Heating Question

[djm]

I hope the is the right forum for a heating question, I have a farm house that we only get to visit on weekends, It has a oil furnice for heat and we don't need ac. I would like to convert to a more safe type of heat since the house is vacant during the week. Would a heat exchanger be the best and cheapest method to heat this house during the winter months in virginia. I do not want to go the full cost of a heat pump unit because we do not need ac in the summer. Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

DJM

[roger g]

It depends on what you mean by "safe". To prevent damage from frozen pipes, the safest is electric baseboard heat. It is very simple without any moving parts to fail. Other methods may be cheaper to run but if even one part fails then the whole unit fails. I live up in Canada and used to be in cottage country where lots of people used their places on a irregular basis and it was very common to get calls of no heat and when we got there all the pipes had burst,drywallwas hanging and the basement/crawl space was a skating rink. We had one person who had temprature alarms set that if the temp ever dropped too low then a security company wouls show up. The sensors were in the basement where all the plumbing and water pumps were. It sounded good but there was one big problem. When the furnace failed, the upstairs got cold first and split the toilets and pipes long before the cold got into the basement to trigger the alarms.


roger