Larger Furnace Required If Finish Attic Room

But before we buy an 80 000 btu furnace there s furnace efficiency to consider as well.

Larger furnace required if finish attic room.

You might not receive the same air movement benefits if the unit is in a garage either. Insulating the walls and ceiling in a furnace room can reduce heating costs and make the furnace more energy efficient. A furnace in the attic is a design that works for all homes. In most cases though the joists cannot support live loads and may not even be covered with boards.

Air ducts lose a fair amount of heat through leakage so shorter lengths are more efficient. In rare cases especially in new construction homes the attic may have been built unfinished with the correct flooring in place with the idea that the homeowner could later on finish the space. So my interior furnace closet has a huge duct in it that connects the closet to the unconditioned vented attic right above it. If the closet is next to one of the bathrooms as it often is this gives you a nice remodeling opportunity.

There s usually nothing up in an attic aside from some stored items so a furnace won t take up useful space. Thanks to the equation we know we need 80 000 btus of heat. How to insulate a furnace room. With an 8 foot ceiling the room would have to be 625 square feet or 25 feet by 25 feet.

The basic space requirements for a finished attic boil down to the sizes of the finished rooms. The room would have to be 100 000 divided by 20 5000 cubic feet to need no vents. You ll also free up a closet. Since we have 200 cubic feet we have enough air for only 200 x 20 4 000 btu hr input.

If you don t have a crawl space or a basement then it can be a challenge to place a furnace on the ground floor of the structure. Flooring ceiling and wall materials and other elements will reduce headroom and floor space and it s the finished area that matters. We need something stronger. It will not require long lengths of pipe to deliver heat to the rooms as a basement furnace does.

The biggest advantage of having an attic furnace is that it s a space saver. 2 000 square feet x 40 btus 80 000 btu output required. For instance a furnace with 80 000 btu input and an 80 efficiency rating will only produce 64 000 btus. An attic furnace is closer to the upper stories of a multi level home.

Rigid foam insulation is attached to the. Most furnace rooms need vents. Attic furnaces take advantage of the closer proximity to use shorter lengths of air.