I've done some searching and haven't come with an answer so I'm hoping I might get some opinions here.
My house was built in 2001 - it's pretty tight with decent windows and spray foam insulation. However, the furnace is set up to burn inside air for combustion. Most of the new installs I see have an outside air intake for the furnace. It seems to me like burning inside air would be inefficient, but I've not been able to quantify exactly how bad it is. Maybe it's minor in the scheme of things - I just don't know.
I could have an outside air intake installed on my furnace. I'd hire someone, simply because I'm too chicken to saw a hole in the side of my house. I'd assume that's going to cost me $100-$200. I'm curious if I would see a payoff to doing this, or if I should just ignore it and move on in life to larger energy wasters.
Edit: We do have an outside air intake plumbed into the return HVAC air. So we are getting outside air into the home, we just need to heat it before we burn it.
Based on an old document I found online, it takes 873 cuft of air to burn 1 gallon of propane. Given that and our 1,100 gallon usage - we are burning 960,000 cuft of conditioned air. I'm just not sure where to go from there.
My house was built in 2001 - it's pretty tight with decent windows and spray foam insulation. However, the furnace is set up to burn inside air for combustion. Most of the new installs I see have an outside air intake for the furnace. It seems to me like burning inside air would be inefficient, but I've not been able to quantify exactly how bad it is. Maybe it's minor in the scheme of things - I just don't know.
I could have an outside air intake installed on my furnace. I'd hire someone, simply because I'm too chicken to saw a hole in the side of my house. I'd assume that's going to cost me $100-$200. I'm curious if I would see a payoff to doing this, or if I should just ignore it and move on in life to larger energy wasters.
Edit: We do have an outside air intake plumbed into the return HVAC air. So we are getting outside air into the home, we just need to heat it before we burn it.
Based on an old document I found online, it takes 873 cuft of air to burn 1 gallon of propane. Given that and our 1,100 gallon usage - we are burning 960,000 cuft of conditioned air. I'm just not sure where to go from there.
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