00:14 Pete Hello there. Welcome to A Very Fine House, brought to you by the Energy Pros. This is the show where we help you keep your home safe, comfortable, and efficient. My name's Pete.

00:25 Marty And I'm Marty. We're the Home Energy Pros, and we're going to talk to you about everything you need to know about heating.

00:30 Pete And cooling.

00:31 Marty Your insulation.

00:32 Pete Your drafty attic.

00:34 Marty Your windows.

00:35 Pete Your doors.

00:36 Marty And everything else you need to know to keep your home safe, comfortable, and efficient.

00:40 Pete And today we'll be talking about HVAC with Dave Sommer, Vice President of Service at Smith & Obie. Well, Marty, Episode 3, here we are. Very fine house with the energy pros. And we have a real pro in the house tonight, which we'll get into. But it's Episode 3. You know, we got two under the belt. What are you thinking so far? Any feedback? What are you hearing? What do you say? What do you know? What do you hear?

01:08 Marty Some feedback, Pete, and I'm discounting what my kids and wife say, because they're pretty rough critics, but I think some folks are finding a very fine house. Very, very fine. And I know some of our sponsors think so, at least our customers are listening and we're getting some feedback there. Did you cash that royalty check yet? If you could hold off just a week or two, I think we'll be all right.

01:34 Pete Our downloads are increasing. Sponsors, anyone out there, download A Very Fine House.

01:40 Marty Today, we're going to digress into an interesting topic on HVAC systems. It's very important and a very fine house and a big investment for most people. People don't think about HVAC until it doesn't work, right? So Pete, you learned a new phrase in the previous episode, HVAC. So why don't you tell us if you remember what that means.

02:01 Pete I do remember and, you know, I'm always learning. So HVAC, heating, ventilation, air condition. And we have a real pro today that's going to get into more of this.

02:11 Marty We're happy to have with us a real pro, a gentleman with 30 years experience in the HVAC business. And he's Dave Sommer. Dave is service manager at the Smith & Obie Company in Ohio. Smith & Obie is one of the largest commercial HVAC and plumbing companies in the state. In addition, he has a deep background, previously working for over 20 years for the Train Company. And most of you may recognize Train as a popular brand name. They're one of the largest manufacturers of residential HVAC systems in the world probably. So he's seen it all, and Dave, welcome to A Very Fine House.

02:47 Dave Thank you, Pete. Thank you, Marty. I enjoyed the first couple episodes. I learned a lot about insulation, and I'm glad to be able to sit and talk with you about HVAC. It's all I've known for over 30 years and I believe it makes an important impact on our comfort and on our health.

03:03 Marty We need that in a very fine house. So guys, if I could, HVAC, the very fancy phrase that Pete learned last time, it covers a lot of ground. So today I'd like to focus our attention just on the H side of things, the heating side. And more specifically, since we're in the Midwest, and Dave can tell us probably what percentages, but the large percentage, I'd say 75%, 70% of homes in the Midwest have forced air heating systems. So Dave, let's focus on that for this episode. What is a forced air furnace?

03:38 Dave Sure, Marty. So you're right. The most popular method of providing heat and ventilation in your home is through a forced air furnace. And we're really talking about the heat aspect of it. And that's important. Anywhere north of the Mason-Dixon line, you can't live a comfortable and productive life without having reliable and safe heat in your home. A forced air furnace, it's an air handler. If you think about that, it just, it's a box that contains a blower and a heat source, whether it's gas burners or electric resistance bank, and it blows into the ductwork that distributes that warm air throughout your home.

04:15 Marty And is it fair to say in our area, Midwest, most are gas, natural gas, forced air furnaces, heated by natural gas, right?

04:24 Dave Natural gas or in the outskirts, in the country, propane.

04:29 Marty Gotcha.

04:30 Pete Dave, what are some issues that, you know, you come up with when you're looking at furnaces in residential settings? Some common, you know, calls that you guys receive.

04:41 Dave I would tell you, Pete, that forced air furnaces are reliable because they're fairly simple. They're generally reliable and efficient, but there are some issues that homeowners may experience with these types of systems. Poor air quality. So the forced air furnace relies on clean duct work to be able to distribute the heat throughout the home. If the ducts are not clean and clear debris, they could be clogged, they could cause issues with asthma or allergies, things like that. So that's a problem that we hear about often. Uneven heating is another one, Pete, that the forced air furnace can also lead to uneven heating throughout the home.

05:21 Pete So your basement is a different temperature than your second floor.

05:26 Dave Right. Right. It's difficult to balance that. And I think we can talk a little bit about that all on its own. And then noise. So noise is a common complaint we get. And you've all been in those locations where you hear the furnace kick on, and you've got to raise your voice a little bit. The furnace kicks off. It's like living next to the highway for a couple of minutes every hour.

05:45 Pete Yeah, we're in a home-built, you know, post-World War II, I think, 1953 house. And, you know, knock on wood, it's been safe for us so far. But for a typical consumer, what's important from a safety and, you know, efficiency standpoint? And how do I know if this is, you know, properly functioning?

06:04 Marty Now, Dave, you got to remember, you're talking to a liberal arts major from a very early school, so let's keep this simple for the common man, okay?

06:13 Dave The easiest way to know if your forced air heat is not working well is if you're cold, right? Makes sense. Yeah. If it can't keep your home warm and comfortable, then you probably have a problem or an issue, especially if it used to be able to keep your home warm and comfortable and it no longer is capable of keeping your home warm. So that's a big sign. It's, it's difficulty because the, there aren't many things that a do-it-yourselfer can do with their furnace. So you really need to rely on a professional. There can be some dangers. Really, it's about the heat exchanger. So there's a plate that separates our combustion air from our home's air. And if there's a crack or a void in that plate, you're liable to get carbon monoxide mixed in with your home air. And unfortunately, every year, we hear of several cases where people fall asleep and have carbon monoxide poisoning caused by a crack in their heat exchanger.

07:09 Marty You know, that's a good point because including my own house, you have your furnace, it goes on, it goes off, and then it fails. So there's not a lot that people can see. My tires on my car, I can see if they're worn out. Other things you can see deteriorating. This seems to be a catastrophic failures. Are they common for furnaces? It just stops working?

07:30 Dave Again, it's a pretty simple device, right? It's got a blower and it's got a burner. And so there's not that many components. Any one of those components fails, it's catastrophic. The unit doesn't work. Marty, if you're like me, it only fails on the coldest day of the year, or it only fails when I'm away on vacation. So it's really important to have the self-discipline to have a professional inspect it annually and look for those little signs that they can see that might indicate a component is about to fail. Because you don't want to wait until it fails to decide, do I want to repair this or replace it?

08:10 Marty So that sticker on my furnace, it says Joe's Heating Company, I should call that guy. What kind of frequency should we be looking at? And what does it cost? What would it cost if I had, I don't know, annually? Tell me, let's talk a little bit about that maintenance checkup sort of thing.

08:26 Dave Right, so the maintenance checkup is really where they're going to go through and they're going to check your thermostat. Is the thermostat or the control of the furnace work okay? They're going to check your heat exchanger because we want to make sure that it's operating safely. They're going to pull and clean all the burners and all the heating elements. And they're going to check the ductwork and look for debris and make sure it's clean. So that's the annual check. That could take somewhere between two or four hours. As far as the cost, Marty, there's certainly, Joe's has lots of specials. You can clip coupons. What I think the consumer needs to realize is, If it doesn't take two to four hours to perform the service, then I probably didn't get a good annual check. And if it costs $49.99 and I'm expecting someone to be there for two to four hours, there must be something else to it. So you get what you pay for. You've got to find a reliable contractor that you can trust, that sends good people to work on your system, and you have to be willing to pay what that service is worth.

09:36 Pete What's the typical life of a furnace? I mean, how long do they typically last?

09:42 Dave So what the studies say is the furnace lasts between 15 and 20 years. What's interesting there, Pete, is that to be average, That means half of them fail well before 15 years and half of them fail well after 15 years. So right around that 12 year mark, you're approaching the end of life. And as Marty mentioned earlier, you probably don't want to wait until your failure to decide to replace it. So it also is a process like with your car that you want to try and plan out when the best time to replace that appliance would be. It's not going to be when it has the catastrophic failure. If you wait till then, you may be faced with paying for the repair and then having it replaced and paying for the replacement afterwards.

10:26 Marty So maybe similar to like a roof, you know, you look at the age of your shingles and get it replaced. So let's say we're at the 12-year mark and you're conservative and, you know, Peter, I, forced air furnaces, we want to shop for a new furnace. I see some ads, we see all these vans driving around. Give us a little shopping guide. If we're going to stick with the forced air, what do we buy? How do we decide which bells and whistles?

10:50 Dave and so forth. It's about what you want, right? Just like shopping for a car. What options do you require? What options would you like to have? What options are nice to have? We're back to talking about that forced air furnace. There's not a lot to it. So there are some choices to make about the blower itself, about the airflow. There's some choices to make about efficiency. In my opinion, you've got to step back and figure out a couple of things. How long are you going to be in the home? Typically, people, whether they want to acknowledge it or not, they're moving every six or seven years. There are very few cases of, this is my forever home. And when you think about your timeline of, I may be moving in the next six or seven years, that should impact your thought process on how much to invest in that appliance. I can tell you a guy that moves a lot, typically I don't say, I'm going to offer a lot more for this home because I like that furnace.

11:51 Marty That is sweet. That's the closure, dude. The furnace is always the closure.

11:56 Dave So we don't even ask, right? When you're buying a home, you don't say, well, is that a new furnace? Is that a new kitchen? Yes, that's important. But we don't look behind the mechanical room doors.

12:06 Marty So what about the efficiency? Similar to cars, and we talked about insulation last time and improving the efficiency. I know there's these high-efficiency furnaces that the trains and the Lennox's of the world are talking about, 95, 98% efficient. Maybe mine is, like, what's my old typical furnace, 67? 85. So let's talk about should we pay and how much can we save with a high-efficiency furnace, and what are the economics of that?

12:32 Dave And the economics are really up to the individual, right? Because if I'm a snowbird and I just want to keep the house a little bit warm while I go to Florida for four weeks over the winter, I'll have a lot less run time. If I have small children and they're home all the time, I may have a lot more run time. The efficiency and the return on the investment depends on the run time. And then, you know, you have to think about the price of the fuel. So the price of the fuel, you probably bought your cheapest BTU of natural gas yesterday. The price of fuel is always going to go up. It's very difficult to have a hard and fast rule about the return on the investment and how efficient your furnace should be. The professionals that come to sell you that new furnace, they can put it into a calculator. You just have to be careful whether the juice is worth the squeeze or whether that additional upfront cost, how long is it going to take me to recoup that cost?

13:30 Marty I guess I compare it to- Similar to like a miles per gallon on your car, something like that maybe?

13:33 Dave Yeah, I compare it to if I was buying a car and I only drive to church every Sunday, I really don't care what the miles per gallon is. If I'm buying a car and I make trips to Ithaca, New York every weekend, then it's more important to me what the miles per gallon is.

13:47 Marty With the forced air furnace, we're talking about maintenance, right Pete? First maintenance, having a professional. We want to stay away from do-it-yourselfers sort of things, right? And then new furnaces are an investment decision. What does a new furnace cost if you're just taking out an old and putting in a new today for a run of the mill Chevy sort of furnace? What would you say?

14:07 Dave Yeah, there's so many variables. I'm going to try to avoid that answer as best I can, but there's so many variables.

14:11 Pete Dave, you could have been a politician.

14:14 Dave I'm kidding. It's the size of the furnace. It's the complexity of the installation. But in round numbers, I think furnace is probably a $4,000 to $6,000 investment.

14:28 Marty Gotcha. So if you wanted to get some fancy other things, it might go up from there.

14:32 Dave And hardly anyone's buying just a furnace. Right? So you are buying a humidifier along with it. And typically you're buying air conditioning. So furnace, air conditioning, humidifier, air cleaner. I could be spending $20,000. Gotcha.

14:47 Pete We'll be right back. Thank you. And we're back.

15:00 Marty We're in a lot of homes as we talked last time and people call us all the time and you have this box that's kicking out heat and it's delivering it through this duct. Talk about the ductwork system and the returns and all the, and the importance of that. I mean, we go in houses, Dave, all the time where the ducts have been removed or blocked. In fact, we did a little remodel at our house recently and I removed the supply duct from one particular room and didn't tell anybody and they're not real happy. So just tell us about what is the supply and return system and why is that important?

15:31 Dave Well, that's a really big part of the system, right? You have the furnace and you have the ductwork, but the air distribution is an important part of the system. Air travels in our ductwork, that's the air that we breathe. If you have pets, live in an area with lots of construction or near the highway, that dirt and debris accumulates in the ductwork. The design of the ductwork is often overlooked. We concentrate on the piece of equipment or the appliance. We overlook the importance of having ductwork that doesn't leak. Air leakage, as you know from your studies, Marty, air leakage is a big factor in the ductwork and happens a lot.

16:11 Marty Kind of like a leaky hose. Right. Right. We see it all the time. You have this great fancy $10,000 furnace, but the ductwork's got all sorts of leaks, and it's like trying to wash your car with a hose with a bunch of holes in it.

16:23 Dave The other thing that some people don't track through as much as they should is how important the return air ducts are. So we think a lot about the supply ducts. Like you said, you blocked off a supply. People are always messing around with the supply ducts. The return air is just as important because we can't, if you picture a paper bag, you can't just shove more air into that paper bag. You have to take some air out to be able to shove some more air in. So each room and each area in our house, to be able to have comfort, we have to be able to extract the air and bring it back to the furnace. as much, that's as important as being able to put supply air into the space.

17:04 Pete So Dave, would the ductwork checkup be typically included in this annual checkup that you advise our listeners to do?

17:12 Dave What we're going to do on an annual checkup is really just concentrate on the appliance, but you will be able to tell the cleanliness of the ductwork from that mechanical

17:21 Marty And what do you think about this duck cleaning? I mean, when we moved in our house, they said, oh, we just had the ducks cleaned. And someone came in and drilled these holes and did some magic to the duck work. What do you think about that?

17:32 Dave And you said, I'll pay a little extra then, right?

17:35 Pete We did the same thing, Marty. And I don't know if the guy just showed me a bunch of dust that he shows everybody or if it actually came from our house. But it made you feel better, right?

17:43 Dave Oh, of course. I'm a fan of duck cleaning. I'm maybe a little over the top with clean air in my home. I mean, I spend a lot of time in the house and the amount of fresh air that we pump into the home and the amount of cleaning that we do is probably more than average. But I'm a big fan of it. I think it helps. We have a lot of folks in our house that have allergies, some respiratory issues. And so I'm a big fan of clean air in the home. And ductwork is just one piece of that puzzle.

18:17 Marty So that leads us to the cleaning ductwork is a good idea. Keep making sure they're sealed, which It may or may not be, but what about the filter? I know like, oh gosh, change, we have a little tick on the calendar, change the filter, change the filter. What about the filter, the type of filter? You know, I know there's different price points. Can you talk a little bit about that filter that you shove in the furnace in the basement?

18:40 Dave I think a big part of keeping your furnace reliable, dirty filter will cause a furnace failure, your furnace to trip off. because not enough air going over that burner. So you have to have a good amount of air to keep your burner burning clean. You have to be a little careful, you can over filter, right? So just like a dirty filter, if you get these HEPA type hospital grade filters and your furnace is not equipped with a blower to be able to pull the air through that filter, you can cause some problems that way too.

19:11 Marty Those high MERV, I think it's called, M-E-R-V ratings, right?

19:15 Dave Correct, right. So I'm not a fan of the basic bird screen type filter, but you have to be careful if you're going to the hospital grade filters in a residential application. I would just say upgrade your filters and check them and change them frequently.

19:34 Pete What's the I know I write the date of when I do it is it supposed to be every two months or three months?

19:38 Dave What's the so it depends on how much you use your fan? Okay, right, but I would say at least twice a year and probably three times a year is the appropriate amount Okay, and it depends on where you live Pete depends on a lot of factors if there's construction in my neighborhood I'll probably have to change my filter a little more if I got new carpeting I probably have to change my filter a little more

19:58 Pete You mentioned you're kind of monitoring the quality of your air. Is there anything in your home that you have that help you understand how quality level of air that you're breathing in? Is there anything that people add on to their homes to do that? Or is it just kind of knowing that the maintenance is done properly?

20:16 Marty You're talking about measuring the air quality specifically?

20:18 Dave Yeah. I'm not aware of any residential or consumer grade air monitoring devices, certainly in the commercial world. We have lots of ways to monitor the indoor air quality. I think really, Pete, for people at home, the important thing is to just be aware of your surroundings, right? If you have dirt and dust buildup, that may be an indicator that your ducts need cleaned or that your filter needs changed, or you have some issues. If you have poor air quality, so if you suffer from allergies, asthma, and other respiratory illnesses, you may want to be more aware of that. If there's foul odors, that's a worthwhile reason to investigate. Some of the homes here in Northeast Ohio are built on a foundation with no basement. Sometimes the ductwork is run in the concrete of that foundation. Oftentimes that gets infiltrated with moisture. It starts to fall apart. There's ways to coat that ductwork. And then, you know, the last thing you want to think about, but pest infestation. So if you're finding that maybe you have a little… A mouse in the house. Right, right. Or bugs, things like that.

21:29 Marty Well, you brought up that point and you, I think you ran it, you told me you ran into this in your house where the leaky ducts, Odors and you can there is a process you can use it's a sealing process to Coat the inside of your ducks if they're leaky and they're buried inside a wall. Can you describe that briefly?

21:45 Dave I think you had it done that you recommended it in my house I think right so we had a house that had was built on partially on the foundation had the duck work running through the Concrete and that area of the house always smelled a little musty no matter what we did. We couldn't get rid of that kind of Mildew, mold, musty smell. It was because moisture was getting into our ductwork and it just had degraded underneath the concrete. No way to get to it. So what they have is a product that they can jet in a plastic liner into that ductwork. So you basically keep the ductwork the same. They're able to put this liquid into the ductwork that coats the outsides and hardens and turns into a plastic interior.

22:30 Marty Kind of like painting it from the inside.

22:31 Dave Yep. Took care of our problem. It was amazing. Really the next, I mean, immediately that must be.

22:37 Marty Yeah, we've recommended that to a number of customers. It's not cheap, but it works. And an old, very fine house like yours, Pete, those ducks could be buried in a wall with gaps and holes and you'll never be able to fix it short of tearing it out. Right. So. My former house, my former very fine house had a humidifier on, had this, had the filter and it had a humidifier with a little dial on it. And I don't think it ever really worked. And you know, we set it and off we went. And we'll talk about humidification a little more in our air conditioning podcast. But should I add that onto my furnace, this humidifier on the back end of the furnace? What do you think about that?

23:20 Dave Personally, I think it's a minimum requirement. You have to have humidification. Humidification is important for several reasons, right? Because health and comfort. In the winter, the outside air is often very dry, and then your forced air heating system can make the indoor air even drier. That can lead to dry skin, throat irritation, and various other health problems. By adding humidity to the air, can help alleviate these issues and make the indoor environment more comfortable. It also protects the home. Pete, if you're in this 50 plus year old home, you probably have a lot of woodwork. Maybe some wooden banisters, some older intricate woodwork. And the lack of humidity can kill that woodwork, right? So you need to maintain a minimum level of humidity so that you're not damaging wooden furniture, damaging your flooring or other materials in the home.

24:20 Marty That's a great point. I mean, we've seen configurations in houses, Dave, and again, we'll get into this more, I think, when air conditioning, but I've seen humidifiers on the furnace. Right next to it is a portable dehumidifier, and they're kind of, it's like you're humidifying the air and you're dehumidifying it. So humidity is a major issue with comfort and efficiency, and that's a good point. I never really thought of that.

24:44 Dave It really makes for efficiency, Marty, because Humidified air, if I have that humidity between 40 and 60%, I can turn the temperature lower. Our bodies will feel warmer if it's humidified air. If it's very dry air, we need to have the temperature higher.

25:01 Pete Dave, one thing we talk about a lot on this podcast is safety, right? So you hit on it a little bit with the air quality thought process. Are there other safety aspects that you would advise people to think about as they consider HVAC?

25:16 Dave Well, yeah, it's carbon monoxide, right? That's the big scary thing with our forced air furnaces, our gas furnaces. And as long as you're having it checked annually, have a carbon monoxide detector on every level of your house, I think you can operate very, very safely. A couple of little things. Often we see people use their mechanical room also as a storage room. So we don't really want to bury that furnace with a bunch of boxes around it and don't allow it to have room to breathe. So that's another safety concern.

25:52 Marty Are you uncomfortable with, first of all, it's a great point about carbon monoxide. I mean, we go in, again, we're in a lot of houses, you're in a lot of houses and buildings. Rarely do we see a home with carbon monoxide. Pete, do you have carbon monoxide detectors on each level of your home? No. Yeah, and you have probably an open combustion gas situation. So that's a great recommendation. They're inexpensive. And like you said, once a year you hear about someone succumbing to carbon monoxide.

26:20 Dave Marty, I really want one near the garage. It's between my furnace and my cars.

26:25 Pete Or an attached garage, yeah. Makes sense.

26:28 Marty Sure. What do you, do you feel uncomfortable with an open flame combustion in your house or do you, what do you close combustion versus open? Why don't you explain the difference there?

26:38 Dave Sure. Uh, no, I don't feel uncomfortable. I mean, a lot of people have a gas stove that still has a standing pilot. The older stoves had a standing pilot. A lot of, uh, gas water heaters have a standing pilot and then some older furnaces or a lot of furnaces still have a standing pilot. It really just means that the combustion is open to the atmosphere of your home. So that flame, you're able to see it, and it's open to the atmosphere. The closed combustion is, you see it all the time. You see two pipes coming out of the side of someone's home. One pipe is bringing fresh air into that combustion chamber, and the other pipe is your flue that's pushing the combustion.

27:20 Marty Those white pipes you typically see. Right.

27:22 Dave And so one's bringing fresh air. It's a sealed combustion. Gotcha. It really has to do more about efficiency than safety.

27:29 Marty In the news, we talked about last time, Pete, all our federal government's providing all these incentives and we'll put out some websites. We can check out different rebates for high efficiency furnaces and things like that. But there's a lot of conversation and push for a heat pump. In layman's terms, again, for our hosts and our audience, can you give a layman's definition of a heat pump versus a forest air furnace? I could give it a shot. All right, like splitting the atom here.

27:57 Dave Let's go. Heat pump is just reversing the air conditioning process. When I'm air conditioning, I have a condensing unit sitting outside by my back porch that is throwing hot air into the atmosphere. Because it's pulling the hot air out of my home, using refrigerant to transfer it to that condensing unit and ejecting it out into the atmosphere. In the wintertime, we reverse that process and the unit outside is pulling what heat there is, even though it's cold out, it's pulling the heat out of the outside and rejecting it into my home.

28:35 Marty So I grew up in a house when I was in the 70s in high school. I recall we had a heat pump and we live in Cleveland. And when it got to 10, 15, it didn't work well. Is that still an issue today with these heat pumps? It is. That they don't perform?

28:51 Pete Was that in the outhouse or an actual house?

28:54 Marty Well, first we had a wood burner and then we upgraded. We finally got a heat pump. It was a long road. Then when I walked home from school, of course— Uphill both ways. Exactly.

29:06 Dave Uphill both ways. Marty was in charge of stoking the steam boiler.

29:10 Marty All of a sudden, one day we got the heat pump and my job was done. So is that still a flaw? There's this big push toward heat pumps, but do they work at low temperatures?

29:19 Dave So the technology is getting better and better, but the fact of the matter is we're trying to pull BTUs out of the outside and transfer those BTUs indoors. At zero degrees outside, it's very difficult to find any BTUs of energy to pull out of that environment. So in the north area of our country, most of the heat pumps have electric backup heat. So when the temperature goes down below the effective use of that heat pump, you're on electric resistance heating.

29:51 Marty Gotcha. And then last question, if our audience is thinking about a new furnace and using these incentives and things, you described the working of this furnace. So I've got Trane. I'm just thinking of brand names, Pete, like what comes to your head? Lennox, Trane, Carrier. I mean, it's very confusing. And so how do we decipher which brand to get? Do I get a Lexus? Do I get a Hyundai? Do I get a Chevy? Or how do we do that?

30:13 Dave Well, it goes back to choosing a contractor that you know and you trust, check references, take the time to check references, take the time to ask around about that contractor's reputation and figure out if you trust them. It's a Ford, Chevy, Dodge type argument, right? Some people love train, some love carrier, some love York. To complicate it even further, Carrier manufactures Bryant and they manufacture Payne. So each manufacturer has several brands underneath their umbrella. So it is complicated.

30:48 Marty So you just blew it for the sponsors that just were going to sponsor the show, but I get it. Yes. But you're saying that you're suggesting that it's more important to find the installer you're comfortable with rather than the equipment manufacturer?

31:01 Dave Do you think the application is important? Is it properly applied? Is it properly sized? Is the ductwork designed properly? The nameplate on the appliance is not nearly as important.

31:11 Marty Oh boy, there goes our sponsorship, Pete. So Pete, what do you think we learned here? What do you think? How would you summarize this?

31:17 Pete I would say we've hit on a lot of really good topics, right? For a novice like myself, the idea of maintenance, the importance of the annual checkup, the useful life being, you know, 15 years or so. And then I think an awareness of the safety features. The carbon monoxide one I thought was an excellent tip. And then the air quality and the duct work, I always just thought there were holes in the wall, but they're important to this whole process, right? It's almost as if they're the veins to your home.

31:54 Marty Yeah, so I think we're looking at the furnace as a complete system. So I don't know, I picked up a lot here today. I think we covered a lot of ground. Anything we missed?

32:03 Pete I don't think so. The technology you hit on too, it seems like it's, It's less important that technology change as it is getting that unique fit and prescription for your specific home and needs.

32:19 Marty Should we get a fancy nest thermostat or is that an overkill?

32:23 Dave Well, I was going to say, Marty, I think as you have a plethora of topics for this fine house, but indoor air quality is a great topic. To be able to remote in to see what temperature your home is, is important for peace of mind if you're traveling. Air conditioning and all the different variables that go with that. Humidification, there's just a lot to talk about. The appliance itself is important for your home, not just to provide heat, but to provide comfort, peace of mind, reliability.

32:55 Marty That's great.

32:56 Pete Well, we've covered a lot of ground, Dave. We want to thank you for being a guest on A Very Fine House. You are an energy pro, and we're thankful for your involvement in our podcast, and look forward to keeping in touch.

33:12 Marty Thanks again, Dave. We appreciate your insights and thank you for contributing to a very fine house for our listeners.

33:20 Dave It was great to be here. Always like to talk with you guys and appreciate all that you're doing for everybody.

33:33 Pete I'm Pete Carroll.

33:34 Marty And I'm Marty Berry.

33:35 Pete And this has been A Very Fine House with the Energy Pros, sponsored by Barry Insulation. You can find us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo, Lycos. Chatbot. Chatbot. Chat GPT.

33:49 Marty Got a question you think we can answer? Reach out to us and maybe we'll answer it on future shows. Learn more about Barry Insulation on our website link in the description.

33:57 Pete And if you enjoyed today's show, a five-star rating and a subscription would go a long way. Subscribe so you never miss an episode.

34:04 Marty Sound designer and producer extraordinaire is Noah Foutz. Our audio engineer is Zach Hurst. Recorded at Evergreen Podcasts, executive producers Michael Dealoia and David Allen Moss.

34:15 Pete We'll see you next episode. And if you only remember one thing from this podcast, it's this.

34:19 Marty Install a carbon monoxide detector.