COMFORT BLOG

This winter so far has dealt us some brutally cold weather. With this comes high home heating oil usage as well as the associated high costs. There are many improvements that you can do to burn less oil and obviously save money and quite possibly increase your comfort levels.

The most obvious improvement most HVAC companies would recommend is the replacement of older inefficient boilers and furnaces with newer high efficiency equipment. This alone can save up to 30 percent of fuel usage depending on how old and inefficient your present equipment is. However, this may or may not be the best way to cut costs and improve efficiency.

In the past couple of months we have had an increasing number of people who are calling us about adding central air conditioning, strictly as a benefit for resale of their homes. The majority of these calls are older homes with hydronic heating with either baseboards or radiators and no existing duct work. In most cases these people are looking for high velocity or Mitsubishi ductless splits systems which our company has come to specialize in. These systems use no duct work at all or use compact air handlers and small 2 inch duct work which can be installed in existing homes with little or no modification to the existing structure.

I recently have done home energy audits for customers that want to do oil to propane conversions of their heating equipment. Both times this was recommended by an HVAC contractor that wants to obviously sell new equipment. I understand the knee-jerk reaction to want to find an alternative option to oil, especially at today’s elevated prices, but here are some things to consider: