Shavitz Heating and Air Conditioning Blog: Posts Tagged ‘Heater’

Reasons to Consider Radiant Heating Installation

Friday, January 30th, 2015

Radiant heating is often considered a rather unusual option for home heating, despite actually being a technology that predates forced air systems. Though it is less popular than forced air systems like furnaces, radiant heating can actually offer a wide range of advantages over them. Let’s take a look at what radiant heating actually is, and why you might want to consider installing it.

What is Radiant Heating?

Radiant heating is a boiler-based heating system that uses water to distribute heat. Its installation begins with putting a network of water pipes in the walls or subfloor of each room that you want to be heated. Occasionally, these pipes may be connected to a terminal heater like a radiator or a baseboard heater. This network of pipes connects to the boiler.

When the heat is turned on, the boiler heats water and pumps it through the pipe network in the house. As the hot water flows through the pipes, the heat from the water radiates through the pipes and out into the room. This is why it’s called “radiant heating.”

What are the Advantages of Radiant Heating?

There are several big advantages to using a radiant heating system over a forced air system. For one thing, the radiant heating system can heat a room much more evenly than most forced air systems. When warm air enters a room from a duct, it will quickly rise to the ceiling and stay there until it cools down. This is hardly helpful to the people in the room, who are almost always closer to the floor than the ceiling. This creates uncomfortable cold spots in rooms heated by forced air systems. Radiant heaters, however, transmit heat directly through the floor. As the heat does not rely on air as a medium, it stays close to ground level where people can benefit from it.

Radiant systems are also quite energy efficient, delivering more of their heat to their destinations than forced air systems. This is for two reasons. First, water is a better medium for transporting heat than air is. Second, a large amount of a forced air heater’s heat is lost to leaks in the ductwork of the average home. Radiant systems bypass this disadvantage completely by not using ducts.

If you’re interested in installing a radiant heating system, call Shavitz Heating and Air Conditioning. We provide heater services throughout Chicago.

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Choosing an Efficient System for Heating Installation

Thursday, September 11th, 2014

When it comes to selecting a heating system for your home, you must weigh a number of different factors in order to find the best unit for the job. Along with picking a heater that can provide the level of warmth necessary for your family’s comfort and which uses type of fuel best suited for where you live, you also must choose a heater that runs efficiently and will not create exorbitant utility bills.

Here is a tip on how to narrow down your heating systems choices based on their efficiency. For further assistance finding and installing the right heater in Chicago, IL, call the company that has kept the city warm for over a century: Shavitz Heating and Air Conditioning.

AFUE and HSPF: Efficiency Ratings to Watch For

The best way to determine the efficiency of a heating system is to look for either the AFUE or HSPF rating. The latter is found only on heat pumps, while the former applies to all other systems, such as furnaces and boilers.

Annual fuel unitization efficiency (AFUE) is a measurement of how well a heating system burns its fuel source to generate heat. AFUE is written as a percentage that expresses what amount of fuel the system converts to heat; the higher the percentage, the more efficient system works and the less it will cost to run. A furnace with an AFUE rating of 85% would return 85 BTUs of heat for every 100 units of fuel it burns (gas, propane, electricity, etc.).

How high an AFUE should you aim for? That depends on your budget and the type of heater. For a gas furnace to qualify for the U.S. Department of Energy’s ENERGY STAR label, it must have an AFUE of 90% or better. In general, you should look for units with ENERGY STAR certification when shopping for a heater.

Heating seasonal performance factor (HSPF) is different kind of efficiency measurement, and it only applies to heat pumps in heating mode. (For cooling mode, they have a separate rating, SEER.) HSPF is a ratio of the amount of heating provided to the amount electricity consumed in watt-hours. The HSPF rating for efficient heat pumps tends to hover in the range of 10–12 and is almost always lower than SEER for the same system.

Here’s something to keep in mind: an efficient heating system doesn’t necessarily mean that it is powerful enough for your home. A heater can efficiently consume energy, yet still fail to produce enough heat to effectively warm a space. This is why you must rely on professionals for installing a heater: they will assist you with balancing all the important factors so you will end up with a system that will save you money and keep out the cold.

Call Shavitz Heating and Air Conditioning today for the Chicago, IL heater service you need to make the upcoming winter (and many after it) a pleasant and cozy one.

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Why You Should Consider Combustion Analysis for Your Home

Friday, January 31st, 2014

Combustion analysis is a means of measuring the efficiency of your furnace or boiler. Both of those systems burn fuel to create heat for your home. In the case of furnaces, it’s usually natural gas, while in the case of boilers, it’s usually oil. The Chicagoland area has a wide variety of heating system services available and a Chicago heater in need of combustion analysis might burn an alternate type of fuel as well. But all of them generate exhaust gases that need to be vented for safety reasons. That allows a trained technician to measure the air-to-fuel ratio of your system, and determine whether it’s acting as efficiently as it could. That’s the biggest reason why you should consider combustion analysis for your home.

The mixture of fuel and air is key, because it allows the technician to determine where and how your heating system could be functioning better. If there’s too much air, for example, it could be that additional air is entering the system through a leak or the like. If there’s too little air, the air may be escaping the same way. It could also be that some component or piece of equipment is malfunctioning. Whatever the problem, combustion analysis provides a good tool for pinpointing it, which can then help you determine your next step.

Regardless of the outcome of a combustion analysis, you benefit from the gained knowledge. If it’s a question of replacing a few parts or hunting down a leak, the act could lead to reducing your heating system’s inefficiency and saving you money in your monthly bills. If something more substantial is called for, it lets you get a jump on it and make the change before it causes more damage to your system

Regardless of the exact situation, you should consider combustion analysis for your home as a way of pinpointing any general problems your heating system may be experiencing. With a Chicago heater, you can trust the experts at Shavitz Heating and Air Conditioning. We can perform an expert combustion analysis for you, then discuss your options with an eye on what’s best for your household. Call us today to make an appointment!

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