Has your old clunker of a furnace seen better days? It may be able to retire the gas guzzler and upgrade your home heating system to something that also upgrades your overall lifestyle.
Might we recommend a Quilt?
There are plenty of signs that it’s time to put your furnace out to pasture, and replacing your boiler in time is critical. Your heating system is one of the most important — and oftentimes expensive — elements of your home, so you want to make sure you have the time to be thoughtful about how you’ll replace it, rather than rushing to swap in something to avoid a home emergency. Here are six signs it’s time to replace your gas furnace:
1. Your furnace is beyond it’s teenage years
Experts say the lifespan of a typical furnace is anywhere from 15 to 30 years. A well-maintained furnace can stretch closer to the 30 range, but if your furnace is revealing its age — whether it’s making strange noises that aren’t part of its standard garble or requiring more maintenance and repairs than it did in the past — it could be on its last legs.
2. Your energy bill is on the up
If your bill is higher than it was this time last year, it’s possible your furnace is to blame. When a furnace ages, it becomes less efficient and requires more energy to do the same job. This translates to a higher bill.
We’d be remiss not to mention Quilt’s efficiency at this point. Quilt is 300% more efficient than a standard furnace to supply the same heating. In other words, our heating and cooling system works smarter: It operates at over 400% efficiency, producing four units of heating or cooling for every one unit of electricity.
3. The heating feels uneven in your home
Is it drafty in here? Hot and cold spots are common with furnaces because of faulty or underperforming ducts.
Furnaces rely on ductwork to distribute heat to the different rooms of your home. This setup is already inefficient, because much of that heat gets lost in the distribution process. Plus, in addition to your furnace, those ducts also require routine maintenance and cleaning to properly heat your home.
If you want an alternative to ducts, consider ductless mini-split systems like Quilt — it’s in the name. Rather than run on a ducted system, ductless mini-splits heat and cool rooms with individual units that are installed in different zones throughout your house. This is more efficient — meaning it wastes less energy — and helps maintain comfort throughout your whole house.
Quilt’s mini-splits offer room-by-room control, which means not all rooms have to be the same temperature, which is both useful and logical, don’t you think? (You don’t necessarily want the temperature of your home office to match that of the baby’s room.)
4. You’re replacing or adding a home cooling system
We’ve been talking about furnaces, so you might be wondering how AC comes into play here. Home climate systems like Quilt provide a two-in-one solution: Quilt’s electric mini-split system heats your home in the colder months and cools it in the warmer ones. It’s really that simple. So if you’re investing in a new product to keep things breezy in summertime, it might be in your best interest to do away with your furnace that has only a few good years left.
5. You’re concerned about your home safety
While every home should have carbon monoxide detectors installed, it’s of the utmost importance if you heat your home with a gas furnace. Gas furnaces emit low levels of carbon monoxide: to generate heat, gas is mixed with air and then burned. Along with installing detectors, scheduling regular maintenance to ensure everything is running as it should is critical to preventing any safety issues.
6. You want to get your home off fossil fuels
Climate change is the collective crisis of our time, and burning fossil fuels to heat our homes is partly responsible for that.
Your furnace burns natural gas — which is indeed a fossil fuel — in order to heat your home. According to 2020 data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, close to half of homes in the U.S. still rely on natural gas as the primary way to heat their homes. But this is trending downward, as more U.S. homeowners are looking to electrify their homes to run their lives more efficiently and make a greater impact to support a sustainable planet.
As electric vehicles continue to be adopted and loved, so too will electric home heating systems like Quilt. Quilt is the most efficient way to heat and cool your home, and it does it all without burning gas.