Are Oil Furnaces Efficient?
When it comes to choosing a way to heat your home, there are a number of advantages to choosing an oil furnace. For one, it doesn’t matter where you live, you can have an oil furnace installed where ever you are. This isn’t necessarily true with gas furnaces since you’ll need to have gas lines. Oil is also safer than gas since there’s a much smaller risk of a whole house explosion. Last but not least, an oil furnace requires very little maintenance and can last between 20 and 30 years.
However, one important factor that may influence your decision is how efficient an oil furnace is. The efficiency of your furnace is important for several reasons – more efficient your furnace is, the less of a negative impact you’ll have on the environment around you, not to mention the lower your heating costs will be.
The Efficiency of Oil Furnaces
The one thing that you’ll want to look at when comparing furnaces is the AFUE (Annual Fuel Utilization Efficiency) rating. The AFUE rating measures the efficiency of the combustion of a furnace. The higher the rating is, the more efficient it is. Gas furnaces tend to boast pretty high AFUE ratings – they can commonly be found at 89 percent to 98 percent AFUE.
Modern oil furnaces may not be as efficient as gas furnaces, but they still reach between 80 and 90 percent AFUE, which is solid – especially when considering that this is still as much as 30 percent more efficient than oil furnaces of only ten years ago. Additionally, you can expect an oil furnace to last much longer than a gas furnace. Most gas furnaces will only last between 11 and 14 years.
This, of course, means that some newer oil furnaces are as efficient as some newer gas furnaces – although, for the most part, gas furnaces are typically a bit more efficient . But one thing you should also keep in mind is that oil furnaces are typically less expensive. A gas furnace that is sized around the same as an oil furnace will typically cost between 10 and 25 percent more than an oil furnace.
The Fuel
Another thing you’ll want to consider is the fuel. Heating oil is typically less expensive than natural gas. In fact, natural gas is a non-renewable fossil fuel, which means that it’s prices are affected by global supply and demand.
Oil produces very few emissions and some of the newer oil technologies allow oil to be re-burned, thereby lowering emissions even more. There have also been the creation of lower sulfur oil blends that – when combined with biofuels – can create an even cleaner heating oil option.
There are a lot of different factors to consider when deciding what kind of furnace to invest in. However, when it comes to efficiency, modern oil furnaces are not far off from their gas counterparts. For more information about installing an oil furnace, be sure to contact us at Woolley Home Solutions today.
