If you’re looking for an energy efficient furnace, you should know a little bit about the types of furnaces that are available so that you can make the best decision for your home and your budget. There are plenty of different types of furnaces available, but we’ll only discuss a few types that use energy most efficiently.

Central Warm-Air Furnace: This type of furnace basically heats air in a combustor or resistance unit, which can run on electricity, oil, or gas, and pushes the air through the home. The system can either rely on the natural flow of hot and cold air, which is a gravity system, or fans, which are called forced-air systems, to get heat through the home.

Hot Water and Steam Systems: These types of central furnaces push steam or hot water through pipes, which are either in those old-fashioned radiators many older homes will have or are embedded in the walls, floors, and ceilings of the home. This type of system can be combined with a coil unit that can also help cool a home.

Heat Pump: This type of system uses the same sort of compressor that is found on a refrigerator to either pull heat out of the outside air and bring it in or to pull heat from the inside air and take it out. This type of system can also come in a geothermal unit, which uses the natural heat and coolness of the earth to generate heat or air conditioning.

The most efficient type of heating system is a geothermal heat pump, but this system can cost a lot of money to install. It may pay for itself over time, but you’ll want to know that you will live in or use the building where you’re installing it for decades to come to know that you’ll get your money back out of it.

The second most affordable type of heating system is a central heating system that runs on natural gas. Natural gas is cheap in most places, and it can be used to power everything from your furnace to your water heater to your stove. Besides this, natural gas doesn’t leave a lot of environmental residue. Oil, on the other hand, can be quite expensive, and it leaves residue in your home and in the environment. If you can’t get natural gas in your area, though, oil may be the choice you’ll have to make.

For the best savings on your heating and cooling bill, you should install a furnace – or dual heating and cooling system – that is at least 80% efficient. This means that the system actually uses 80% of the fuel injected into it to heat or cool your home. The other 20% is wasted, and systems that waste more than 20% of the fuel dumped into them should not be used, as they are expensive over time and can leave too much environmental residue behind to be worth the savings on the front end.

There is a lot of debate going on right now about energy-efficient appliances. The government is offering rebates 

to people who buy them, but who has money to spend on new appliances, especially if their old ones are still working? Well, you may change your tune and save up some money for a new furnace when you find out just how much an energy-efficient furnace can save you.

This isn’t to say, of course, that you should pull out a five-year-old furnace to replace it with the newest model, but you should seriously consider replacing your furnace if it is more than ten years old. For one thing, you’ll save money on repair costs, no matter what type of new furnace you buy. And even the most inefficient, most inexpensive contemporary furnaces can still save energy compared to one that is more than a decade old.

The actual amount that you can save from a furnace depends on what type of furnace you have and what you’re replacing it with. Because of the cost of oil, furnaces that run on oil will save more money when they are efficient than furnaces that are run on gas. However, all types of energy materials are rising in cost, so the sooner you replace your old furnace with a new, energy-efficient furnace, the more money you’ll end up saving over time.

Savings with Gas Furnaces

These savings hold true for a home that is about 2,500 square feet, and they are meant to show you what you could save by replacing your old gas furnace with a new one that is 90% efficient. In frigid Maine, the average savings for replacing a 60% efficient furnace with a 90% efficient one are about $1,300, and replacing a 78% efficient gas furnace with that same 90% efficient model can save $355. These savings are per year, so just imagine what you could save over the life of your new furnace. Of course, if you live in a more mild area, you won’t save quite as much, but even in Florida, the savings would really add up.

Savings with oil Furnaces

The amount of money you can save with an oil furnace is even more shocking. If you were to replace a 60% efficient oil furnace with a new one that is 83% efficient, you could save around $1,600 a year in a cold climate and at least $200 a year in a hot climate. Replacing a 75% efficient oil furnace with an 83% efficient model would save you almost %600 in a cold area and at least $100 in a warmer area.

Repair Costs

While you’ll still have to have your brand-new furnace checked every year, you could save some serious cash on actual repair costs. If your duct-work and electrical wires are in good shape, it may only cost you about $2,000 to $3,000 to replace your furnace with a new energy-efficient furnace, and if you live in an area that gets even a little chilly in the winter, you can recuperate that in repair costs and energy cost savings in just a couple of years.

 

These days, you might hear a lot about humidifiers, since many doctors and clinics are beginning to recommend them for different medical conditions. A humidifier basically takes water and puts it back into the air, creating an environment that is less dry and irritating. You can actually buy furnace-mounted humidifiers that will keep your entire home from getting too dry, which can help with asthma, allergies, and other health conditions.

 

How a Humidifier Helps

If you have one of the following conditions, a furnace-mounted humidifier can really help you feel better and stay healthy:

·         Asthma and allergies: Although a humidifier won’t completely get rid of these conditions, it can help ease some of the irritation in the nose and throat that people with asthma and allergies tend to experience. If you or your children are constantly fighting sore throats and dry nasal passages during allergy seasons, a humidifier can certainly help ease the itching and pain.

·         Dry Skin: There is nothing more annoying in the winter than dry skin. It can seem like no matter how much lotion you slather on and how many glasses of water you drink, your skin is still constantly itchy, flaky, and even painfully cracked. A humidifier can put moisture back into the air to help solve this problem.

·         Dry Eyes: Contact wearers know the annoyance of being in too-dry air. Just think about what happens when you spend a lot of time outdoors on a hot, dry day, and your eyes will probably start to itch. Dried-out contacts can cause blurry vision, and they can be downright uncomfortable. Putting moisture back into the air of your home can help your contacts become more comfortable.

·         Colds and Flu: During cold and flu season, there’s nothing worse than dealing with both a runny nose and a dry nose. Using a humidifier in your home can help ease many of the symptoms of colds and the flu, and it can help make your sick little ones much more comfortable.

 

The Importance of Cleanliness

Humidifiers can certainly help your family in all of the above ways, and they can even help your home, especially if you have wooden floors and beams that can crack and creak when they are too dry. However, it’s important to keep in mind that you need to keep your humidifier clean. Humidifiers that are spurting dirty or contaminated water into the air will only make things like colds, the flu, allergies, and asthma worse.

 

Furnace-mounted Humidifiers

While you can buy small humidifiers that will put moisture into the air in a single room or a large living area, the simplest and most effective way to humidify your entire home is with a furnace-mounded humidifier. Many modern furnaces come with these already integrated into the furnace system, but if yours didn’t, you can have a professional install a humidifier on your furnace.

These humidifiers work like many of the smaller ones do. Most of them have a fan that pulls water from a reservoir into your air ducts, which disseminates it throughout your home. The best part about these humidifiers, though, is that they almost all have self-cleaning cycles, so you only need to service them a few times each year.