For a long time I thought my only option for heating was a furnace.
I wasn’t too pleased with the furnace that came with my Elgin, IL home.
I don’t feel a single furnace really cuts it with the Illinois winters. The snow is brutal and the windchill is horrible. A furnace uses ductwork to transfer the heat from room to room. The issue is that heated air rises and then gets wasted. My furnace was working all the time but my family was cold. The machine just couldn’t keep up. So I started researching. There had to be something better. I found that a boiler was the best for my area. When the winters are long and cold, you need something with power. A boiler system can sit in the basement and be hooked up to all sorts of things. You can have it serve as the family water heater, baseboard heater or be a radiator. You can even hook piping to it and put it within the floorboards. Hydronic heating is very efficient and silent in operation. Since it is water, you don’t have heated air rising or creating cold spots. The hydronic heat also warms anything that comes into direct contact with it. Obviously I am leaning towards hydronic heating. The main setup is what is slowing me down. I need a boiler and a hook up for hydronic heating. That will be quite expensive. But, I know for my cold weather Illinois area, I will never regret having a hydronic heating system.