Even though the foot print on the new American Standard 95% 2 Stage Variable is the same as the Trane 90% it is far from the same machine.
Older Trane Furnace
In its day this Trane 90% was on top of its game, very efficient and durable. But at this stage of the game the owner elected to put money into a new furnace instead of repair costs.
American Standard 95% Variable Speed 2 Stage
The new American Standard bolted up exactly as the older Trane unit, but its what is in the unit that counts. The new variable speed blower with a ECM motor is far more efficient to run, helps over come air flow issues, helps balance out the home and gives us far more comfort. The 2 stage gas valve seldom operates in 2nd stage, delivering added comfort on those average to mild days. But when needed the 2nd stage really delivers the heat.
Heating And Cooling Skagit County
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Unfortunately my dad was an oil man, meaning I was raised doing oil service calls. Oil can be a very clean piece of equipment if its maintained correctly. Notice the words “maintained correctly”! Usually your changing oil to oil because the people are still happy with oil heat and do not want to invest in something way more costly. And their oil hunk of junk oil furnace is not worth fixing up. Usually that means the furnace is older than dirt and we are getting dirty!
Older Oil Furnace
The furnace above is an old Montag oil furnace and its lived its life. Fortunately American Standard produces a fantastic oil furnace made by Thermopride. Built like a tank and its 84% efficient. It comes with a state of the art Becket Burner assembly and in my opinion one of the best oil furnaces on the market today.
American Standard Oil Furnace.
The new American Standard furnace slips right into position with a few minor duct and venting adjustments and its ready to run.
Dirty Duct
When you remove ducting that looks this bad then you get told to hire a duct cleaner …. HIRE A DUCT CLEANER. This piece of ducting was not near as dirty as what was in the home.
Heating And Cooling Skagit County
Need a Heat Pump, Air Conditioner, Furnace, Boiler or Tankless Water Heater? We install them all over Skagit county including Mount Vernon WA, Burlington WA, Anacortes, Sedro Woolley, La Conner, Stanwood WA, and on Camano Is.
I added the American Standard air conditioner to this system over 3 years ago, at that time the customer elected not to replace the furnace. But RHEEM furnaces never let me down and now its time to replacement it, the repair bills where getting to high.
Older RHEEM unit
Lucky for the customer we now have the American Standard 95% Variable Speed 2 Stage gas furnace. But as you can see the newer 2000cfm units are a little wider than the older coils. So I had to make a small transition under the unit. Because we felt the system really needed a better filter system we added the Honeywell 4″ f100 filter system.
New American Standard 95% 2 stage variable speed
Now the customer has a matching system with an American Standard air conditioner, indoor coil and gas furnace.
Heating And Cooling Skagit County
Need a Heat Pump, Air Conditioner, Furnace, Boiler or Tankless Water Heater? We install them all over Skagit county including Mount Vernon WA, Burlington WA, Anacortes, Sedro Woolley, La Conner, Stanwood WA, and on Camano Is.
I can not tell you how many RHEEMs I have replace in my life, perhaps over 100? Maybe more I do not know, but I can tell you I really enjoy doing it! And I can tell you in most cases I usually find something seriously wrong with the installation. Now stating that RHEEM furnaces caused heating contractors to do poor installations would be absolutely wrong, but stating that RHEEM furnaces in their day where more economical to purchase and that may have attracted more of the spec market heating contractors might be more on target.
Here we are replacing a RHEEM 80% with an American Standard 95% Variable 2 Stage, As you can see we already pulled the unit off its base can exposing something very wrong in the base can.
Furnace Removed
On a side note, this furnace was actually screwed to the wall for support, this is a big no no in my book. Screwing the furnace to the wall will allow vibration noises to directly transfer into the home.
Looking into the base can.
Now looking into the base can you can see the trunk line that not only was not sealed, the tabs where not even secured (bent over) to the base can. This drastically cuts off air flow and cause excessive leaking into the garage and or crawl space.
Old RHEEM 80%
The older RHEEM had many repairs done through out the years, all in my opinion can be directly related to the poor installation by the previous heating contractor.
New American Standard 95% Variable 2 Stage
Here we have the new American Standard 95% Variable 2 Stage installed. We also replaced the older base can with a new sound lined base can making sure to seal it to the trunk.
Heating And Cooling Skagit County
Need a Heat Pump, Air Conditioner, Furnace, Boiler or Tankless Water Heater? We install them all over Skagit county including Mount Vernon WA, Burlington WA, Anacortes, Sedro Woolley, La Conner, Stanwood WA, and on Camano Is.
One of my big concerns when changing out furnaces is duct and grille sizes, mainly the return air. I find most return ducting to be about 1 size to small and the grilles about 1/3 less in size than they should be. Now considering the new variable speed blowers that are in the new furnaces we could potentially have air flow noise issues. If your installing a 2 stage variable your not going to see high blower speeds until high fire. Its at high fire I get concerned.
Existing RHEEM 80%
In this situation the ducting was a little small but within the limits of the system, it was the return grille and can in their hallway that concerned me. So After replacing their RHEEM 80% to an American Standard 95% Variable 2 Stage and adding a Honeywell 4″ pleated filter system I replaced their stamped faced 14 x 18 #1050 grille to an recessed 20 x 20 #905.
American Standard 95% Variable 2 Stage
Now the new furnace I installed can breath allot easier and their existing return air flow noise drastically decreased.
Heating And Cooling Skagit County
Need a Heat Pump, Air Conditioner, Furnace, Boiler or Tankless Water Heater? We install them all over Skagit county including Mount Vernon WA, Burlington WA, Anacortes, Sedro Woolley, La Conner, Stanwood WA, and on Camano Is.
When I first was called out by the bank on this Repo home I was asked to install a new gas furnace. When I got there I found no furnace, just everything that goes with it. Turned out the previous owner(contractor) took the furnace as well as all the appliances, deck and fence. Yes even the fence. The bank wanted a cheap price on a furnace. I really hate the word cheap.
Furnace gone.
I’m very thankful that the bank decided not to install a furnace, turned out the new owner of the home contacted me later. An American Standard 95% variable 2 stage was installed because he wanted a very quite and efficient furnace, the cheap 80% would not have done that. Unfortunately after the new furnace was in I could not get a clean picture, way to much duct in the way.
Heating And Cooling Skagit County
Need a Heat Pump, Air Conditioner, Furnace, Boiler or Tankless Water Heater? We install them all over Skagit county including Mount Vernon WA, Burlington WA, Anacortes, Sedro Woolley, La Conner, Stanwood WA, and on Camano Is.
When I saw the circuit board that came out of this Trane furnace I was shocked. Shocked because it was the 2nd board Ive seen in this condition in a matter of a week. I started to think about similarities…but couldn’t think of one.
Burnt Circuit Board
Location of the circuit board
All I know is these customer’s are very fortunate in both cases not to have had a house fire.
Here I replaced a Trane 2 stage 90% gas furnace for an American Standard Variable 2 Stage 95%. In this case the repair costs where pushing into the cost of replacing. Im very happy this customer made that decision because of issues we found with his zone system that where contributing to poor performance.
Older Trane Unit 90%
The Installation look fairly clean except for the bypass damper hitting the drain line on the right side of the furnace. The bypass damper relieves air when a zone shuts down.
Bypass Damper
After removal of the furnace we actually found the damper was broken and therefore allowing excessive amounts of air back around into the return, causing poor air flow performance as well as possible overheating issues in the furnace.
American Standard 95% Variable 2 Stage
With the new furnace in place it was time to see how it reacted with the existing zone package. The downstairs was the larger of the 2 zones and operated just perfect, but the upstairs smaller zone was causing the furnace to go out on high temp. After a few test I determined that the bypass was still letting to much hot air back into the return. So I actually eliminated the bypass and made sure 2nd stage would never come on for the upper zone. This actually makes sense with a variable speed blower.
After a few more tests the unit and systems was running perfect and was out performing the original Trane.
Heating And Cooling Skagit County
Need a Heat Pump, Air Conditioner, Furnace, Boiler or Tankless Water Heater? We install them all over Skagit county including Mount Vernon WA, Burlington WA, Anacortes, Sedro Woolley, La Conner, Stanwood WA, and on Camano Is.
There are certain types of projects that really appeal to me, these projects generally have the biggest impact or affect for the customer and are usually the most challenging. This project was for the Church Of Christ in Mount Vernon, their oil furnace was from 1951 and it was a monster. Time for a upgrade!
Existing Oil Furnace
The furnace was located in the basement in a room about 9′ by 9′ and it consumed most of that room. I had to stand back out of the room just to take a good picture(above). One of the biggest challenges with small community Church’s is the furnace sizing. A lot of small Church’s only get occupied say 1 to 2 times per week and the rest of the time the furnace generally stays off. So you have to consider raising the temperature say from 50 degrees to 70 degrees just for a few hours, and within a short period of time. And of coarse keeping the noise level down. Perfect for the American Standard 95% 2 Stage Variable.
New American Standard 95% 2 stage Variable
One of the complaints from the church was the down stairs is always cold, and even though they had damper controls to help with this issue it never seemed to work correctly, therefore they abandoned that part of the system and went to space heaters. The American Standard 95% Variable 2 Stage furnace with a Honeywell 4″ pleated filter system (above) was installed to deal with just the down stairs, fortunately the existing duct work was zoned to do just that. As you can see the foot print is much smaller than the oil furnace.
Attic Ducting.
Now for upstairs I decided to move the furnace location to the attic, as you can see in the picture above there was plenty of room. This of coarse required some duct modifications.
New American Standard 95% 2 stage Variable
The new American Standard 95% Variable 2 stage furnace and Honeywell 4″ Filter installed like a dream. I had to convert some of the ducting to return while keeping the rest supply air. I also installed a Heat Pump, seeing how they wanted air conditioning I convinced them a Heat Pump is the way to go for added cost savings. As you can see I installed an emergency drain pan under the unit just in case we have a leak. The LP tank you see is for temporary back up heat until we get gas to the building.
New American Standard Heat Pump
Here is the new American Standard Heat Pump, funny how they always seem to match the building color. The refer pipe had to be installed on the exterior of the building and travel up to the attic, so we used a gutter pipe to conceal this piping. Works very well.
New Honeywell Thermostats
And to control the 2 furnaces we installed 1 Honeywell VisionIAQ and a 1 Honeywell VisionPRO 8000. Both the thermostats where located in the mechanical room and both where installed with remote sensors in the occupied spaces. By using remote sensors no unauthorized fingers can adjust the temperature.
Need a Heat Pump, Air Conditioner, Furnace, Boiler or Tankless Water Heater? I install them all over Skagit county including Mount Vernon WA, Burlington WA, Anacortes, Sedro Woolley, La Conner, Stanwood WA, and on Camano Is.