Takes about a minute. No obligation.
Half the homes in Las Animas County were built in 1972 or earlier. A furnace going into a house that age isn't going into a blank slate. The ductwork, the vents, the return air path, all of it was sized and routed for whatever heated the place decades ago, and the new furnace has to work with that layout, not the one in a house built last year. Some older homes were never ducted for central air at all, or had a smaller furnace swapped in at some point without the ducts changing to match. Worth having the contractor check what's actually feeding air through the house before deciding on a unit.
NOAA nClimDiv, 1991–2020 normals
The old furnace doesn't get left behind for someone else to deal with.
The crew that installs the new one disconnects the gas and vent on the old unit and hauls it away.
Natural gas ran $10.09 per million Btu in Colorado last year. That's cheap enough that a high-efficiency furnace takes a long time to earn back the difference in price over a standard one. In a house with low gas bills to start, the fancier unit may never catch up. That doesn't mean efficiency doesn't matter, it means it shouldn't be the only thing driving the decision. Given the age of the ductwork in most Las Animas County homes, how well the furnace matches what's already in the walls counts for more than a rating on a sticker.
If you're replacing a system in an older house, the new one has to fit the house you have.
Find a contractorBefore the new furnace gets picked, the ductwork gets measured, not assumed. A contractor can check static pressure and airflow against what the new unit needs, and size the furnace to match the ducts instead of the other way around. If the return air path is too small for a bigger unit, that gets sorted out now, not after it's running.
The efficiency rating on a furnace tells you how much of the fuel burned turns into heat in the house instead of going out the flue. A higher rating means less of what you pay for escapes unused. It says nothing about how big a furnace you need or how evenly the heat reaches every room. Furnaces with the same rating can perform very differently once they're hooked up to different ductwork.
A high-efficiency furnace condenses the exhaust to pull extra heat out of it, and that means a separate vent pipe and a drain for the condensate it produces. That changes what the installation involves, not just which furnace goes in. If the ducts, the venting, and the return air can't support what the higher-rated unit is built to do, the rating on the sticker stops being the thing that decides how the house actually heats.
Estimates for a typical Las Animas County home, from EIA household energy data, Colorado fuel prices and NOAA climate normals. Your home will differ.
Install day starts with the old furnace coming out, not the new one going in. Gas gets shut off at the valve, the vent disconnects, and the old unit gets disconnected from the ducts before anyone touches the replacement. Once it's out, the installer can see the plenum and the return boot clearly, sometimes for the first time, and that changes small things about how the new furnace sets in. Setting the new unit is the fast part. Most of the day goes to the gas line, the vent pipe, the ductwork connections, and on a high-efficiency furnace, the condensate drain and the new intake and exhaust pipes it needs. Once it's hooked up, the contractor fires it, checks the gas pressure, and runs it through a cycle to see how it draws air and how it exhausts before calling it done.
