When you "lowered" it, how far each time ?? 1 inch, 1 foot ?? Did you not re-connect the wires ?? Did it get down to the floor ?? Sorry about your family. Were you able to find a nice nursing home that accepted Medicaid ??
There is an optimal point of efficiency that is the perfect mixture of gas and oxygen. Rather than barbarity close or open anything and possibly cause problems, get a service tech to check your burner. He'll use an instrument to check oxygen content in the flue and adjust as needed.
We're installing O2 trim equipment on our boilers at work. It works very much like the fuel injection and emissions system on your car and will adjust every second as load changes and burner modulates. It is also $25,000 per boiler
Have you considered this line of products?
It is BS. you can actually damage your furnace or produce CO By doing this.
Michael:
Do I presume correctly the second furnace was not connected to the gas line, and no fire in the firebox? The only heat in the 2nd firebox came from the exhaust of the first?
Wasn't there a problem with chimney back-drafting in winter? Or did this happen down South where you don't get temperatures below 10 degrees F?
I was left with those questions and others too. It sounds like the second furnace was just being used as a heat exchanger to recover some additonal heat from the exhaust of the first furnace. I was also confused by the ending statement: "Rather than modifying the existing unit, you might consider alternatives. " Is he actually suggesting this double furnace arrangement as a sound alternative? And if so, I'd say that while not modifying the existing furnace itself, he is making a huge change in the overall heating system.
It doesn't sound very practical to me. In addition to having to somehow rig in a second furnace, you also have to consider that the second furnace, which presumably is acting as a heat exchanger only, has it's own blower. How much does it cost in electricity to run that versus the amount of extra heat being recovered? Then, factor in that to gain that additional heat, you are pulling air through ducts from the conditioned living space, heating it only slightly, then sending it back. With typical duct work, you might very well give back much of the energy being gained due to heat loss as it's being moved around.
It would seem to me that from any practical sense, if you want to get more heat out of a gas furnace, just buy a high efficiency one.
And what do you loose in increased cost to run the blower, they pull alot of power. Just set it to spec and have it completely cleaned.
old furnaces were commonly massively oversized...........
the longer a furnace runs the more efficent it is..........
so throttling back a really old furnace might save a little energy, at the risk of CO2 poisioning if the exhaust gas isnt hot enough to draft up the chimney.
Its probably not a good idea, but some people might try it.
Define problem. It may have heated, but it may have been too hot from being too lean or too much co, or somenumber of things that don't show up right away.
it ran throttled back for nearly a year, burners didnt get sooted up, home was warm. no one got ill they have a CO2 detector it never went off......
That's simply the dumbest thing I've heard in a while. Do not do this or your asking for problems!
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By the way, the existing furnace was a hot water system unit, built during the days that it was more expensive to meter the gas than for the actual gas. My, things have changed.
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