If you’re buying a furnace for your Dayton area home, there are plenty of options available to help you get the most out of your system. One upgrade, a variable-speed fan motor, is a great investment – not only to reduce your heating costs through the entire heating season, but to offer a boost to your home comfort.
Traditional furnaces don’t have a lot of built-in flexibility. When they’re on, they’re on – burning fuel at a constant, usually high rate, and circulating it through your home at a certain volume per minute. Because this rate has to be high enough to keep you warm during the coldest parts of the winter, when your furnace is running in cool but not cold weather, keeping the furnace in constant operation would overheat your home.
This is why traditional furnaces switch on and off in order to maintain your indoor temperatures; they heat your home up to around its target range, and then let it cool down until it’s time to engage again. To make an analogy, this would be like driving your car only at full acceleration or none, and keeping within the speed limit by turning your engine on and off. Where your furnace is concerned, that makes for noise and temperature fluctuations, and added wear and tear on your blower fan.
Buying a variable-speed furnace addresses these by varying the rate of warm air delivery through your ductwork. When you need less warm air, less is circulated, and when the temperature drops you’ll get more hot air circulating to offset it. This means that a variable-speed fan can keep your home at a steady equilibrium in both noise and temperature, and closely match your energy use to your actual energy needs. Variable-speed operation also saves energy, and the near continuous operation offers enhanced air filtration as well.
To learn more about buying a furnace and the energy-efficient, cost-saving options available, contact us at Ace Hardware Home Services, Inc.
Our goal is to help educate our customers in Dayton, Ohio about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems).
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