Are all heating systems the same? My heating system is running constantly and it can only maintain a temperature of 67 F in my home. It's very cold outdoors, actually below zero. But still, I would expect the house to be comfortable even if the temperature got bitterly cold. Why is my home heating system not able to keep up? What can be done to keep me warm when it gets really cold?
Bitter cold temperatures are straining hundreds of thousands of heating systems all over the nation. I think you may be a victim of an undersized furnace or heating system.
Furnaces, boilers, portable heaters, electric heaters and so forth come in different sizes. A boiler that works to heat my home will not be large enough to handle heating a hotel or an office building. Heating contractors have the ability to actually calculate the heat loss of your home. That's the actual term - heat loss - and it's a measurement of how many BTUs (British Thermal Units) of heat your home loses each hour in its battle with cold temperatures.
When your house was built, the heating contractor was supposed to take all sorts of measurements that enable him to calculate the heat loss very accurately. These calculations are done on a room-by-room basis so the contractor can make sure that he pumps or pipes into each room the necessary BTUs to make that room comfortable. These calculations are based upon a seasonal average low temperature in your area. When Old Man Winter drops the temperature far below this average for days on end, your furnace can't deal with the larger deviation.
Understand that the colder it gets outdoors, the more BTUs your home loses in an hour. Assuming your home is at 72 F and it's 60 F outdoors, the inside of your home will stay comfortable for quite some time. But if it's minus-25 F outdoors, the temperature inside your home will drop like a rock. Your furnace or boiler works to offset this leakage of heat to the outdoors, and when it gets bitterly cold, it simply can't produce the amount of heat each hour that's being lost.
You can install a bigger furnace if you like, but in mild weather, it will run you out of the house as it sends vast amounts of heat into the house in a short amount of time. If your home has forced-air heat, understand that in a perfectly balanced system, the air floats out of the ducts at lower velocity. This means no whistling noises at the registers. You want gentle amounts of air flowing from the ducts that keep you warm without noise.
