What Is A Furnace? Types, Uses, And More

A furnace is one of the oldest and best ways to heat up your house during winter. With so many different types of furnaces available in the market, you can purchase one and connect it to your ventilation system, and voila! You will slowly start feeling the room heat up!

To learn how furnaces work and their various types, read this post till the end.

What Is A Furnace?

Furnaces are one of the best types of heating systems you can install in your house to heat your rooms. All furnaces produce heat through various methods, depending on their type. Furnaces are connected to your house’s ventilation system. The heat that’s generated inside the furnace gets transmitted to all the rooms connected to the ventilation system.

How Do Furnaces Work?

If you wish to know how a furnace works, then you are on the right page.

Every furnace has a “Home Heating Cycle” to which they adhere to. There are many steps in this home heating cycle, which your furnace will carry out one by one.

Every furnace comprises of many parts, which are as follows:

• Blower Motor: The blower motor is responsible for distributing warm air throughout all the rooms in your house. This motor is connected to your ventilation tubes, which carry the heat around all rooms. In addition, it has another blower that distributes cool air outside your house, which is also used for cooling the motor.
• Heat Exchanger: This refers to the connecting point of your ventilation tubes and the heat exchanger. It comprises a series of metal tubes that absorb the heat from the furnace and transfers it to the air inside the ventilation ducts with the help of the blower motor.
• Combustion Chamber: This is the heating chamber that generates the heat. The heat here is generated by various means, depending on the type of furnace used.
• Filter: To ensure your HVAC (Home Ventilation and Air Conditioning) system works perfectly, the air needs to be purified. A furnace does the same with its built-in air filters.
• Thermostat: This is attached to the surface for you to see. If the temperature of the thermostat falls under a certain level, the furnace will start heating your room automatically.
• Spark Plug: When the furnace turns on, this device will ignite the flame that produces heat in the combustion chamber.

Now, this is how your furnace will work, explained step by step:

1. First, the thermostat needs to sense the dip in temperature. If it dips below a certain degree, the thermostat will signal the furnace to start heating automatically.
2. Now, the spark plug or coil will light up the fire in the combustion chamber. In gas furnaces, the gas also gets released in the combustion chamber for the combustion to take place.
3. After enough heat is generated, the heat gets transferred to the heat exchanger tubes.
4. As soon as the heat exchanger gets warmed up to its limit, the blower motor will automatically get turned on.
5. As the blower gets turned on, it blows air to the heat exchanger that absorbs the heat from them. It soon gets carried around your house through the ventilation ducts.
6. As the thermostat rises to a certain degree, it will automatically signal the furnace to stop working.

Types Of Furnace

The most common types of furnaces that you can buy from the market are:

1. Natural Gas Furnace

This is the oldest and most common type of furnace. This furnace uses Carbon and Hydrogen gas inside to generate heat by mixing them together in the combustion chamber.

2. Oil Furnace

In this furnace, oil gets ignited in the combustion chamber, which results in the production of heat. If there is no oil, this will stop working until it’s refueled. This works similar to a boiler heating system.

3. Electric Furnace

The most common type of furnace in modern homes uses heating coils instead of heat exchangers. When these coils get electrocharged, it gets warmed up, generating heat.

4. Propane Furnace

Similar to a gas furnace, propane furnaces use propane, a combustible gas. It gets ignited inside the combustion chamber, generating heat. This furnace heats homes the fastest since igniting propane ignites a massive amount of heat.

5. Waste Oil Furnace

Many recyclable furnaces, like waste oil furnaces, have been introduced on the market to make use of discarded oil. Here, discarded oil refers to wasted automobile oil and vegetable oil.

6. Wood Burning Furnace

As the name implies, this is another ancient furnace that uses burnt wood to generate heat in its combustion chamber. These furnaces look alike to the wood burner in steam engines. You have to constantly feed it wood to make it work.

7. Dual Fuel Furnace

One of the most efficient furnaces in the market, a dual-fuel furnace uses an electric heat pump and a gas furnace. It works similarly to a hydronic heating system.

8. Modulating Furnace

This is an upgraded version of the gas furnace, where you can control when to start heating and how much heat to be generated to get the perfect room temperature you want. Therefore, this is one of the more expensive furnaces on the market.

9. Treatment Furnaces

This is the most expensive type of furnace since there are many variations of it available in the market. These are mostly used in factories and laboratories for heating various objects, also known as heat treatment.

Frequently Asked Questions!! (FAQ):

People have several questions regarding a furnace. I have answered the three most asked questions below:

Conclusion

When it comes to purchasing a furnace, you must take into account its price and type. It’s essential to do so since various types are available in the market. They are all built for different uses. While most are made for houses, some are built for industrial use, like in factories and laboratories.

If you have any queries regarding furnaces, let me know in the comments below!

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