subject: Heating Issues When Buying A Home [print this page] When you are trying to determine whether or not you should buy a home, something that you should take a close look at are heating issues. This is especially true when we talk about rising energy costs.
Consider Heating Issues
While inspecting potential homes, remember that heating issues should be foremost in your mind. There are less obvious things that need to be considered even though obvious issues will be apparent.
Layout. The layout of a home can have a major impact on both heating issues and energy bills. High ceilings can be a huge heating issue even though they are beautiful architectural aspects. You are going to need more heat to warm a home with high ceilings due to the fact that heat rises. Always remember that high ceilings equate to high energy bills.
In the second layout issue, it concerns the number of stories in the residence. How are you going to heat the lower floors if you choose a tri-level home or townhouse, no matter how enticing it may seem. Most of the time, tri-level home have a problem with something some call the zone effect. The rooms on the bottom of the tri-level are always cool, while the top floor may be close to a sauna. Tri-level residences are going to drive your heating bill through the roof unless you have a very sophisticated heating system.
Consider the Control Areas. One way to reduce the heating requirements for high ceiling and tri-level homes is a controllable heating system. Due to modern heating systems, you will be allowed to isolate particular sections of the home you want to heat. There are larger homes where certain rooms are not used often and for them, these can be a godsend.
Have you Considered the Vents? A more mundane, but important issue, are vent locations. In some homes, the vent layout appears to have been undertaken by a drunken sailor. If you find vents located under windows, you can expect the heating bills to be outrageous. Also look for very large rooms with one or no vents as these rooms will take a long time to heat up.
With new homes, one can expect to find heating issues addressed competently. But with older homes, what you may need to do is consider how the heating issue is going to sap your cash flow during the winter months.
