Furnace dead... time to replace, need advice.

caragol

caragol

Member
So my 30 year old furnace needs work, and it's at the point where it's not really worth repairing so it will need to be replaced. We're getting a few quotes from random people in the yellow pages but I'm expecting to get some high figures just because I really don't know what I'm doing or who to call. Any tips or recommendations on this stuff?
 
I love costo. I'd live in there if I could. Richard here works there too... he's a district manager I think.
 
Went with Costco, good deal! The threw in some freebies which made them very competitive. I can now control my thermostat from my smartphone, which is huge for my wife... and before where the house took a few hours to heat up or cool down, it's done in minutes. I had no idea how crappy my 30 year old furnace and blower were until this new one was in.

Thanks all!
 
were you able to jump on the nicor and comed rebate? you need a min. a 14.5 SEER A/C to get back 200/250 and a 92% min. furnace for another 200/250.
 
90% plus furnaces are condensing furnaces. Which means your using the most heat as possible from the system. the older 80% furnaces have metal flue pipes that waste 20% or more of the heat that goes out the chimney. a 90% plus has two heat exchangers and it pulls more than 90% of the heat out and waste less then 10% of the heat energy your producing, they condensate and instead of a metal chimney you have two PVC pipes that go out of the side of your house. some people prefer 80 over 90 because they have less/cheaper parts which means cheaper maintance cost when something fails. but 90 will save you more on energy but will have higher maintance cost when the major parts fail. also by your system heating or cooling faster is not the best thing it could mean that they over sized the unit and your just heating/ cooling the sensible air not your latent like furniture and walls so your system will short cycle and be constintly switching on and off which means your parts will wear down faster and you will be spending more on maintance or buying a whole new unit before you should have to. bigger is not always better in hvac when it comes to homes. if you went to a true hvac place they would have sat down with you and explained all of this. Did they even come to your house first to do a walk though or did you just give them the square footage and they took it from there? theres SO many calculations that come into play when sizing a furnace and air conditioner for any home or building. Soon like in the next year you wont even be allowed to buy a 80% furnace for your home. which is bullshit because it does help bring the install cost down a lot when changing out a old to new furnace. the new 90 you need to re pipe everything and thats y it cost so much more when comparing the two. the new t-stats are cool though how you can controll them by your phone or computer so at least they sold you that which is SWEET. man I cant believe they sell coffins to thats crazy lol.
 
I get the 90% vs 80% thing... I didn't know about the rebate. We had four companies do a walkthrough. Worst was a company that told us we should replace our not-so-old AC, and also move it to the side of the house and came up with an $8000 quote and told us we had to go to the city to get our permits ourselves. Everyone else was in the high $2k, low $3k range and quoted about the same size furnace. When I say minutes, I don't mean like 10 minutes, I mean under an hour to jump 6 degrees. Before, to cool the house (with the same AC unit) it would take 2-3 hours to drop that same amount. I thought that was normal because I didn't know what normal was. Now I can feel air blowing through the vents... my blower must have been garbage but I had no idea. It's really not switching on an off a lot, though it would be cool if there was some graph built into this WiFi thermostat. Maybe I could build an app that scrapes that data from the webpage.
 
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