Our furnace was on its last legs - original with the house which means 1979, and we decided to replace it last year, so I spent several months researching.
Not actually all that easy to research oil furnaces -- most people have gas or electric or heat pumps. But oil is cheapest so used in Canada and the Northeast. I used a lot of information from Canadian websites.
My biggest choice was between high efficiency and medium efficiency. Had several furnace people tell me the same thing -- the high efficiency furnaces are too high strung to burn the high sulfur oil they sell around here, and, in fact, the technology is so new that they just don't have sufficient track record to know whether the new models will be reliable using low sulfur oil.
A high efficiency oil furnace is so efficient that the exhaust is cool and can use a PVC pipe rather than a metal pipe, but they make a lot of acid that can corrode the little internal pipes, which means constant service calls.
We went with medium efficiency, but I don't like all the hot air that's going up the chimney. Seems wasteful to me.
Oddly, though, even so, it's still cheaper than natural gas.
And then there was picking the air cleaner and the humidifier -- I wound up just going with what Consumer Reports recommended.
The weather finally forced me to decide. The old furnace was putting out plenty of heat but banging and rattling so much that sometimes the vibrations would shut off the pilot light (electronic ignition so not dangerous, just a PITA to relight.) The oil people service it every year but said there was nothing more they could do about the rattling, nobody made spare parts anymore.
Wish we could have kept it another year or two just to see whether the high efficiency ones worked or not. But nobody around here was selling them, couldn't even get someone to install it. They'd all had too many irate consumers with them in the past.
Researching this is what got me interested in biodiesel. Diesel oil and fuel oil are about the same thing, and we can burn biodiesel in the furnace if we can get it. I'd love to do that, essentially burn soybean oil to heat the house (and run an automobile.) |
