Should You Buy A Conventional Or Condensing Furnace?

If you feel like you are paying too much to heat your home, you probably are. This is especially true if you have an older furnace. Older furnaces were built in a time when the government's regulations for furnace efficiency were less demanding. Furthermore, furnaces can decrease in efficiency as time goes by. Thus, an older furnace can be as little as 56% efficient. If such is the case with your furnace, you are basically burning $44 of every $100 you spend on heating your home. Buying a newer, more efficient furnace will help to get your heating costs back in check. The question is whether you should buy a conventional furnace or a condensing one.

The Limitations of a Conventional Furnace

The design of a conventional furnace features one heat exchanger and a vent pipe. The heat exchanger is made so that it leaves enough heat in the exhaust gases escaping from your furnace that they can still rise out of a vent pipe and, thus, escape your home. The problem with this system is that you are not able to use all of the heat created by burning a fuel. Thus, a conventional furnace will never be more than 83% efficient because your furnace has to leave some heat in the exhaust gases so that they don't just build up in your home. 

The Advantages of a Condensing Furnace

A condensing furnace seeks to improve on the limitations of a conventional furnace. Thus, it features a design with two heat exchangers. The second exchanger extracts so much heat from the gases that flow through it, that the water vapor in those gases condenses back to a liquid. The other gases can then dissolve into the water and drain out of your furnace through a drain pipe. This design can achieve efficiency levels of up to 98.5%. Thus, the most efficient furnace you can buy is a condensing furnace. 

As you might imagine, the top-of-the-line condensing furnace comes with a higher price tag than a conventional furnace. The key to deciding whether to buy a conventional or a condensing furnace, thus, will likely come down to which one you can afford. Before you simply decide to go with the less expensive option, you have to look at how much you stand to save each month on your heating costs versus how much it will cost to finance your furnace. As long as your financing costs are less than the amount of money you save because of the improved efficiency of your furnace, it still makes sense to buy a condensing furnace. 

For more information, contact local professionals like Advance Care Heating & AC LLC.

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