Oil Heat~ Forced Hot Air or Baseboard Pro/Cons??

[TwingleMum]

I will be doing a major renovation on my HVAC system. Heating system is 30+ years and on its last leg. Gas is not available where I live only oil heat. I currently have baseboards. I want to add central A/C. DH thinks we should change to forced hot air. I am leery. I had forced hot air growing up and it was really dry. He thinks it would be good because you can do A/C and heat through same ducts. And the boys have allergies and he thinks you get better air quality with forced hot air.I think it would be incredibly expensive to run ducts through house and change over. I think we should update burner/baseboards and add central A/C. Our house is 2 stories with 4 bedrooms and 3 baths upstairs. What do you think??

 

[3boymthr]

I think that if your kids have major allergies you probably don't want force hot air. DH is in HVAC. As you mentioned he's always talking about the dryness of the heat. He also always talks about how dusty and dirty the vents are. How the humidifiers are giant mold generators, etc., etc.

BUT, if you are going with central AC you might want to price it out. You may find it to be cheaper to do a combined system than two separate systems. OTH you may find that because of the age/layout of your house ducting is just not possible without lots of sacrifices (DH talks about people having to spend $$$$$$ having floors & ceilings redone, losing closets putting in duct work) and there are some very affordable and efficient AC solutions (not fully central though) which don't require ductwork.

 

[Phil'sFrontier]

one advantage of Forced Air is that you can use the same ducting to supply rooms with fresh air.

If you are getting an all new system another unit you might consider is an 'enthalpy recovery ventilator'. In warm climates they use cold exhaust air to cool incoming warm fresh air.

 

[TwingleMum]

Thanks for the replies. I'll have to cost both out but I'm not too keen on forced hot air.

 

[mrodgers]

I don't know of any benefits of forced air heat other than you can use the ductwork for AC.

Forced air heat is not allergy friendly. We constantly change the filter and still the walls are very dirty during spring cleaning because of the air blowing up them at the registers.

Along with dirty walls, forced air is blowing what is settled on surfaces elsewhere around.

As has been said, forced air dries out the house. Though our house is pretty humid even in winter, so it actually helps us.

Forced air is an on/off system, which means hot/cold. Hot water system holds a nice even and constant temperature.

The further away from the furnace the rooms are, the colder they are. Not much of a problem I assume if the furnace is in the middle of the house, but ours is on one end and the registers run across the basement ceiling to the bedrooms on the other end (single story.) The bedrooms are quite cold (I like that for sleeping, but not for all the girls in the house. I'm outnumbered.) We don't even have a very large house, practically a shack at 1000 sq foot single story and we still have a lot of heat loss running the distance in the ductwork to the bedrooms. Same thing for multi-story. Running up to an upper level is a lot of distance that heat has to move, so bedrooms are colder than the downstairs.

 

[pumba]

we just purchased a house and we were looking for hot air, because if we go to Florida in the winters it is easier to walk away from the house......hot water baseboard would either mean leaving it on during the winter (if we went to Florida) or draining the pipes ....
We ended up getting a house with baseboard and so far (this AM it was in the upper 20's outdoors) we are comfortable inside with the heat...

 

[msjprincess]

Definitely baseboards. I've lived in 2 houses with forced air and I hated it. Like others have said it's very drying, you go from hot to cold, and it was very hard to keep the upstairs warm without the first floor feeling like an oven.

 

[cepmom]

we have forced hot air and it's not really good for air quality. Our house is pretty dry in the winter and pretty dusty also. The one advantage to having forced hot air was that we were able to add central AC with little problem, however, running AC through the vents is not ideal since the vents are on the floor or along the baseboards and cold air naturally drops down (as opposed to hot air rising) and our upstairs does not cool down enough. We have to place floor fans in front of each vent in the bedrooms to sort of pull the cool air out of the vents and circulate around the room. When you run AC specific ducts the vents will be placed at the ceiling level and will cool more efficiently than from the floor level. While it's not perfect, it's better than no AC at all for sure, but I'm not sure I'd put in air ducts in your situation. I guess best thing to do is to price it out both ways, then weigh the pros and cons.

 

[BellePrincessBelle]

I'll be the lone disenter here. I much preferred forced air to baseboards. It takes forever for the water to get through all my baseboards where as the forced air was equal in all rooms. It's easier to close off one room on forced air & you can put filters in all your vents. Baseboards are huge dust catchers that I spend every week washing down.

 

[Phil'sFrontier]

A lot of things said here abot forced air is not true. I have an oil furnace used with a dedicated ventilation unit called an hrv. My humidity is always between 40-60 percent. My air quality is excellent(because of the hrv), and my temp is easy to set, maintain, and adjust. People who talk about could and hot floors to me says improperly sized ducting.

Although if you want the ultimate in efficiency I would recommend electric heat.
Anytime you use a radiant heat source you have to consider ventilation. You need air circulation in your house to maintain a clean and healthy environment.

 

[seashoreCM]

The fanciest forced hot air and air conditioning combinations have three sets of ducts for a two story house, four sets of ducts for a 3 story house, etc. Registers are in both floor and ceiling with louvers to select using the ducts above for AC in summer and using the ducts below for heat in winter.

I disagree that forced air heating dries out the air in an unusual manner. Most of the air going through the system is recirculated so the humidity in the air is not lost. Simply heating the air causes the relative humidity to go down; air rising from radiators is similarly affected. Humidifiers have just as much a place in a baseboard/radiator heated house as in a forced hot air heated house.

Both forced hot air registers and baseboards have (or should have) louvers to balance the heating in different rooms.

If you have heating problems putting filters at each register in a hot air system, remove those filters and put just one large filter panel down in the furnace.

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