Factors to Consider When Choosing a Home Heating System

What You Need to Know to Keep Your Home Cozy

How you heat your home has a big impact on your comfort. Your home heating system can also make a big difference in what you spend each month to keep your family comfortable. If you’re shopping for a new home or building from scratch, you have a lot of options: boiler, furnace, even heat pumps. But if you’re replacing your old heating equipment, the best option is to upgrade to a more efficient version of what you have already.

Here’s what you need to know.

Equipment Options

Replacing like with like is the best way to go if you are replacing an old heating system. That’s because different types of home heating systems distribute heat differently.

• Forced hot water boilers: Heat water to between 170°F and 200°F and provide instant heat through pipes throughout the house. Vents in the baseboard then disperse the heat throughout the house.
• Steam boilers: Create steam and send it to radiators as a vapor. When the vapor cools, it returns to the boiler to become steam again. You need to monitor the water level in steam boilers or they won’t deliver heat.
• Furnaces: Use a heat exchanger to warm air, which is then blown through ductwork to warm your home. Registers in the floors or ceilings of your living space allow warm air into your spaces and feature a damper so you can control the flow. A system of supply registers and return grills delivers warm air into your rooms and sends cooled air back to your system.

Replacing a system of vents and ducts with a system of pipes and radiators (or vice versa) is a complicated and expensive undertaking. Today’s high-efficiency boilers and furnaces will work better than older versions, keeping your home more comfortable while burning less fuel.

What About Heat Pumps?

Electric heat pumps are popular because they don’t require ductwork and can work to cool rooms in the summer and provide heat in the winter. But heat pumps work by moving existing heat in the air from one place to another using an outdoor compressor and an indoor air handler. In the summer, hot air from inside your home is removed — creating a cooler indoor environment. In the winter, the pump extracts heat from the outdoor air or ground and distributes it to your home. But with our frigid winters, a heat pump needs to work extra hard to generate heat. That can drive your electricity bill through the roof.

Fuel Choices

Furnaces and boilers can be run with oil, propane, natural gas, or electricity. However, except for natural gas and propane, you can’t change fuels without replacing your equipment. With our cold, raw weather, most homes use oil for comfortable, reliable heat.

Heating oil has a higher BTU output per gallon, so you use it more slowly than propane. That means you could pay less to heat your house with heating oil, even if the per-gallon cost of propane is less.

In addition, thanks to advances in the refining process, ultra-low sulfur heating oil burns so cleanly and produces such negligible emissions that the Federal Clean Air Act doesn’t even regulate it anymore.

What’s more, new high-efficiency boilers and furnaces now burn heating oil 99.9% cleanly, according to studies conducted at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven Laboratory.

While there’s a lot of pressure to go all-in on electricity, it might not be the best choice for heating in our winter climate—especially if rates continue to climb. Electric heat just takes much longer to reach a comfortable temperature and maintain it—driving up your energy usage. That means, even without rising energy prices, electricity costs you more.

The Bottom Line

A new heating system is a significant investment that is worth every penny. The pros at Bolkema have decades of experience helping families in northern New Jersey and southern New York State keep their homes warm. We’re here to answer all your home-heating equipment questions, get your new system installed properly, and help make sure it performs well for a long time.

Contact us today to get started on upgrading your home’s heating system.