The nights are getting cooler, the kids are going back to school, and it won’t be long until your furnace starts kicking in again.
It’s a tough decision to decide when to replace your furnace, since furnace replacement is one of the big ticket items for homeowners. There is the time-honoured method of replacing your furnace when it stops working during the worst cold snap of the year, but if you’re not that kind of gambler, there are three criteria for deciding when to replace your furnace.
3 Reasons To Replace Your Furnace
- The first item on your decision-making list is if your furnace is having frequent breakdowns, needing repairs, making strange noises, or showing rust, it’s probably time to replace it.
- The second item is the age of your furnace. Furnaces last around 20 years on average. If your furnace is older than this, it’s on borrowed time. If your furnace is fairly old but still seems to be running okay, you might want to think about replacing it anyway, because chances are excellent that you would be replacing it with a model that is much more energy efficient.
- That brings us to the third item on the list—your winter heating bills. It is a little bit startling how much money you can save by replacing your old furnace with a new, energy-efficient model.
As Ragsdale Heating Air and Plumbing in Atlanta, GA notes,
Even if your furnace has a few years left in it, it may not be cost-efficient to keep it if your energy bills during the heating season are high due to the furnace’s horrible efficiency. With that in mind, you need to assess how much it’s costing you just to keep the current furnace you have versus how much you’ll save with a new furnace…
AFUE [Annual Fuel Utilization Efficiency] is a gas furnace’s efficiency rating, represented in a percentage. It stands for how much of the gas it uses to heat your home. So an 80% AFUE furnace uses 80% of the fuel to heat your home, the rest goes up the flue pipe—wasted. That means for every dollar you use to heat your home, 20 cents is wasted… So if you’re upgrading from a 60% AFUE furnace to a super efficient 90% AFUE furnace, you’re saving $33.33 for every $100 you normally spend on heating… The savings from a higher energy efficiency furnace may motivate you to replace your current furnace earlier than you expect.
Replacing a furnace is a cost outlay, no doubt about it. However, replacing an older, inefficient furnace or a furnace that is having frequent or costly repairs makes good money sense. There are also rebates available from the Alberta government for the purchase of an energy efficient furnace. These aren’t huge, but they’re something.
Your first step is talking to 4 Seasons Home Comfort, and discussing your furnace needs for the upcoming winter. Contact us to discuss options or visit our showroom at 3620 9th Ave North in Lethbridge.
