Oil Furnace Efficiency Ratings
The vast majority of homes use either a furnace or boiler to provide a central heat source for the entire home. Furnaces typically use either electricity or gas to heat air and direct the heated air throughout the home. Knowing how to assess the energy efficiency of your furnace is important for fairly obvious reasons, particularly in extreme cold and hot climates where energy costs can spiral out of control in the summer and winter. You can understand how to gauge the efficiency of your furnace by making a few careful considerations. Does this Spark an idea?
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Oil-Fired Furnaces
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Furnaces that use oil as an ignition source, as opposed to natural gas, propane or electricity, are a popular alternative in those parts of the country that do not have access to other fuel sources. Depending mostly on geographic area, your oil-fired furnace may use heating oil alone or a combination of heating oil and bio-diesel. In addition to providing an ignition source for those with no access to natural gas, using an oil-fired furnace offers the additional benefits of heating your home with a domestic and renewable energy source.
AFUE
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The energy efficiency of all furnaces, whether oil-fired or otherwise, is measured using a metric known as AFUE, or annual fuel utilization efficiency. AFUE takes the total amount of fuel that a furnace uses in one year and estimates the percentage of that total that will be converted into heat energy. So, a furnace with a 70% AFUE rating means that 70% of the oil you use for the furnace over one year will be converted into thermal energy to heat your home, while the other 30% is lost to inefficiency.
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Factors Affecting Efficiency
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For oil-fired furnaces, the individual components of the furnace play a major role in how efficient or inefficient the furnace is. Older furnaces tended to use larger burners than were necessary to deliver necessary heat output; replacing this burner with a smaller size or with a flame retention burner will greatly improve the efficiency of your oil-fired furnace. Adding vent or flue dampers to prevent heat losses through a chimney flue and adding a barometric flue damper can have similar positive effects on furnace efficiency. Most of these retrofits will need to be installed by a professional.
Other Considerations
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According to the Michigan State University Extension, electric furnaces are generally considered to be 100% efficient since all of the electricity is converted to thermal energy, but oil-fired furnaces tend to be more energy-efficient than gas furnaces, particularly newer models of oil furnaces that take advantage of flame retention burners, improved heat exchangers and other efficiency-improving technological advancements. Note, however, that efficiency depends on a near limitless list of unique factors, so your individual results may vary when using an oil furnace in your home.
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