. All told, it cost over two thousand dollars, but sitting in my house, warm, toasty, and free from allergies, I can say it was worth it.

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