Bob Mims Heating & Air Conditioning Blog : Archive for January, 2017

How Gas Furnaces Have Changed to Become More Efficient

Monday, January 30th, 2017

gas-furnace-burners-combustion-chamberAt Bob Mims Heating & Air Conditioning, we’re always looking toward the future of heating and AC technology. Like any field, HVAC continues to advance with new developments, refinements, and innovations. Even comparing air conditioners and furnaces from only a decade ago shows how far the new equipment has advanced.

We’ll take the gas furnace as an example. After all, it’s the most common type of heating system in the country, and many Staten Island, NY homes have gas furnaces working through winter to provide them with warmth.

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Indoor Air Quality Can Be a Serious Problem in Winter

Monday, January 16th, 2017

Question: Where is the air quality worse, outside a home or inside?

You’ll probably answer “outside,” since this is place people associate with pollution. But according to studies, the air quality inside a home (as well as other buildings) can be 3 to 4 times worse than the air outside! Why is this? It’s because a home has numerous sources of pollutants inside it. Just a short list: gas-using appliances, cosmetics, personal care products, hobby products, cleaning supplies, air fresheners, paint, varnish, and pressed wood products. Without any easy way for these contaminants to exit a home, they’ll soon start to build up.

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Your Gas Furnace Still Needs Electricity!

Monday, January 9th, 2017

We’d like to clear up one of the major misunderstandings about furnaces that we still hear: a gas furnace will be able to supply a home with heat in case of a power outage. On the surface, this makes sense. A gas furnace uses the burning of natural gas to create the heat that then goes through the ventilation system. It’s like an old-fashioned stove this way: no need for electric power, just plain old heat from consuming another power source.

However, this is not true. If your gas furnace doesn’t have electrical power, it won’t run.

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What’s That Sound from My Furnace Mean?

Monday, January 2nd, 2017

It would be nice if the technology of furnaces included an A.I. (artificial intelligence) program that could immediately diagnose any malfunction when it first starts and then notify homeowners of what is wrong. But we don’t yet have these sorts of furnaces. So to know when there’s a problem, we have to watch for certain warning signs. One of the most common is odd sounds.

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