Deciding Which Furnace Brand to Buy

So you're interested in replacing your furnace and or air conditioner, but you don't know which is best for you because there are so many different brands. It seems only natural that you would be reading articles like this one. You will eventually get to the process of having a few contractors come out and look at your job to give you a quote. I'll deal with finding a good contractor in a follow up article.

A good brand of furnace or air conditioner is easy to find and identify.

First things first.

In my opinion,

#1. Cabinet construction is important.

If the manufacturer builds a furnace or air conditioner with a flimsy weak cabinet - stay away from it. The bottom line cost of building a low priced product is more important to that manufacturers line of thought than building a product that lasts. Cabinet Construction is the first step, I like furnace cabinets that are made of thicker metal, vs one that is thin and weak. If I need to put weight on the cabinet during installation, I don't want to collapse the product.

#2. Parts and components availability.

There are a few name brands that are sold in your area, that you will see the majority of contractors will offer. This has less to do with brand quality than it does with the contractor purchase price, the brands own advertising, and the most convieneint whole sale store. Contractors have few choices, most of the time there are only about 4-6 brand choices within a 10 mile radius of where the contractor does business and they tend to buy for convenience and price.

You'll open the phone book and see one brand carried by the majority of contractors and you'll see that a lot of the contractors who offer repairs will say they work on all brands. What you want to find out about the product your going to choose, is parts availability. You can easily determine the parts availability of a product by looking for the model number of the furnace that you are interested in and calling the whole sale outfit in your area that sells the brand, then simply tell them you have xyz furnace or air conditioner and tell them you need to find out availability on the gas valve, or hot surface ignitor, or blower motor.

You can also call the manufacturer your self and ask them where their nearest distributor to you is located, simply tell them you want to the distributor to recommend a contractor.

If the whole sale company won't tell you the availability of the part, you can pay a contractor for an hour or so of his time, to call the supply house and ask about the availability of parts. Why by a new furnace or air conditioner, and then when it fails find out you can't get parts right away, because the supply house does not carry em.

#3. Consumer reporting of new equipment failures is not all that accurate because they do not take into consideration that the contractor who installed the equipment may not have installed it properly. They may have undersized the duct work, or kinked the refrigerant lines, or under charged the air conditioner or not evacuated the air from the lines properly or they may have made any number of other mistakes that have to do with venting, or firing rate or gas pressure that has led to an equipment failure.

There are a lot of things that go into deciding which furnace brand to install, we use a set of criteria that most manufacturers can't pass. This is our list of questions we ask of the products we install, before we recommend them.

What is the units Co2 waste factor.

What is it's energy efficiency factor - minimum 92.5% energy efficiency and 15.0 SEER availability.

What is the units total electrical consumption.

How expensive is the initial unit cost

Does the brand utilize ozone friendly refrigerants

How expensive are replacement Parts

Is the units operation too technical requiring a specific training to diagnose, making repairs expensive

What is the length and quality of the original manufacturers warranty

Does the home owner have to purchase extra warranties to get extended coverage?

What is the reliability of the unit

How well are the units manufactured

What is the units replacement parts factor

How readily available are parts for the unit.

What is the warranty factor and how much trouble is the warranty process

Does the brand tend to have a lot of warranty problems

Does the brand have a good name because of advertising dollars spent or because of its true reliability.

How much care does the manufacturer take in shipping its products - do their products arrive with damage? How often

What are the start up failure rates.

Does the furnace use a new technology or a tried and proven technology

Does the manufacturer build its own product or buy it from somewhere else and put their name on it.

How accessible are parts - are they available - does the manufacturer have adequate supplies in our area

Has the Brand been around for a long time or is it new to the area

Does the manufacturer focus on high efficiency products or just sell anything they can

Does the unit meet rebate requirements from utilities

Does the unit qualify for tax rebates