A Furnace Creates Warm Air to Go Through Your Wisconsin Home
If you’re like most people, you don’t think a whole lot about your furnace—unless it stops keeping your home warm. Yet, knowing more about how your heating oil furnace delivers warm air through your home will help you to make smart choices if you’re considering replacing your old heating system with a new, high-efficiency model. And if you’re having a heating problem, knowing more about how your furnace works will be helpful when you discuss the issue with your heating oil service contractor.
A Closer Look at Your Oil Furnace
Also known as warm-air or forced-air systems, heating oil furnaces produce heated air in the combustion chamber.
- Inside an oil-fired furnace, the fuel is mixed with air and burned.
- The heat exchanger transfers the heat to the air, which is pushed through the heat exchanger by the furnace’s blower fan.
- The fan blows the heated air through a network of air ducts before the warm air exits through registers or vents throughout your home.
- Combustion gases are vented out of the building through a flue pipe.
The Advantage of Having a Furnace
Besides heat, the ductwork that connects with your furnace can provide other kinds of conditioned air, including through:
- a central air conditioning system
- a whole-house humidifier
- an air cleaning system or air purifier
Old Furnaces Vs. New Furnaces
Today’s energy-efficient heating oil furnaces provide homeowners in Wisconsin with a great opportunity to increase their comfort while decreasing their energy usage. New furnaces can now heat a home using significantly less energy compared to older generation equipment. Here are examples of how new furnaces compare to older models.
- Older furnaces vent exhaust gases directly to the outside, but this wastes about 30% of the heat energy because the exhaust gases need to remain hot enough to rise through the chimney safely.
- Modern oil furnaces use an insulated flue pipe instead of a barometric damper. This improves venting and reduces heat loss.
- Modern-day heating oil furnaces can run at a range of speeds and include other efficiency-enhancing features including microprocessor-based controls, high-pressure flame-retention oil burners and durable heat exchangers.
Advanced technology has also brought us the ultra-efficient condensing heating oil furnace, which recovers and uses some of the heat that may have been lost, thanks to a secondary heat exchanger.
Replacing Your Old Furnace
As noted, today’s high-efficiency furnaces provide extra heat more efficiently than units made a generation ago. Higher efficiency means more energy savings, which of course translates into lower energy costs. This is why it pays to learn as much as you can about today’s high-tech heating solutions. Your heating oil service contractor can help you, with all of the latest information on high-efficiency heating oil furnaces.
Your installer will have to figure out how much BTU power your new system needs. Some contractors will miscalculate and install a heating system that’s too powerful, or oversized. This will give you more heat than you need, wasting energy and money. But if the system doesn’t have enough power, (undersized), your home will not feel comfortable; you will also spend more on fuel because the furnace will keep turning on.
To decide how much power your home’s heating system needs, an experienced heating oil service provider will do tests to figure out how much heat your home loses in the winter.
Once a proper-sized system is selected, your heating oil service provider will install it the right way. This requires skilled technicians with specialized training. A furnace is not like a refrigerator that gets wheeled into the kitchen and plugged in. A heating system installation takes much more work!
Bottom line: installing a new heating system will increase energy efficiency and save you money, assuming the furnace is sized and installed correctly.
If you’re ready to explore new heating oil system options for your Wisconsin home, your heating oil service company will be happy to help. Please remember to ask about current rebate opportunities in Wisconsin for new heating oil equipment.