New furnace cost (Dover-Foxcroft: house, heat pump, to buy) - Maine (ME) - City-Data Forum

namder1 · 02-25-2011, 06:11 AM

I have to buy a new propane furnace for my recently purchased home in Abbot. For some reason the previous owner took the old one! So far I have learned two things. 1) Most propane companies don't service this area and, 2) The installed price of a Rennai monitor heater runs about $2500 to $3000 versus a stand up gas furnace with no ductwork, around $5000!! Anybody got suggestions or know a good company. I hesitate to say the name of the company that gave me this quote, but they are based in Dover-Foxcroft. Thanks!!

Northern Maine Land Man · 02-25-2011, 07:27 AM

Why the dedication to propane? Propane is very expensive for heating. The lowest cost new heating unit in Maine a Miller gun hot air furnace. The absolute highest cost long term is a heat pump. Take your pick in between. We have galloping inflation. The building market is slow and some HVAC companies are trying to make their annual overhead costs off the few customers that show up. Anybody wanting to buy equipment these days should shop around. Despite the scalpers in this world there are still good honest suppliers who will compete for your business.

All that said, the lowest cost long term unit to buy and maintain including fuel cost is either the Rinnai space heater vented to the outdoors or a good pellet stove.

Fuel is going to be scarce and expensive. It makes not difference what you burn; the cost is going to go up a lot.

dmyankee · 02-25-2011, 02:21 PM

I have pretty muck settled on a couple of Rennais or Toyo. Which one would be the better of the brands?

AustinB · 02-25-2011, 03:43 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dmyankee

I have pretty muck settled on a couple of Rennais or Toyo. Which one would be the better of the brands?

Both are good brands. For me, it would be who can give the best service, because it will break sometime.

Submariner · 02-25-2011, 05:35 PM

I would recommend that you consider coal or pellets as they are both U.S. produced.

Maineah · 02-25-2011, 08:31 PM

We have a System 2000 oil boiler. It is very efficient. It's extremely quiet. It heats our modest 2600 square foot home very well and costs us about half of what our old oil boiler system cost. The problem for the uninitiated is these very efficient systems cost just under $10,000 to install. With oil as high as it is now the payback is down to about 5 years. This also includes all the hot water we could ever use. We have a wood stove that helps take the edge off and gives the oil boiler a break. We heat part of the house with that wood stove and the oil boiler makes up the rest especially during very cold periods. We would have a hard time heating this place to a comfortable level with just wood stoves. Sure we could do it with probably three of them but we would have to burn 10 cords of wood doing it. Just supplementally we have used more than four cords this winter and are on target to use five and a half or six. Now granted we run the stove 24/7 and it never goes out. It's been burning constantly for six weeks now around the clock. I only stop it for an hour or two every two weeks to take the ash out of it. Running a stove that much burns a lot of wood but it's shirt sleeve comfortable in the lower floor of this house all winter and we save a fortune in oil. Next year I'll have seven cords ready by winter as oil will be $4.50 a gallon. That's $1237.00 a tank full! No way in hell do I want to pay that. Propane isn't ANY cheaper!

namder1 · 02-26-2011, 06:21 AM

Well, You guys convinced me, I did some research yesterday and decided on pellets. I think I found a good one at Northern Tool. Part of what convinced me was American made and I can install myself! I still may go for a woodstove in the livingroom just because I like wood......just don't want to be tending the wood all the time.

Submariner · 02-26-2011, 06:53 AM

Okay now that you have decided on fuel, now consider the next step.

If you go with a boiler [a stove that heats water] then you can circ that with a tank and heat your domestic hot-water.

If you have baseboard registers in each room you can distribute that heat through-out a home nicely.

Have you considered radiant floors? PEX tubing ran with the floors can heat your floor, giving you nice warm floors.

If you made that tank large; then you could call it a 'thermal bank' and then one day add a solar array to it as a secondary method of heating the water.

I don't know how you feel about being off-grid, but you may wish to consider how you will power the pellet-stove auger and circ pump when the electric grid goes down.

A dozen car batteries tied in parallel on a charger can be termed a 'battery bank'. An inverter from it powering your heating system could easily keep you toasty for a week or more with the electricity down. Or else you can just get a generator.

OutDoorNut · 02-26-2011, 05:07 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by forest beekeeper

A dozen car batteries tied in parallel on a charger can be termed a 'battery bank'. An inverter from it powering your heating system could easily keep you toasty for a week or more with the electricity down. Or else you can just get a generator.

I don't know if this is true or not, but back when I heard it, I got it from more than one reliable source: when you store those batteries, don't place them directly on a concrete floor, because doing so is supposed to either damage the batteries or at the least discharge them. Better to place wood boards between the batteries and the concrete. Sounds crazy, but that's what I heard a few decades ago.

If true, I could never figure why: maybe the concrete acts as a heat sink, and maybe the batteries being cold at their bottom and warmer at their top damages them in some way. I dunno, or maybe the batteries being made colder than the surrounding air by their contact with the concrete floor, get water condensation on the outside of the battery case, which condensation completes a circuit between their terminals and gradually drains the battery.

Submariner · 02-26-2011, 08:37 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by OutDoorNut

I don't know if this is true or not, but back when I heard it, I got it from more than one reliable source: when you store those batteries, don't place them directly on a concrete floor, because doing so is supposed to either damage the batteries or at the least discharge them. Better to place wood boards between the batteries and the concrete. Sounds crazy, but that's what I heard a few decades ago.

If true, I could never figure why: maybe the concrete acts as a heat sink, and maybe the batteries being cold at their bottom and warmer at their top damages them in some way. I dunno, or maybe the batteries being made colder than the surrounding air by their contact with the concrete floor, get water condensation on the outside of the battery case, which condensation completes a circuit between their terminals and gradually drains the battery.

Don't know, could be. On subs our batteries were always on wooden frames, they never sat directly on the hull.