replace furnace

The owners of this house had only recently moved in, after renting it to others.  The tenants had used the thermostat very frugally so that the heating bills were unusually low and the computer model could not be made to match accurately.

We found a gas leak at the end of an old disconnected pipe where an appliance had been.  We recommended removing and recycling the pipe, capping off the junction.

This house had extremely high baseline electricity consumption.  Our main recommendation to the homeowners was that they reconsider whether they need to run two full-size freezers, three refrigerators, and a hot tub year-round.

This manufactured house had two wall furnaces, one of which had been replaced just months before we arrived.  Since these wall furnaces are natural draft appliances (using the air from the room to draw exhaust up the flue pipe), whenever they are not in use their flue pipes leak air from the outdoors.  We recommended replacing the older of the two furnaces and one of the window air conditioners with a mini-split heat pump so that the flue pipe could be permanently sealed.

We recommended a tankless water heater since the house had only one bathroom and one resident.

This house presented us with some biological hazards, namely pigeons in the attic and a dead squirrel under the porch!  There was also a significant amount of moisture in the crawl space, made worse by batts of insulation that had fallen from the flooring above.

This was one of the leakiest houses we have audited, due mostly to an open ceiling in the mechanical closet.  This opening was left to provide make-up air to the natural-draft furnace, but it had the effect of opening the entire house to the attic via the ductwork.

An unusual feature of this house was a second-floor playroom, added on above the back porch in such a way as to be accessible only from a half-height door in one of the bedrooms.  This unorthodox design resulted in a valley where the main roof of the house sloped into the wall of the playroom (see photo).  This valley creates an opportunity for moisture problems.  There was also no ventilation in the bathrooms, and the clothes dryer vented into a crawl space, creating more potential for moisture problems.

The most notable thing we found testing this house was that sewer gas flooded in when we did the blower door test.  The floor drain trap had been routed into the sump pump hole so that the trap was always empty, allowing gas to enter the house from the sewer.  The owner had the sump pump replaced immediately after our visit, and the problem was fixed.

This home proved a real challenge to model, since it had four gambrel roofs of differing sizes and two separate basements, each with its own furnace and water heater!  Although the heating and cooling equipment was quite old, the heating bills were unusually low due to extremely frugal use of the thermostat, which is great, but it left little room for improvement!  In fact, one of the furnaces had not been used at all in the previous winter, and the temperature in that part of the house was below 60˚F.