Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler New Home Owner - Questions on Furnace

Guys,

The heating furnace in my newly purchased home is 15+ years old. Its heat exchanger is rusted .The inspection report states that furance is toward the last phase of its life.

I have two options

1. replace the heat exchanger, which seems like a sub 600$ investment and delay the new furnace investment.
2. Buy a new one, sears gave me a quote of $4000 [ ouch...ouch].

Pls advice, i got to dig deep to find that extra 4k and also a baby is on the way too.....

-Raj

Raj,

Congrats on the forthcoming parenthood!! With 3 kidlets myself, I understand about money being tight.

Certainly the HtExchanger replacement will get you through for now, but unless there has been other work done on the unit, everything else is 15yrs old as well. The motors, burners, gas valve, and electronics are all on the downside of their lifespan. You may be begining a cycle of "good money after bad". Most repairs run between $300 and $800 per incident. It wouldn't take long to spend half the cost of a new one.

With regard to the Sears quote, can you fill us in on what brand and model he was quoting? Was it mid or hi-efficiency? Was it a Single Stage, Two Stage, or Two Stage with Variable speed motors?

The Variable furnaces are the most expensive, but they have the quickest payback due to electrical savings. (They only use 80 to 100 watts as opposed to 600.)

If the house was bought as an investment with the intent of turning it over within a few years, you should be able to buy a furnace for far less than $4K. (Or have that one fixed) If you plan to be there long term, seriously consider dropping the extra dough for a good one.

Feel free to PM me.

4000 sounds pretty expensive for a basic furnace, hopefully this is for a dual-stage (hi and low heat) furnace with a DC servo blower (uses much less power than normal blowers when running at low speed).

If your current furnace is a basic contractor-grade unit (which is likely) then you can probably get an equivalent quality furnace installed for much less.

Can you dig up a bit of info on your current furnace ?

Need more info.

Is yours oil, gas, propane or electric?

Does that $600 include labor for the heat exchanger swap? I've swapped them and I'd rather swap the whole furnace than a heat exchanger.....

One thing's for certain, if your exchanger is bad, get it fixed pronto. You'll be breathing CO pretty soon if you don't. And you won't be breathing it for long......

....I hope you have CO monitors in your home.

Make sure to check with your local utility as well. You might be able to get tax breaks and/or discounts for switching to a high or ultra-high efficiency furnace. We had to replace our old oil burner in '01. Between tax breaks and discounts we saved $1500 and the energy savings were pretty amazing. We went with an ultra-high efficiency furnace which is so efficient it exhausts through a PVC pipe instead of a metal chimney. The PVC barely gets warm. That means the heat is going into my house, not the atmosphere.

I heard about these new furnaces that use hot water from the hot water tank and the heat that it gives off gets blown with a fan...

Sounds like a really cool and economic furnace.

It may be a new concept, I am not sure.

Ah. A radiator with a fan. How novel!

Sorry, feeling argumentative this morning. I'll try to keep it to a minimum.

No, you won't.