What is the most efficient brand of home furnace to buy?

There really is one shining star of efficiency in relationship to all other brands in the marketplace.

Highly Efficient Furnace Installations

The most efficient brand of furnace to purchase is the furnace that is installed correctly. The question is…how do you know that it is installed correctly?

The minimum efficient forced air furnace on the market that is legal to sell and install in California in an 80% AFUE. The highest efficiency furnace that can be obtained is currently 96% AFUE, but these efficiency ratios are only at the factory perfect test conditions and it will be a cold day in you know where for your home furnace to achieve them.

All furnaces are rated according to their input and output. The input varies with the quality of the local gas supply, propane or natural. A cubic foot of gas may contain as much as 1100 Btus of heat or it may contain a little less than a thousand Btus of heat and you have no control over this.

A great many gas valves are not set right from the factory. The factory does not test fire their furnaces. They run through a bunch of quality controls, but test firing the furnace is not one of them. We find many gas valves that are set for too much gas running through them and a great many gas valves running too little gas through them. We have the equipment and knowledge to adjust them to within the specified factory tolerances for maximum efficiency.

Most furnaces are rated to push air with a total static pressure of 0.5 inches of water column. It is common to see furnaces operating over 1” of water column. This reduces the amount of airflow across the heat exchanger and therefore allow more heat to escape through the flue. The higher total static pressure is a result of dirty filters, too small a return air, too long and under sized ducting. Mismatched evaporator coils can also increase static pressure. Unnecessary 90 degree elbows are terrible on static pressure.
The average efficiency that we have been calculating for home heating systems for quite some time is about 67% on average. We use a HeatMaxx calculation taught through the National Comfort Institute to measure the performance of home heating systems. At 67% efficiency that super-efficient 96% AFUE furnace is actually only operating at 64.32% AFUE (0.96 x 0.67). This means when you have a top of the line furnace installed on average you are still wasting nearly 36% of all your heat. Not very good. This is why we have developed methods to ensure that we install your furnace correctly.

The number way in which you can determine that your furnace is installed correctly is to have a City or County inspector inspect it and verify that you have a quality furnace installation.