subject: Direct Vent Furnace - A Convenient, Economical, Safer Home Heating System [print this page] Also named as condensing or high proficiency furnaces, a direct vent furnace is a great inclusion to your house. As the name implies it may pay for itself back in cheaper service bills as time passes.
So where does this direct vent furnace heating system get its different labels? The names derive from the truth that this type of furnace lets the air for use in the burning chamber to be drawn from outside the home directly and after that the exhaust gases are straightly vented out of the sidewall of your house. Meaning no exhaust vent requires to be built through the roof and possibly taken through one more story of the home if your home is more than one story high.
You can find a lot of reasons for the overwhelming popularity of the product. One, is that they carry an efficiency score of 80 percent or better. This provides it the high efficiency furnace name.
Yet another, is the fact that you have the ease of setting your direct vent furnace any place in the house that you desire so long as it is extremely near an outside wall. In fact, they can be as far away as four feet from one of those walls and still work properly. Because the home heating system functions on air flow this will cause the 4 foot limitation. But it does not even need being close to an exhaust vent.
But among the major features is the way in which they utilize the air for work. An effective model comes along with two pipes. One draws air from the exterior, runs it through the system and vents the exhaust from burning out the other pipe.
But a furnace that's more inefficient runs on the whole different strategy. It pulls air from within the house. This creates a sucking motion that makes drafts from windows, doors, and any little crevasse that you might find within the structure and vents it outside via the chimney. Then what you've is a house filled with cool air in the winter months that now has to be heated all the more to get it to a cozy temperature.
Not just this but that air flow pattern creates a potential for back draft. If the exhaust fumes, of which carbon monoxide is one, back washes into your house, you've a recipe for tragedy. Therefore utilizing a direct vent furnace where the fumes nor the air used in this closed system touch your house's air supply, makes for a much safer furnace.
Using a direct vent furnace is a good solution to efficiently heat your home without having done needless work. If that is not sufficient incentive, you might qualify for several discounts through your home owners insurance, or government rebate plan, for upgrading your system with a much safer one.