If you are planning an addition, you’ll probably have to make appropriate adjustments to your heating and air-conditioning systems. You’ll notice that I didn’t mention increasing the size of your heating and air-conditioning system. Proper sizing involves more than the square footage. It is also based on the amount of heat your house loses during cold weather and gains during warm weather.
Because heating and cooling systems are big-ticket items, we probably hang on to them longer than we should. While we are hanging on, technology improves, and the newer systems become much more energy efficient, and less expensive to operate, than the ones we are trying to save. In the long run, therefore, we lose money, not save it.
Every year, millions of American homeowners lose money in this way. Of the 43 million residential oil and gas furnaces in operation in U.S. homes, one in four is more than 20 years old. Many new furnaces are 25 percent to 40 percent more efficient than older ones.
For example, the Energy Star program of the Environmental Protection Agency promotes furnaces using a “condensing technology” as the most efficient. An efficiency rating tells you how much of the total energy used is delivered to the home as heat: the higher the rating, the better.
A furnace that is 80 percent efficient delivers 80 percent of the fuel consumed to the house. The rest, 20 percent, is lost up the flue. Your heating bill, therefore, depends on the unit cost of fuel and on the efficiency of the furnace.
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