If you’re looking to save money on furnace repair, you’ve come to the right place. There are lots of ways to save on repairing your furnace, and here are a few of them:

 

1.       Have it Serviced Regularly

This is the one thing that you absolutely must do if you want to save on repairing your furnace. It’s like with your car; if you fail to change the oil, check the alignment, and replace the timing belt, you could end up with a very expensive mess when you would have simply had to pay a little bit to stay on top of those things in the first place.

The same thing goes with your furnace. As a general rule, you should bring in a professional to clean and tune up your furnace at least once a year – if not every six months. This will keep you from having to pay for more expensive repairs down the road, and it has the advantage of having a second set of eyes to tell you when you may need to replace your furnace in a few months or years. This way, you can save up money for a new furnace and installation instead of getting stuck with a sudden $2,500 bill when your old gas furnace finally kicks the bucket.

2.       Don’t Make it Work So Hard

When you don’t take steps to save energy, you lose money because you’re paying more for your electricity bill or gas bill, but you also waste money by causing your furnace to work harder than it needs to. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t put a decent furnace to good use, but you will save on furnace repair if your furnace isn’t running at top level twenty-four hours a day.

3.       Check Before You Call

Before you call the repairman, be sure that you check a few basic things so that you aren’t wasting someone’s time or paying for a needless visit. First off, be sure that your pilot light is on; if it’s gone off for some reason, you’ll have instructions – likely pasted on the side of your furnace – for lighting the pilot light. Be sure, too, that your thermostat is clean and is reading the temperature correctly, as a faulty thermostat could fool you into thinking there’s something wrong with the furnace. Another basic thing is to be sure the circuit breaker for the furnace is set to the on position.

4.       Call a Professional

Once you’ve checked all that basic stuff, don’t attempt to do anything further on your own. You’re likely to mess up your furnace more, which will end up costing you more in the end. You could also seriously injure yourself, as furnaces run on very flammable elements.

5.       Buy a New One

This doesn’t seem like much of a way to save, but it can actually help you out a lot if you have an older furnace. If your furnace is more than fifteen years old, as your repairman at the next yearly check-up how everything looks and whether it is likely to break down any time soon. Buying a newer high-efficiency model before your old furnace croaks gives you time to save up some cash and costs less in repairs later on.

 

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.