Serving The Chicagoland Area Since 1998
Heating technology doesn’t stand still. It is constantly advancing, and that’s why modern gas furnaces are more energy efficient than the furnaces of 30, 20, or even 10 years in the past. But simply saying that “technology got better” isn’t really saying that much. What exactly makes the new furnace so efficient?
Before we get into why furnaces are more efficient, let’s look at exactly how much more efficient they are today than in the past.
Air filters, pl. noun: Devices that remove air contaminants by using a mesh of filters to trap particles in the air flow that moves through them.
Air purifiers, pl. noun: Electronic installations placed into HVAC systems that use ionization, UV radiation, oxidation, or other methods to eliminate pollutants without using filtration. Syn: air scrubbers, air cleaners.
Now that we’ve put up those two definitions, the next question is, “Okay, which one is the best for improving my home’s indoor air quality?”
The last thing you want to happen on a cold winter day is to turn on the furnace to heat your home, only to have the furnace immediately stop working. When this happens, we recommend that you check on the electrical panel to your home to see if a circuit breaker has been tripped. If one has, reset the breaker and try the furnace again. If the furnace turns on, but then immediately trips the circuit breaker again, there’s a problem that needs to be addressed.
(Yes, a gas furnace can trip a circuit breaker. Natural gas furnaces do rely on a number of electrical components, such as the blower motor fan and the electronic ignition system. This isn’t just an electric furnace problem.)
During yet another cold winter in Chicago, you may not realize that a key part of staying comfortable inside your house is maintaining a good level of indoor air quality. This is one of the unpleasant little secrets of the modern home: they don’t “breathe” well. This keeps heat from escaping in winter (and keeps the heat out in the summer) but it ends up trapping contaminant-filled, stuffy air indoors, and that can be a problem.
So, is this your first winter using a heat pump to provide cozy comfort to your house? Whether it’s because you have moved into a new home that has a heat pump installed, or you had the heat pump installed yourself earlier this year, you need to know a few things about what happens during winter. There are some behaviors you may notice from your heat pump that seem alarming. But they are actually normal and not necessarily indications of malfunctions that require repairs:
There are more options for water heaters today than there were a few decades ago. Back then, “water heater” almost always meant a storage tank water heater, a system that uses a supply of water kept at a constant temperature inside a tank using gas jets or electrical heating elements. But today there are tankless systems as well as systems that rely on different sources of power, like the heat pump water heater. This type of heat pump removes heat from the surrounding air and then applies it to the water. A heat pump water heater is extremely energy efficient and costs much less to run than a standard electric water heater.
The temperatures in Chicago are dropping rapidly into the 30s and 20s, and of course it’s only going to get colder. We hope that you’ve already scheduled an inspection and tune-up for your heating system (it’s always best to have this arranged in the early fall) so that your heater can have an easy time for the rest of the season. But have you arranged for maintenance for your home’s standby generator? If you haven’t, call our generator specialists right away!
We’ve now come to the time of year when furnaces fire up and stay running for long stretches at a time. But as you get ready to enjoy a cozy home, you may detect an acrid odor coming from the vents. Does this mean there’s something seriously wrong with the furnace, possibly something that’s a safety hazard? Do you need to call our technicians to come fix it?
We’ll take a look at what these burning odors may mean, and what to do about them.
During the fall, we make a major effort to stress with our customers and potential customers the importance of arranging for heating maintenance before winter cold arrives. And as you can probably guess from the calendar, winter is not that far away. If you haven’t yet arranged for your annual heating maintenance, right now is the time to jump on it. It’s easy: you only have to call us and ask about our Residential Maintenance Agreements.
Here’s something we need to stress: all types of heating systems require these pre-winter inspections.
The term radiant heat refers to any kind of heat that comes off a heated surface. You feel radiant heat coming from the metal of the sides of buildings during a hot day, or coming up from asphalt. But when it comes to home heating, radiant heating means a particular type of comfort system: hot water circulated from a boiler raises the temperature of pipes running through a subfloor, which in turn heats up the floorboards. These heated surfaces then send heat waves into the room. (You can also have radiant heating through room radiators or baseboard heaters.)
