With This Handy Buyer’s Guide, You Can Select A Furnace That Performs To The Special Heating Demands Of Your Home

Selecting a new furnace is an important process and you need to know exactly how to go about it. It will have a huge impact on your heating costs and overall comfort in your home for years to come. Use this buyer’s guide to make sure you end up with the perfect furnace for your home.
Household Energy Efficiency

Before you even begin to look at furnaces, take a look at your house. Is it as energy efficient as it can be? If not, you may have to buy a larger, more expensive furnace to compensate; this shouldn’t be necessary. Instead, insulate your attic, seal your ducts, and use weatherstripping around doors and windows to maximize your homes efficiency.
Proper Sizing

Next you need to determine what size furnace you need. You can’t simply base this on your current furnace because your home’s needs may have changed. An HVAC technician should perform a heating load calculation to see how much energy your home requires to be heated thoroughly. This step is important to make sure you don’t overpay on heating costs for years to come.
Fuel Efficiency

When looking at furnaces in your size range, you need to compare AFUE (annual fuel utilization efficiency). This rating indicates how efficient the furnace is, and you want a unit rated at least 90 percent AFUE. This means that 90 percent of the fuel that it uses gets converted to heat that will directly warm your house, while the other 10 percent gets expelled through a chimney or flue.
Retrofitting

While installing new parts in old systems can give a temporary boost to your furnace’s efficiency, these are short-term solutions and it tends to be more cost effective to upgrade the whole system if you plan on staying in that house for years to come.

For more advice on purchasing your new furnace, contact Around the Clock Air Conditioning and Heating. We can answer any questions you may have about this important decision. We have proudly served Southern California since 1967.

Our goal is to help educate our customers about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems).  For more information about furnaces and other HVAC topics, download our free Home Comfort Resource guide.

Around the Clock Air Conditioning & Heating services Los Angeles, North Hollywood and the surrounding areas in California. Visit our website to see our current specials and get started today!