Tips for Buying a New Furnace in an Old Home

For those out there who are in love with older homes, we know what difficulties they can possess when you need to renovate or update particular appliances. Think about when you technology updates, and whatever new thing they created now requires new cables or ports to connect with your old technology. It’s kind of the same thing for older homes too. There could be retrofitting or adding convertors to make the old fit with the new, or just replacing all the old to fit in with the new.

With this idea in mind and thinking about replacing your furnace, we’ll need to talk about the ductwork. If your furnace is really old, then your ductwork is really old. With that, it can have
breakage or cracks that the new furnace won’t be able to do its job of being more efficient if the air is just leaking out of the old ductwork, before it can reach the rooms that it’s trying to heat. A heating and cooling expert can give you advice on whether or not you need to replace or repair your old ductwork. If you are converting an old house from radiator heat to central heating, the good news is you can pretty much pick wherever you’d like for your vents since there is no system already established. But the bad news is, it’s going to cost more than if you already had established duct work.

When upgrading from an old furnace, one of the benefits is the efficiency. Depending on your old furnace, it probably is converting only about 60% of fuel into heat. So upgrading to a more modern one, will increase your efficiency. You’ll want to replace it with one that has at least up to 80% fuel efficiency, though there are furnaces on the market that will do up to 90%. Historic houses tend to vent their furnaces through their chimneys that will downgrade your efficiency. If you’d like to improve the cost savings more, then you can convert it to vent another way out of your home to save money through your monthly energy bills.

There are different types of furnaces that range in efficiency and size that you can research or speak to a HVAC professional to help find the right furnace to suit your needs. They can help
you find the size that will fit properly into your older home. New furnaces run on natural gas or electricity and you can choose a cost-efficient furnace based on service costs of gas vs. electric. Furnace costs can vary from $900-$2000, with installation ranging from $2,000 to $8,000 depending on what type of furnace you choose, the location of the furnace in your home, and how large the house is.

Something to note on historic homes, there may be rules and regulations in place to protect them. So investigate whether or not your home is considered historic and see if there are limitations on what you can upgrade before you start the process of selecting a new furnace to install. You may even find potential tax breaks for properly renovating historic properties. At any rate, all this can seem daunting depending on the type of older home you have and your skill levels and knowledge on older homes and HVAC systems. Give us a call at Priority Heating and we’ll help you through this process and get your old home warm and snuggly in no time.