What is the Right Furnace Size for My Home?
4 Factors & BTU Calculator for Sizing Heating Units in Kansas
When it’s time to upgrade your furnace, you will be making a big investment for your home. While it may be expensive, there are major benefits to upgrading the heating system in your home. This is especially the case when your current one isn’t performing as well as it should.
Keeping an Old Furnace Past its Time
Many Kansas homeowners are fortunate to have a heating system they’ve been able to rely upon for two decades or more. But while the old system has been successfully keeping your home warm each winter, it’s likely working harder and less efficiently than it should.
Maybe your furnace has begun having issues such as sometimes blowing cold air or the pilot light not staying lit. If you’ve had to call technicians out to handle heater issues more than a few times in recent years, it’s probably time to replace it.
But even a working furnace may need to be replaced. If you’ve noticed your monthly utility bills going up, that may be because your furnace is not heating efficiently. It’s working harder to put out enough heat for your entire home. Getting it replaced with a new, efficient furnace can make a big impact on those monthly bills.
Replacing your heating system is a big investment, but consider these factors:
Big Benefits of installing a new furnace:
- Home feels more comfortable
- Less chance for needing furnace repairs
- Increased home value
- Smaller energy bills
4 Factors to Finding the Right Furnace Size for Your Home
At Timesaver Home Services, our heating installation technicians are trained and experienced in finding the right type and size of system that a home needs. Properly sizing a furnace is not a one-size-fits-all situation. Many factors help determine the proper unit for a home.
It is not an easy task that most homeowners can do on their own. Some of the furnaces we have worked on in and around Hutchinson are not the right sized heating unit for the home. If you don’t have the right system for your home – whether too big or too small – you will feel the effects of a lack of comfort and overly high energy bills.
Here are some of the factors that determine how to know what system is right for an individual home.
1. The Size of Your Home
Typically it is not difficult to find the square footage of your home. Entering your address to national home listing sites like Zillow can provide you with the square footage of your home. Otherwise, you can determine the total size of your house by adding the square footage of every single room in your home.
- Family room
- Dining room
- Kitchen
- Master bedroom
- All other bedrooms
- Basement
- Each of the bathrooms
- Laundry room
2. Our Climate Zone
Determining the right size of a furnace is about more than the size of your house. The climate you live in plays a big role in determining the proper furnace size. For those of us in central Kansas and across the central parts of the United States, we would consider ourselves in Heating Climate Zone 3.
For Kansas towns to our north, they are considered in Zone 4. The right furnace for a home here in the Reno County area may not be sufficient for a house located in northern Kansas.
3. The BTU Calculator for Furnace Size
Knowing the square feet total of your home and climate zone now allows you to determine the proper BTU level your furnace should have.BTU (British Thermal Unit) is a measurement of the energy that is used to make a heating system work.
You calculate this by multiplying the total square footage of your home with the BTU requirements for your Climate Zone. For our Zone 3, 40-45 BTUs are ideal. If you have a 2000 square foot house and live in Hutchinson, your home will need a furnace that has at least a 80,000 BTU rating.
2000 x 40 = 80,000 required BTU output
4. Unit Efficiency
BTU is not the only factor to calculate. Even though a furnace has a BTU that meets your home’s needs, the unit’s efficiency also needs to be considered.
Let’s say your current furnace has 100,000 BTUs. While that may seem sufficient for your home, if your old system is not very efficient, then it may not be large enough. If that old 100,000 BTU furnace has only a 75% efficiency rating, you are only getting 75,000 BTUs. That may be too low for most large or even mid-sized Kansas homes.
You may be able to replace that old, inefficient unit with a new 100,000 furnace with 90% efficiency. This newer, more efficient unit will give you an output of at least 90,000 BTUs, which would be sufficient for a 2000 square foot home here in Hutchinson.
5. Insulation
There are times when you might want to aim for a higher BTU, especially if you do not have proper insulation. This may also be a factor if your home loses a large amount of heat through drafty doors or a large number of windows.
If your home is poorly insulated or has high heat loss, you may need to do calculations for BTU for Climate Zone 4. You will need a furnace with a higher BTU to make up for having insufficient insulation.
Let The Experts Determine the Best Furnace Size for Your Home
Thankfully, you don’t have to figure this out all on your own. Our Timesaver Home Services team will be happy to assess your home’s heating and cooling needs to help you determine which furnace size is right.
With many years of experience installing heating and air systems in homes across Reno County and surrounding Kansas communities, you can trust us to find the best and most energy-efficient option you need.
Call Timesaver Home Services today at 620-669-9885 or send us a message online.