Written on: September 9, 2024
When it comes to heating your home, efficiency and comfort are neck and neck in terms of priorities. And winters can get raw in northwestern Connecticut. For years, homeowners counted on their oil-burning furnace: it was easy and reliable. And with today’s cleaner fuels, oil heat is as good an option as any other—and better than some, particularly in our climate. But efficiency can make a big difference in what heating equipment you choose for your home. So how does an oil-fired furnace stack up?
If you’re heating your home with an older furnace, then it’s likely not very efficient. But much like the advances in cell phones over the past two decades, the technology has improved vastly.
Today’s furnaces include updated systems such as sophisticated heat exchangers, microprocessor-based controls, and high-pressure flame retention burners that all drastically improve efficiency and help keep your home more comfortable
Those advances mean that a new oil-fired furnace is remarkably efficient. Most new oil furnaces have AFUE ratings between 84 percent and 90 percent. AFUE, or Annual Fuel Utilization Efficiency, tells you how much of the fuel your furnace burns goes to produce heat versus how much getss wasted along the way. They can reach efficiencies as high as 98%. That means for every dollar you spend on heating oil, 98 cents of it goes into heating your home and only 2 cents are lost through the combustion process.
Compare that to an older furnace, which might have an AFUE as low as about 60%–that’s almost HALF your heating oil costs are being wasted.
A furnace is a “forced air” system. The furnace burns fuel to heat air, which is then forced through ductwork using fans that deliver heat to registers (or vents) in each room of your house. If your ductwork was poorly installed, the most efficient furnace in the world won’t perform as it should. Leaky ductwork allows heated air to escape before it gets to your rooms, resulting in drafts and uneven temperatures—and money and energy wasted on heat you don’t get to use.
Heating oil has gotten a bad reputation, but the fact is, today’s cleaner, ultra-low sulfur heating oil produces such negligible emissions that the Federal Clean Air Act doesn’t even regulate it anymore.
And when it comes to efficiency, heating oil has a higher Btu output per gallon, which means it produces more heating energy, so you use it more slowly than, say, natural gas. You need to burn about 40% more natural gas to receive the heating equivalent of regular heating oil. That means you could pay less to heat your house with heating oil, even if the per-gallon cost of propane is less.
If you’re looking for a full-service company for prompt heating oil delivery, plus expert installation, maintenance and repair services in Litchfield County and surrounding areas in Connecticut, look no further than Mandola. Contact us for more information today.