Get a load of Danny Two Furnaces here.

Call me uninformed, but i never realized 2 furnaces in a house was a thing. How big or how many stories or what all else requires that?

I'm assuming they are electric furnaces

You see newer construction have separate furnaces for the ground floor and second floor so that you can heat them more evenly. I would guess designs of the lawyer-foyer variety would benefit from them. Of course, it's unspeakably decadent to me, having grown up in a household where we barely used the one furnace we had.

In a two-story home it is always best to zone the first and second floors. Most of the time this is done with one furnace and dampers in the duct work. The better way of doing it is have two furnaces and AC condensers which can independently heat and cool each floor.

Electric heat is only really big in the South, where they can't lay gas lines and/or don't need it much anyway, or in Quebec, where hydroelectricity is plentiful and cheap, and even then they use baseboards more than central heat.

When I got my ac redone in Friendship, the tech recommended a heat pump. Thus my ac unit produces heat as well. Where I am at, there is no gas delivery like Nicor. We all have LP tanks with truck delivered gas. So electric is preferred for heating.

Heat pumps are pretty remarkable. I didn't think they had the muscle to heat in Wisconsin, though.

Danny Two Furnaces...

They struggle once it gets below 10 or 15 degrees. Much of New England is full of heat pumps and poorly insulated old houses. People here need backup heat sources like propane or wood stoves to make it through most winters, although that need is diminishing given the rising mean winter temperatures we have experienced over the past several decades.

A lot of New England is still on the "some dudes in a truck come by with kerosene" plan, right? or is that kind of tapering off?

Heat pumps are pretty remarkable. I didn't think they had the muscle to heat in Wisconsin, though.

When I got my ac redone in Friendship, the tech recommended a heat pump. Thus my ac unit produces heat as well. Where I am at, there is no gas delivery like Nicor. We all have LP tanks with truck delivered gas. So electric is preferred for heating.

I call them up when it gets to 40%, which is slightly less than half.

You know, it's weird, I couldn't help but inherit my mom's aversion to running the heat, but I will not run the AC, so it's 66 right now and will be 78 in July. She liked to be cold. I like to be cheap.


Who the hell in Illinois is on an electric furnace?