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Putting the "Bonus" in Bonus room

2013-04-15T21:19:02Z

A while back I posted about the problems many homeowners face with regard to areas of their homes that they simply aren't able to use very much they're not able to keep them at a comfortable temperature. I have a confession to make: I am one of those people -- or should I say, I was. I don't have a 4 seasons room, or even a 3 seasons one. I have a bonus room.

Bonus rooms, or my favorite acronymn used to describe them F.R.O.G (Finished Room Over Garage), are a somewhat newer phenomonon, but the concept is ages old: convert what would otherwise be unused and unconditioned space over a garage or other portion of your home into "living" space by insulating, drywalling and adding some kind of HVAC into it. My FROG is above the garage and is approximately 10 feet by 20 feet with sloped ceilings and a window at the end. With a young family we have turned it into a play room for the kids - an area of the house that the toys can live so we have some hope of keeping the bedrooms and other living areas approximately clutter free. There was problem, though - it was almost completely unusable because of the temperatures in the space.

When we first moved into our home we had a single furnace and air conditioner that served the entire home through a single duct system with a single thermostat located in the living room on the main level. There was a single 10 inch round duct that ran from the furnace into the attic where it split into a ductopus to serve the three kids' rooms, a bathroom, and bonus room. Thankfully we moved in late summer because the kids soon had relief from the 80 degree temperatures that were the best we could achieve when the days were warm. The solution for the kids was to increase the size of the trunkline to the second floor and add a zoning system with a thermostat located on the second floor. By adding the ability to sense the temperature on the second floor and direct cool (and warm) air there as needed we had reclaimed that living space (or at least didn't have to feel guilty making our kids sleep up there). The bonus room, however, didn't fair as well.

You see, for the most part, bonus rooms like their 3 and 4 season room breathren exist as a bit of an appendage on a home. As a result they are literally surround by heat load or loss surfaces that lead to wildly different heating and cooling requirements than anywhere else in the house. Think about this for a minute. The room you're sitting in right now more than likely doesn't have more than 3 surfaces that are losing heating (or gaining it, depending on the season). You probably have a wall or two and then either a ceiling or a floor that is touching the great outdoors or otherwise unconditioned space (attic, garage, etc). The rest of the walls, floors, and ceilings are likely shared with other rooms or conditioned spaces and represent no heat loss or gain in the room. So, when we have a bunch of these rooms touching each other and none of them has a terribly large loss or gain we can usually stay pretty comfortable with a single thermostat and a single duct system.

However, a bonus room has almost all of its surfaces touching the outside world. In my case I have a door and about 10 square feet of wall that is shared with my daughter's room. The rest is a floor over the unconditioned garage, walls that are touching a vented knee-wall attic, ceilings with the same, and a window to top it all off. What had the builder of our home done to accomodate what is a heat load and loss wildly different than the rest of the second floor? Two supplies of 6" flex that come out low on one of the walls and a single return. At least there is a return. Needless to say, it isn't nearly enough and even if it were, the system only runs when the 2nd floor thermostat calls for heating or cooling.

So, what's an HVAC guy to do when faced with a comfort challenge in his own home? I took my own advice and installed a ductless mini-split system. A ductless system is really the perfect fit for my application. I have a finished area that has wildly different heating and cooling loads that the adjacent areas, but it isn't really all that large an area that would require a completely seperate furnace and air conditioner. The model I chose to install is the Mitsubishi FE09 Heat pump. The system consists of an inside unit that mounts on the wall and an outside unit that houses the compressor. I chose to open up the drywall and run the refrigerant lines, drain, and control wiring inside rather than outside which made the project take a little longer but will result in a very high WAF (wife acceptance factor) when everything is done. The system is extremely efficient and provides both heating and cooling. Because it uses a variable speed compressor, the unit only runs as fast or slow as it needs to achieve the temperature. As a result the unit is also extremely quiete (watch this space for a video comparing this unit to our whole-house air conditioner).

The resuls of the project are almost unbelievably comfortable temperatures in the bonus room and we now have a space that we can truly use. We can now say that we have extra space that is a "Bonus" rather than a hot or cold room that we happen to store the toys in. Check out the pictures below for how it all turned out.

My Heat Exchanger's Cracked.... Why Should I Care?

2013-03-11T17:48:34Z

We can see the light at the end of the winter tunnel. There is still a little bit of snow on the ground from last week, but the warmer weather and rain from the weekend has almost erased all signs of winter from the landscape. The brown grass is just about the only evidence this isn't a late spring or early fall morning. So why am I thinking about heat exchangers? Well, we've been dealing with a lot of them recently and it has become obvious to me that there is a lot of confusion and misinformation when dealing with this subject.

As a homeowner, getting the news that your heat exchanger is cracked is a bit of a harsh blow. It's not unlike a doctor telling you about the "C" word. You know it's serious and you know you need to do something about it. Some people choose to live in denial of the seriousness of a cracked heat exchanger. They observe that their furnace is running just fine and was doing so before we arrived and will most likely continue doing so after we leave. The reality is that their furnace may be presenting a very real danger to their home and family and they need to address it before something terrible happens.

It isn't hard to see these cracks - Clamshell Style HX

I'm not going to say that every cracked heat exchanger is a life or death emergency and that it is spewing levels of Carbon Monoxide into your home that can cause sickness or death. I am, however, going to say that every single cracked heat exchanger does need to be replaced, either through a complete furnace replacement or changing out the heat exchanger. If I can go back to my cancer analogy, you would never expect a doctor to say "Yeah, we found some cancer, but it's really in a non-critical area and you're feeling just fine, so we're not going to do anything about it. Go on living your life and we'll deal with this when it really becomes a problem." While you might not get rushed into emergency surgery to remove the offending tumor and surround tissue, you can be assured that there will be a treatment in your future. In the same way a cracked heat exchanger needs to be replaced, there is no repairing it and ignoring the problem simply isn't a solution.

So let's get back to basics for a minute here and talk about what a heat exchanger is and what it does. At its simplest level, a heat exchanger allows for the exchange of heat between two fluids without the fluids mixing. In the case of a forced air furnace, it is two different air streams, seperated by sheet metal or tubing that typically snakes back and forth to allow for the maximum amount of air to pass over it and the most heat to be exchanged between the two streams. Other types of heat exchangers exist in the HVAC world as well -- we can have refrigerant and air in an air conditioning or heat pump system, or air and water, like in a hot water boiler. The reason we want to keep the fluids seperate is obvious in the other examples - we don't want our refrigerant to leak out of an air conditioning system so we keep it within the coils and linesets and we don't want water leaking out of our boilers because that would be a hot mess. Why do we care about keeping the combustion air and house air separate in a furnace? What's the big deal, anyways?

Tube Style Heat Exchanger Example

Inside your furnace or boiler there is actually a fire burning, not unlike your oven. Natural gas or propane is being burned and the byproduct of that process is energy in the form of heat, along with varying amounts of water vapor, carbon dioxide, as well carbon monoxide, pure carbon (soot) and some Nitrogen Oxides (NOx). If you haven't already decided you wouldn't like those things to be in your house in any great quantities, let me tell you that almost none of them are desirable in large quantities in your home. With the exception of some additional water vapor in the home during the winter months, CO2, CO, soot, and NOx are certainly what I would call a pollutant and all of them can cause sickness or be fatal in high enough quantities. So why aren't we worried about ovens and stoves inside our homes? Two things - they aren't typically used enough or have a high enough output to worry about the levels they create and you're supposed to use a vent hood when you cook and bake. Everyone does that, right?

So why do heat exchangers crack in the first place? They're not supposed to, right? Heat exchangers are designed to provide safe operation of the furnace during its life expectancy - typically 15-18 years. However, there are many factors that can accelerate the wear and tear on a heat exchanger that they fail much sooner, sometimes in spectacular fashion. So what causes them to fail?

Sometimes it's just age and use. Where we live, furnaces see nearly 900 hours of use every winter. If we assume the average heating cycle is 15 minutes long, that heat exchanger is heating up and cooling down over 3,000 times per year. Try this experiment - take a paper clip, stretch it out and see how many times you can bend it back and forth before it breaks. So, sometimes heat exchangers just wear out with time and age and need to be replaced with a new furnace. Some times that's 15 years, sometimes it's 20 and sometimes they never crack and have other expensive repairs or the efficiency gain is enough to warrant replacment.

More commonly, the cause of a cracked heat exchanger is misapplication or poor maintenance of the furnace. All too often, furnaces are grossly oversized or used incorrectly which causes the heat exchanger to fail prematurely. Think of our paperclip example again. This time fold it completely in half for each "cycle" and see how many times you can do it. I promise you it will be far fewer times. When a furnace is oversized, a number of problems can exist including short cycling and cycling on limit. Both of those cause the heat exchanger to heat up and cool down far more often than if the furnace was closer to the proper size for the home or, better yet, was able to use a lower stage or modulate its heat output for smaller loads.

Another heat exchanger killer is airflow, or more specifically, a lack of it. The primary cause of low airflow in a furnace is a dirty filter. It can be hard to remember to change that filter or at least check it every month (which is why we recommend an air cleaner that can go for much longer without changing) If your filter gets clogged up with dust and dirt and the air simply can't get through, your furnace will cook itself to death. The heat simply won't be able to get out and the furnace will likely cycle on its high limit until it ceases to function or you change the filter. Meanwhile, your heat exchanger will go through a lot of stress when it is constantly overheated and cooled back down. Lack of airflow also leads to much longer heating cycles so not only is the heat exchanger hotter than it needs to be, it also has to endure the pain for a great time.

Sometimes it's easy to see the crack in the heat exchanger and understand why it's a problem, but what about when cracks are just forming or what if it doesn't seem like it's a critical area of the heat exchanger? It is our opinion and one shared by the American Gas Association (AGA) and AHRI that any crack, hole or other failure of the heat exchanger is reason to replace the heat exchanger or the unit. Sometimes the cracks like to hide like these:

But we can see why these are a cause for concern when we simply shine a light inside the heat exchanger and see this:

Our recommendation on finding a crack in a heat exchanger will always be to replace the heat exchanger or the furnace it is in because your family's health and safety is far too important to make guesses and assumptions about how dangerous this crack may or may not be. It's like the doctor that finds cancer - it might not be good news, but it needs to be shared and dealt with.

If you would like to have your furnace inspected and cleaned it's not too late in the season. Head over to our Specials page for money saving coupons too.

Carbon Monoxide Poisoning is Real and Close to Home.

2013-02-28T15:36:25Z

February 25, 2013 (ANTIOCH, Ill.) (WLS) -- Four people are recovering after apparently being overcome by carbon monoxide fumes in far north suburban Antioch.

That's how the story begins and unfortunately is seems all too familiar. Just a month ago we saw this:

January 28, 2013 (CHICAGO) (WLS) -- A family was in mourning Monday after an apparent carbon monoxide leak in a West Rogers Park building killed two women and sickened seven people.

What do these two stories have in common, besides both being in the Chicago area within a month of each other? The cause of the CO poisoning

The fire department says the source of the carbon monoxide poisoning came from a boiler.

and

"What we find out is that carbon dioxide was leaking through the boiler and that caused the problem," Ahmed said.

So what can we learn from these stories? I think the first thing to note is that Carbon Monoxide poisoning is very real and life threatening. With symptops that mimic the flu, you might not even realize you're being poisoned by something in your home.

In at least one of these stories it is specifically noted that the home did not have a Carbon Monoxide detector, which is the law in Illinois and should be something found in every home. For less than $50 you can at least give yourself an alert when levels are elevated. The level in the Antioch home was 600 parts per million. CO becomes dangerous starting at 35 PPM and can be fatal at 100 PPM.

What else can we do to prevent these kinds of tragedies? Get your boiler or furnace tuned up by a professional technician every year. This will not only make sure everything is in good operating order to greatly reduce the chance of CO poisoning, but they also help improve efficiency, and reduce breakdowns in the heating equipment we depend on through the winter.

Part of our Precision Furnace Tune-up is a Heat exchanger safety inspection. The heat exchanger is the part of your furnace or boiler that is responsible for keeping the combustion products (including Carbon Monoxide) seperated from the air in your home. If that part of your furnace becomes compromised by a hole or a crack, you could find yourself in a situation not unlike the folks in the stories listed above. Making sure your furance is safe and reliable are our top priorities when we work on your equipment. After all, this could be your lives at stake as we see in the recent news.

I'll leave with this parting thought: if your furnace or boiler was a car driving at 60 miles an hour, it would drive over 50,000 miles per year. You would definitely have your car checked out at least every 50,000 miles - probably get the tires changes and the oil and filters too. Make the investment in your peace of mind and get your equipment checked out today.

Frankenbeast grows up - Meet Cerberus, the 3 headed HVAC system

2013-02-01T15:54:58Z

It wasn't that long ago that we met the Frankenbeast. It was a story of misapplication with good intentions and bad information. The other day, I met Frankenbeast's big brother. I'll call him Cerberus.

Oh myAt least this time we're in a commercial application where twinning might actually make sense. In this case we have a large room served by a single ductwork system with (2) 5 ton air conditioners. Those 2 air conditioner coils sit above 3 furnaces with 90,000 Btu/h input, 95% efficiency, and 3 ton capable blowers.

Can you guess what the problem might be? That's right, airflow. Amazingly, I'm told that they didn't have a problem with the air conditioners freezing up. The furnaces have not been so lucky. Because of that 10 inch tall shared plenum above all the furnaces and the blocking plates and AC coils and everything else going on here, the heat is having a little trouble actually getting out of the furnaces and inevitably, 2 of the 3 go off on high temperature limit within minutes of firing up.

So, what to do? This is obviously not going to work in its current state, but how do we get to a reliable, sustainable solution without breaking the bank? After all, these furnaces aren't even 2 years old yet. Like so many times, it starts with figuring out what we actually need to get out of this system to satisfy the heating and cooling needs of the building.

I won't go into the gory details of what is needed to correct this problem, but I can tell you that it is neither cheap nor easy. We can't just move to using two of the furnaces because they can't drive the cooling need for the space so they'll need to be replaced with larger units. The coils are hooked up to very old air conditioners using R22 that has become very expensive. In this instance the recommendation would be to replace both the furnaces and the air conditioners to make it a sustainable and efficient solution. Unfortunately in this case, it will be paying twice to have it done right because it wasn't done right the first time.

I don't believe this is a case of a contractor intentionally trying to put together a system that doesn't work - I believe it is a case of a contractor trying to put together a system for as little money as possible without knowing how much heating or cooling was really required for the space and unfortunately the customer is the one that ends up paying for it - literally - in the end.

Show Me the Money - How Much Does Your HVAC Really Cost You?

2013-01-15T17:09:14Z

I went through an interesting exercise the other day and the results were really eye-opening for me and I wanted to share them. Just about all of us get the pleasure of paying an electric and gas bill every month and most of us are aware that our heating and air conditioning is responsible for a large portion of that bill, especially when it's hot or cold outside and the systems get used a lot. We try to save money by setting the temperature inside lower/higher, open windows, wear sweaters... the list goes on and on. But do we really know how much we're spending? I didn't and some of the work I was doing for a customer to investigate his actual cost lead me to investigate my own as well.

The method I used isn't one that was taught to me or standardized by any organization that I know, so take it with a grain of salt. Its not particularly scientific and any similarity to any other method is purely coincidental and I will certainly give credit if someone else can point out where this has been used before. That being said, here's the issue: we all pay utility bills every month and I'm sure most of us would like to see them get smaller, but where do we start? Are we paying more than we need to for HVAC operation? Do we have other energy users that are costing us? How do you know?

The challenge that I faced was seperating heating and cooling costs from other costs in our homes. Things like lights, water heaters, washers, dryers, refrigerators, computers, etc. all use the same electric and gas that our furnaces and air conditioners use, but we only get one bill. I needed to start with a basic assumption that there are times of the year that we use little to no heating or cooling and we can find what I call the baseline months for electric and gas usage. Those months are typically going to be in the Spring or Fall and they're going to be the lowest usage - gas for heating and electric for cooling - of any in the year. Within reason, we can assume the electric and gas costs for these months are going to be everything other than heating and cooling costs (with a little extra thrown in for those occasional hot or cold spells). Once we know what the baseline usage is for our house, all we have left to do is subtract the baseline amounts from the remaining months to leave us with the cost of heating and cooling. An example is going to help clear things up here:

What you see there is a year of data from my gas and electric bills. You can see my gas baseline is in August (which makes sense) and my electrical baseline is in October (not in December or January because we have to use an electric heater in our Bonus Room to make it comfortable). I then subtracted those from all the months to reveal how much Gas and Electric were used to heat and cool the house all the other months. What we end up with is $577 of gas and $428 of electricity that was used to heat and cool my house. Everything that was left - $150 in gas and over $1,200 in electricity were consumed by other energy users in the house.

I was fairly confident that my assumptions were reasonable, but I wanted to double check myself with the tools I have available. What I did next was to apply the calculated heating and cooling load for my house and load that information into a HVAC design program. The results were interesting:

If we subtract the water heating cost we get a total of $975 per year for HVAC costs. The actual costs were $1004 and we had a very hot summer. Overall I'm pretty happy with how close the estimates were and it really opened my eyes to the fact that I have over $100 a month in electrical costs that isn't air conditioning! (Time to turn off those lights and computers when they're not being used).

On a parting note - remember that customer I said I was working with? He has a Geothermal system that we installed for him last year. In a house that is twice as big as mine he's going to be spending less heating and cooling it. As long as he can keep his other gas and electric use under control he's going to be in great shape.

If you find that your Heating and Cooling costs are out of control or just want to find out what they actually are, give us a call or contact us using the link above. You might be surprised just how much you're spending and how much you stand to save.

HVAC Math: 4 Seasons - Comfort = 1 Season?

2012-12-17T23:13:39Z

For whatever reason I've recently had the opportunity to talk to three different homeowners in the span of a week that have comfort concerns in their homes. That's not terribly unusual, I suppose, as the majority of people probably have at least one area of their home they're not comfortable in. What was interesting about these is that they were all the same type of area - 4 Season rooms. They go by many names - sunrooms, 4 season rooms, 3 season rooms, Florida rooms, Solariums, screenrooms...

The idea is the same - a space with most of the walls being windows that should ideally be a place you want to spend a lot of time. Unfortunately, without proper temperature control what you end up with is a room that is far too hot in the summer (all that glass makes it a pretty good greenhouse) and far too cold in the winter (the best window in the world is still a pretty lousy wall for keeping in the heat).

So what's a person to do? I've seen a few different strategies employed, even within the three that I've visited recently. One such strategy is to tap into the existing home HVAC system in order to get some heating and cooling that you already have available. There are a few reasons this plan typically fails, sometimes miserably.

First - since these structures are often additions to the existing home rather than being built with the home, there is no accomodation in the HVAC design for their load. When the contractor that builds the addition simply pulls more supply leads off an existing trunk line or other supply lead in the basement that was close to the addition they aren't taking into account how much air is able to be supplied to the area and whether or not it is enough to satisfy the load. Remember, these rooms often have a ton of solar gain year round and tremendous heatloss for their size in the winter. Often return air is simply neglected if running them is more difficult.

Second - because the need for heating and cooling is so variable throughout the year and even throughout the course of a day, independent temperature control in a room of this type is critical. If the thermostat that controls the home HVAC system is in the middle of the rest of the house and it is a mild, sunny day, the system will have very few calls for heating or cooling but the sunroom could be baking hot and will stay that way until the sun goes down.

In one of the homes I visited, they had this situation and it made the room unusable. The existing trunk that was tapped to feed the room was sized to handle supplies in the kitchen and a small bathroom on one end of the house. With two additional 6 inch supply vents pulled from it, at best the Sunroom was getting a gentle breeze, and the Kitchen and bath were getting less than they should have as well. The sunroom has been comfortable for at best a few hours of some days, it is otherwise too hot or too cold. Remember all those wonderful windows to enjoy the natural light? Shuttered off almost completely to minimize the greenhouse affect and an electric space heater was brought in to extend the usefullness (at the cost of high electrical usage) of the space in winter months.

Other strategies involve the use of supplementary heating or cooling through the use of portable equipment - usually electric space heaters (like above) and floor or window mounted air conditioners. All of these are expensive to run and many are noisy and potentially dangerous for children and pets. In addition, window air conditioners pose a safety and security hazard - they can be very heavy and should be taken out during the winter months when they're not being used. There is also a security concern when the window space they are installed in is not able to be closed or secured as well as others.

Another potential solution is something called a PTAC unit - sometimes called a Hotel unit. You know the type if you've stayed at just about any hotel - they're about 4 feet wide, 2 feet tall and they are all pretty loud and aren't exactly designed for longevity. They are effective at heating and cooling a space, but they're not very efficient and have some compromises in order to keep costs low.

So what solutions do we recommend? It depends. It depends on your current HVAC system, how it is configured, how big the Sunroon is, what orientation it has to things like morning and afternoon sun, how well it is sealed and insulated, etc. The goal for us is always comfort and efficiency and our solutions are engineered to meet those needs for the minimum cost. That's why conducting a complete heat load calculation is essential in solving this comfort problem. One potential solution is to add zoning to your existing system. Zoning is a system that enables your existing HVAC system to independently serve multiple areas of your home the amount of heating or cooling they need. Zoning adds thermostats to different areas and through the use of a zone control panel and mechancial dampers within the ductwork is able to deliver warm or cool air to the areas of the house that need it at any given time. Rather than a single thermostat controlling the equipment for the entire house, each zone can now ask for heating or cooling while the other zones remain unchanged.

So, if it's a sunny but mild day, most of the house will not likely need cooling, but the sunroom may as the morning sun comes through the windows and heats up the space. With zoning, the AC can come on to cool the sunroom while leaving the rest of the home unchaged. Zoning can be a cost effective way to add the temperature control needed to make a space comfortable, but it does require proper ductwork to be connected to the addition as well as have a sufficient load to avoid short cycling the equipment when it is the only area calling for heating or cooling. In other words, you don't want your 5 ton air conditioner coming on to cool a room that only needs 1/2 a ton of cooling. So while zoning may work well for some folks, it's not an option for others.

So what about those others? The people that have taken a porch and converted it to a great 4-seasons room only to find out it is unusable because the temperature is out of control and running ductwork is practically impossible. The folks that had a general contractor build them a beatiful room with a couple of supplies stolen from the closest duct only to find it was only bearable to stay inside the room unless conditions were just right. The folks that built a new sunroom and knew they needed some kind of HVAC solution but didn't want to settle for a PTAC or window unit for their needs. For those folks, we offer and highly recommend a ductless minisplit system.

A minisplit is a technology that is familiar to some and completely foreign to others. At it's core, it is a split system like most central air systems found in homes, with an inside air handler/evaportaor unit and an outdoor condensor/compressor unit that are connected by refrigerant, power, and communications lines. The key difference is that it doesn't use ductwork to distribute the air, but rather the wall mounted indoor unit handles moving the air in an attractive and discrete package. While these units can also be used to heat and cool an entire home very effectively, they're almost tailor made for Sunrooms. They are quiet, efficient, powerful, and did I mention quiet? These units are completely independent from the central HVAC system and as such can either keep the room perfectly comfortable or be completely switched off if the room isn't being used. They come in a range of options from cooling only non-inverter compressor units to hyper-heat High output heatpumps with an inverter compressor that is able to vary its output to match the exact need of the room while producing enough heat to keep a room comfortable until it's almost zero degrees outside.

So, back to the title and the whole reason for this post - if you have an area of your home that is not comfortable, you might as well not have it. I can't say it any better than one of the customers that we installed a system for. She said "We didn't even have this room until we had our mini-split installed". So, if you've got a room that's plagued by comfort issues and you would like to reclaim that space, drop us a line and find out what options might work for you.

New Furnace Standards - Like It or Not, They're Coming.

2012-11-16T17:10:33Z

If nothing changes between now and May 1, 2013, homeowners will have fewer choices when it comes time to replace their furnace. Way back in 2007, congress put together something called the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007. The general idea of the act is to reduce dependency on foreign oil, and it is a pretty all-empcompassing bill that addresses everything from Average fuel economy to biofuel research. Something else it did was give the Department of Energy the authority to set regional standards for furnace and air conditioning efficiency. What the DOE did with that authority is split the country into three regions - North, South, and Southwest. Those regions were then assigned minimum efficiency standards for Heating and Air Conditioning.

What that really means for us northerners (and everyone living in Alaska, Colorado, Connecticut, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming) is that as of May 1, 2013, we will no longer be able to install 80% or less efficiency furnaces. The reality is that things will begin to wind down sooner than that as suppliers and dealers (like us) do not want to become the proud owners of equipment that is no longer legal to install after the deadline. Click the image below for a helpful article explaning in further detail what you can expect.

Image provided by ACCA.orgSo who does this really affect? It really affects anyone that currently has an 80% or lower efficiency furnace. How do you know if that's you? If your furnace exhausts out of a metal pipe through your roof, your furnace is 80% efficient or lower (see image below). If you have PVC (plastic) pipes running through your walls or roof, you already have a high efficiency (>85%) efficient unit and this change won't affect you. So, let's assume you have metal flue - what shoud you do? If your furnace is more than 15 years old and you either 1) Are planning on selling your home within the next couple of years, or (2) Have the furnace in the middle of a finished basement or condo with no easy way to get to an outside wall, you should strongly consider having your equipment replaced before next May. The reality is that high efficiency furnaces cost more to install (if you're going to sell) and require PVC venting to go through either the roof or sidewall of the home (which can be difficult if not impossible in some situations or require extensive reworking of finished areas of the home).

It would be nice if everyone could install high efficiency (95% and higher) equipment in their homes to take advantage of lower utility costs and lower environmental impact, but not everyone can afford to or have the space and open areas to install the necessary venting. If you can accomodate high efficiency equipement you will benefit from lower natural gas or propane usage from the increase in efficiency, improved indoor air quality from the use of outside air for combustion, and the potential for greater comfort with multi-stage and variable speed options.

We have identified the Enemy - he is tan and gray

Do yourself a favor - take a few minutes to investigate what kind of furnace you currenty have installed and see what kind of condition it is in to determine if you should maybe be thinking about getting a new furnace that works for you while you still can. Or, better yet, call us today for a Precision Tune-up on your existing equipment as well as an honest evaluation of your equipment and potential for installing High Efficiency equipment. The last thing I want to happen is come June and someone that really NEEDS an 80% efficient furnace installed simply won't be able to.

A Tale of Two Furnaces: Why Bigger Isn't Better

2012-09-14T16:18:05Z

The more appropriate title would be "A Tale of Three Furnaces" but that's not as catchy. More on that in a bit. We recently had the opportunity to work with a great customer. He was relatively new to our company, only having had a humidifier installed by us last year. He wanted to replace his furnace(s) and wanted to have us present him some options. Some of you might be thinking that he had two complete systems, something not that uncommon in larger homes, perhaps one for the main floor and another for the second floor. You would be incorrect - what he actually had was two residential furnaces twinned together - something not too uncommon in a commercial setting, but slightly unusual in a residential application. What we had here was a Frankenstein HVAC system.

The idea behind twinning is to take two furnaces, put them next to each other, and have them operate as a single unit. The reasons are various, but it is typically to satisfy the need for a capacity larger than a single unit can achieve - either heating capacity or airflow required for air conditioning. This can work fine in a commercial application where you may have a large area (meeting room, lobby, etc) that needs a lot of heating or cooling that a twinned setup can provide. Homes rarley, if ever, fit that profile. A home is typically multiple smaller rooms and levels with varied uses and differing loads at any given time. I suppose something like a wide open loft space with a huge wall of single pane windows might need something like that, but let's agree that's the exception here.

Back to the situation at hand. These two furnaces, side by side, were below what was certainly the original air conditioning evaporator coil from the house - It was 31 inches wide and 27 inches deep. Parked below that were two 21 inch furnaces side by side. The 4 inches of vertical space between the two is where the 11 inches of width were made up in what can only be described as an abrupt transition. The rightmost furnace was essentially blowing into a solid piece of duct, being forced to take a hard left into the shared plenum before passing through the coil. Unsurprisingly, the system required numerous repairs in the previous years. At least it was the smaller furnace. Yep, that's right, the twinned furnaces weren't even the same size. One was 100,000 Btu/hr, the other was 80,000 Btu/hr input. At 90% efficient, they were putting out around 160,000 Btu of mismatched, oversized, imbalanced hot air into the ductwork per hour. Well, at least with that much output, the house was never cold, right? Not so much.

You see, the home had two stories and a finished basement, one HVAC system and exactly one thermostat. This is not uncommon by any means and is probably what 95% of the homes we live in have. For the most part, it works, and in a properly designed comfort system, even multiple levels can be reasonably comfortable with a single thermostat. This system was far from proper: oversized equipment, questionable duct sizing and layout, and multiple levels added up to a cold basement, livable main floor and uncomfortable upstairs. So, what could we do to help out this customer? The first thing we did was a full Heat Load calculation.

By taking the measurements of the home, understanding the orientation on the lot, determining the insulation values of the walls, ceilings, and windows, and plugging that into the ACCA Manual J spreadsheet we determined that the heat loss at design conditions was literally half of the current furnace capacity. That might not sound too bad at first (well, actually it still sounds bad) until you realize that the Heat loss value is a Worst case number. I usually tell people it's how much heat you need at 4AM in early February. In other words, it's the most heat you're ever likely to need. That means that for the rest of the year, when it's not -10 outside, you need less - sometimes much less - heat supplied by your furnace to keep the house comfortable.

Unfortunately for our homeowner, his system only had one speed: Insane Blast Furnace. That means that on a mild fall day where you only need a little heat, the system was coming on, melting the curtains (not literally) and shutting off in short order. That is not only very hard on the equipment, but it also causes some pretty serious comfort issues. The system simply doesn't run long enough to exchange the air in all the rooms to get them warm and comfortable. Our solution was to install a properly sized furnace that has two stages of heat. It still has the capacity it needs for those coldest days, but the majority of the time, it can run at a lower output to increase the length of time it takes to heat the house and gets you as close as possible to a nice even temperature throughout the house, despite varying loads and poor ductwork design.

The other issue that we fought was control of the system. Because the thermostat is on the main level, as soon as that room gets to the temperature it needs, the system shuts off, even if the second floor is still cold. The second floor will also get cold much quicker than the main floor because it has all the surface area of the cold attic above as well as the walls and windows heat is transferring through all around. The short run times caused by the oversized equipment just exacerbated the problem even more along with ductwork that wasn't carrying a large enough percentage of the heated air to the upper level. Our solution was to install a zoning system with an appropriately sized bypass to allow for seperate control to the upstairs, main living area, and master bedroom. The system has three seperate thermostats along with mechanical dampers in the ductwork to open or close the airway to the three zones as needed. That not only allows the system to get all three areas comfortable (after all, now it can tell what the tempatures is in each) but also allows the homeowner to turn the temperature down in the areas that aren't in use. For example, you don't need to keep the living room warm when you're sleeping in your bedroom at night - this system would allow you to keep them at different temperatures so you can be comfortable and save energy at the same time.

These all seem like simple solutions, but the reality is that multiple other individuals had contributed to the larger problem throughout the years - both contractors installing the systems and homeowners buying them - each bringing the system a little closer to the breaking point, each making the home a little less comfortable to live in and each using more energy and dollars in the process. A 40 year old coil connected to a 15 year old air conditioner on top of two 20 year old furnaces - A Frankenbeast if there ever was one. Thankfully, the customer allowed us to educate him and trusted us when we said that a single 100,000 Btu/hr furnace would not in fact leave him in the cold and would make things much more comfortable, be much more reliable, and use much less energy.

So, the moral of the story is that when you find yourself in need of replacement HVAC equipment, have the entire system thoroughly evaluated. You may have inherited a Frankenbeast without even realizing it.

Note: the only thing that I wish we would have been able to do a little different is the return transition into the air cleaner. It's hard to see from the angle of the picture, but we had to move the return front to back almost a foot and a half to line up with the new furnace and the fittings simply didn't lend themselves to using a nicely radiused boot. The system still peforms approximately 1 million percent better than the one it replaced. Approximately.

Repair vs. Replace - How do you know?

2012-07-11T14:48:18Z

We get asked this question all the time - should I repair my unit or replace it? Well, like so many things in life, it depends. As an HVAC contractor, you might think our answer is always going to be "replace" so you can buy new equipment, but that's not the case. Sometimes it does make sense to repair a piece of equipment, even if it's older or if the repair is costly. First, let's talk about when you probably should consider replacement:

If you have a standing pilot furnace or an air conditioner that is built before 1992, it's time to consider replacement, even if you're not facing a repair. The reality is that your furnace is around 65% efficient and your air conditioner is 8 SEER or less. The amount you can save in utility costs will help pay for the cost of a new unit and it's not a matter of if, but when you will find yourself facing a costly repair. Take the time now to research and plan for replacing your unit so you have the time to make an educated decision instead of being rushed because you don't have heating or cooling.
You have an out of warranty compressor that has failed in your AC or cracked heat exchanger in your furnace. Replacing either of those components is the equivalent of a heart transplant. We do heart transplants for people because we love them and they have value outside of just the cost of the procedure. Machines do not and you shouldn't spends thousands of dollars repairing the core of an older system that includes lots of other components that are likely to fail or leak within a few years. While making this repair may be less costly than new equipment it is not a decision that I would recommend for the reason I stated above. It's just not a good investment. Take this opportunity to get new equipment that will save you money in both utility costs and repairs - after all, new equipment comes with new warranties and higher efficiency. Air conditioners also come with environmentally friendly-er refrigerant which has begun to cost much less than the R22 that exists in most air conditioners today. Read more about this here: http://www.illianaheating.net/blog/2012/6/7/refrigerant-pricing-whats-going-on-here.html

So those situations are almost always going to be a "Replace" recommendation, but what about when it's not so obvious?

Follow one of the many rules of thumb to determine if repairing or replacing makes the most sense for you. Consider replacement if the equipment is beyond three-quarters of its life expectancy and repairs will cost more than a third of replacement. So, if your furnace is 15 years old and you're facing a $750 repair, you should probably replace the unit. Keep in mind that you can also take this opportunity to improve your home comfort and lower your utility bills - in other words, don't just settle with Single stage 80% furnace and be done with it - consider things like multiple staging, 95% efficiency, and variable speed blowers to maximize your savings and your comfort. Below is a chart that oversimplifies things a little bit, but gives you an idea of what you can expect.
The best option is to have a highly trained and qualified technician give you an honest assessment of your equipment. Some 10 year old equipment needs to be replaced due to lack of maintenance or a poor quality installation. Some 20 year old equipment looks and works like new because it's been well maintained. A technician knows what to look for and what they're looking at. If you live in a beautiful newer home but are still stuck with builder's quality HVAC equipment which has made your home uncomfortable and your utility bills higher than they needed, it might be time to replace your equipment, even if it does have some life left to it. Every situation is different, everyone's needs are different. Let us help you determine what makes the most sense for your situation.

Some other considerations to help with your decision include knowing how much you could potentially save by replacing your older, less efficient equipment with new high efficiency heating and air conditioning. One tool for that is http://www.hvacopcost.com/ where you can plug in the age, size, and efficiency of your existing equipment, where you live, and what you might replace it with. Try it yourself, you might be surprised by how much you can save.

The government has also put together some helpful Replacement guidlines here: http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=heat_cool.pr_checklist_consumers

At the end of the day, repairing or replacing your HVAC equipment is a decision that only you can make based on your financial, comfort, and environmental needs. If you're not sure what's right, maybe you would like a free in-home analysis and estimate of your existing HVAC equipment. Give us a call or drop us a line if you have any questions.

Refrigerant pricing - what's going on here?

2012-06-07T21:48:59Z

I sat through a meeting the other day with one of the largest refrigerant manufacturers in the world where I hoped to get a better understanding of what is going on with the price of R-22. For those of you that don't know, R-22, also known as Freon, is the substance that is contained in your air conditioning system. It is pumped between your outside condenser and inside evaporator by means of a compressor and it changes from liquid to gas and back to cool your home in the summertime. Many people will experience a time that their air conditioner doesn't work and find that it's frozen up. Often, the reason for that problem is that there is a leak in their system and refrigerant has escaped to the atmosphere and now the system doesn't work as designed. Air conditioners are supposed to be a closed system - they don't need to have refrigerant added as a normal part of operation and if they do, it's because there is a leak somewhere in the system that needs to be repaired or the system replaced.

The moral of the story is this - the price of R22 is and will continue to increase and that is a reality that homeowners, contractors, suppliers, manufacturers and the government will all need to deal with in the coming years.

Anyways, back to the pricing situation. Way back in 1987, the Montreal protocol was established to phase out ozone-depleting CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons). You might remember the issues surrounding the use of CFCs in aerosol spray cans (think Aquanet) and the move to alternative propellants and pump spray bottles that resulted from the changes. That was the phaseout of R12 which was replaced by R22 which is an HCFC. While much better for the ozone layer, HCFCs like R22 are still bad for it and as a result were the target of the 1992 amendment to the Montreal protocol. Under the amendment, R22 air conditioners are no longer manufactured starting in 2010 and the complete phaseout is supposed to be complete by 2020. There are "dry charged" air conditioners that are available that will still run using R22, but we only recommend them in very specific situations where the positives outweigh the negatives (that we'll get to soon) and there is no other option.

Over the last few years, the price of virgin R22 has been rising as the supply has been ramped down and we have needed to increase our pricing to compensate for our increased costs. We typically have been able to smooth out those increases by purchasing refrigerant in large quantities at the best pricing we can get. However, the situation is very different this year. When we inquired about purchasing a large quantity of refrigerant this year, we were told the most we could be sold at a time was 2 or 3 drums and the price was 2 to 3 times higher. Surely, something was going on here. That something is the fact that the EPA decided to significantly cut production of R22 at the very end of 2011. In fact, no R22 was produced for a month or so until the manufacturers coudl figure out how much they would be allowed to produce in 2012. Just how bad is it? Let's look at some numbers.

In 2009, the EPA allowed the manufacturer to produce 265 million pounds. Under the original plan, 2010 was 138M, 2011 was 100M, and 2012 was supposed to be 90 million pounds. At this moment, the manufacturer has been told they will be allowed somewhere between 55 and 80 million pounds for the year. That is down significantly from both last year's production and the planned production - almost half at the low end. The graph below reflects what we're experiencing.

So, this means a few things for us. First, it's harder for us to get refrigerant to continue to serve our customers that are using R22 (which is most of them) and second, the price has gone up. Substantially. While we are working hard to solve both problems, a price increase in unavoidable and I'm sure our customers and those of any other contractors paying attention will soon (if not already) discover.

So why is this happening? Why did the EPA suddenly cut allowable production amounts? Remember that Montreal protocol thing and the Ozone layer? The whole point of getting rid of R22 is to help protect the environment and part of that is making sure as little R22 as possible makes its way into the atmosphere. The EPA is concerned about 2 things - Leaks and illegal venting to the atmosphere. Let's address the first one first. As I said in the first paragraph, an air conditioning system is supposed to be a totally closed system which means that all the refrigerant that is in there is supposed to stay in there - you shouldn't need to add any, in theory, ever. But reality is different. Sometimes systems are installed incorrectly and leaks exist in the field-installed joints from day one. Sometimes systems come from the factory or sometime in the trip to the home develop leaks. Sometimes environmental factors cause leaks to develop on either the inside or outside coil. Whatever the reason is, leaks are a fact of life and just about everyone will need to address one in their AC system at some point.

The EPA realizes that with the amount of refrigerant being produced (and used) every year and the fact that new systems no longer contain R22, that refrigerant had to be going somewhere - and that place is into the atmosphere. So how can they control that problem? What can the Government do in order to reduce the leaks? The only thing they can do - decrease the amount of R22 they will allow to be produced which will in turn increase the price that will make people either (1) make sure the leaks gets fixed or (2) replace the leaking system.

Before we talk about fixing and replacing, let's talk about the other way R22 is getting into the atmosphere - venting. When an R22 system is replaced, sometimes the system is simply being vented to the air when it is disconnected. It's quick, it's easy, and it's illegal. When we replace an old R22 system with a new R410a system, we reclaim all the refrigerant into an approved cylinder using a reclaimer so that when we're done with it, the system can be safely recycled for its base materials without releasing anything into the atmosphere. We then take that refrigerant and send it to an approved Refrigerant recycler that processes it and resells it back to suppliers and contractors like us to use in R22 systems. This is an important step for a number of reasons, not the least of which is ensuring quality. I have already heard of contractors that are skipping this step and just selling reclaimed refrigerant back to customers. While I suppose that is a step above just venting to the atmosphere, it's still not right. We won't do that because we don't have the sophisticated lab equipment to check the purity before we put it back into a customer's sytsem to ensure reliable operation of the equipment.

The other side of things is reporting back to the EPA how many pounds are being reclaimed and that is part of what drove this production reduction in 2012. The EPA wants to see between 27 and 43 million pounds of refrigerant reclaimed every year as part of the process of replacing and servicing R22 systems. In 2010, only 8 million pounds were recycled with approved suppliers. With such a low amount of refrigerant actually coming back for recycling the EPA has decided to increase the value of R22 by reducing production of virgin material with the hopes the reclaim and recycle industry will pick up.

So, what's a homeowner to do when they need to add R22 back to their system? For one thing, you need to have that leak found and fixed if possible. That will be more expensive than just having refrigerant added, but in the long run it will be cheaper and it's the right thing to do for our planet. The other thing is to start saving for a new R410a system - it's very possible you will want to replace your R22 system earlier than you might have in the past simply because the cost to add refrigerant is going to become painfully expensive in the next few years. A new system uses R410a which, as of right now, has actually decreased in price and new equipment is more efficient and when it's installed by Illiana Heating and Air Conditioning will provide years of worry free, reliable service.

If you have any questions, feel free to call the office or post a comment or contact us using the contact form.

For more information about the R22 phaseout and what it means for you, go here: http://www.epa.gov/ozone/title6/phaseout/22phaseout.html