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