
If you’ve landed on this post, you’re probably in the middle of planning for the coming winter with a new heating installation. You might be in a new house that doesn’t yet have a heating system to call its own, or your old heater has finally ended its days and needs to be replaced.
Whatever the situation, right now you’re facing a question about your home heating future. Whatever system you decide to have installed, it will be with you for ten years or more—so you want to make the right choice. We’re here to help with the most common choice dilemma: go with a gas furnace or an electric furnace.




Past mid-February isn’t the end of winter, even with March around the corner. March is a notoriously unpredictable month—so much so people can’t even keep straight whether the saying is “March enters like a lamb and leaves like a lion” or “March enters like a lion and leaves like a lamb.”
EMERGENCY! It’s a cold winter day or night in Indiana, and you have your furnace running. Or maybe a heat pump or boiler. Then suddenly—nothing. The heater stops working and a chill settles over your home. You might feel panic creeping up your spine, and who could blame you? This is one of those winter nightmares homeowners hope never happens to them.
When people are shopping for heating systems to install in a new house, one of the points of comparison they make between different models is their estimated service life. In this column,
Furnaces are the top type of heating system in the country. The majority of furnaces use natural gas to create heat, although they draw on electricity to power the blower fan and the ignition system. (Which means that, sorry, your gas furnace won’t work during a power outage.)