Anyone who has a gravity furnace to heat their home (anyone? crickets?) knows how big and bulky the thing is, and may (or may not) know how it works. Basically, heat fills a large caldron inside a metal "house", and gravity does the rest. Since heat rises, it floats up through the ducts and out the vents throughout the 1st and 2nd floors.
I of course didn't take a picture of ours, so here's one I found on the interweb :)
Ginormous, right?! Now ours didn't have as many ducts coming out of it octopus style like the photo above, but still it was very similar and pretty inefficient. Our heating bills weren't as astronomical as say a home that heats their house with oil, but we knew we could still get more bang for our buck with an upgraded system. Plus, doing so was pretty much necessary in order to heat our home's 2 addition rooms that didn't have any duct work.
Instead of ripping up walls throughout the house to run ducts to those rooms, we went with a dual zone furnace set up. In other words, just like newer cars have dual heating for the driver and passenger sides of the car, we have a now have a furnace in our basement that heats the first floor, and one in our attic that heats the 2nd floor. And the cost difference between adding the 2nd heat pump or tearing open the walls was so minimal it made our decision that much easier.
So far - WE LOVE IT! We like to keep the 2nd floor a little cooler and the separate units make that easy peasy! Here's what the new furnace in the basement looks like:
See how it's all tucked up nicely against the wall and out of the way? Wanna see where our old monster gravity furnace sat? Check it out:
Instead of ripping up walls throughout the house to run ducts to those rooms, we went with a dual zone furnace set up. In other words, just like newer cars have dual heating for the driver and passenger sides of the car, we have a now have a furnace in our basement that heats the first floor, and one in our attic that heats the 2nd floor. And the cost difference between adding the 2nd heat pump or tearing open the walls was so minimal it made our decision that much easier.
So far - WE LOVE IT! We like to keep the 2nd floor a little cooler and the separate units make that easy peasy! Here's what the new furnace in the basement looks like:
See how it's all tucked up nicely against the wall and out of the way? Wanna see where our old monster gravity furnace sat? Check it out:
Let me zoom out a little so you can see where exactly in the basement the beast resided:
That's right. Smack dab in the middle of the basement. It took up so much floor space! Now my honey has all the room in the world to exercise!
Oh, and see that large freezer in the top right of the above photo - yeah, with all that paint stacked on and in front of it :)? We never use it (it'd be a terrible wast of energy even if we did) and it's also just taking up space. So it's getting recycled to our energy utility company. They're actually going to come pick it up from us AND pay us $35 for it, plus $25 for each of our three AC window units (since we're also upgrading the home with central air, too. Saaaaaaaaaaweet! :)
So in case you're wondering what became of the beast, here's where I last saw it:
About to be hauled off by the HVAC guys to get recycled at its final resting place...
Stay tuned folks, cuz I've got some AWESOME renovation progress pics comin your way in an upcoming post!
I think the word "wow" is not enough to describe this blog coz it gives me complete information, how do I say so? Before I don't have any idea when I heard the word gravity furnace but after I read this page I do understand it well, thanks a lot-gravity furnace Los Angeles-
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