Mobile Home Furnaces – What To Look For When Buying A Mobile Home Furnace
Mobile home or manufactured homes are great housing solutions for folks who don’t have a lot of ready cash on hand. Believe me I know. Mobile homes are safe, decent forms of housing that like apartments don’t cost you a bundle to own or to rent. But allow you to leave separate from your neighbors and all their potential dramas!
But after living almost a decade in a mobile home, I discovered one of the most worrisome problems with this type of housing. Repairing or replacing a mobile home furnace. Mobile home furnaces are actually pretty durable things all and all. Like all heating systems, they can go bad if not properly serviced or when they reach the end of their useful lifecycle. So there I was just a couple of months before the hit of winter looking at new mobile home furnaces.
The first thing I discovered that there are basically three types of furnaces: electric or gas (either natural or propane) and oil. But the most common are electric followed by gas. But it doesn’t matter how the old furnace was powered, since most mobile homes or manufactured homes use forced-air heating with metal ductwork running underneath the flooring.
This means that you can replace almost any old heater with a used mobile home furnace. These furnaces are very easy to find and fairly affordable and are simple for a certified service technician to install for you. But there are several things you need to look at before you buy your replacement.
Buying Tip #1: Did you get a service check? Have you checked out your old furnace for problems that can be repaired? Sounds like a odd question to ask, but many times people see their old and annoying heater, they automatically think, “dump it”.
But frequently no one has taken the time to check out the heating system thoroughly and determine if it can be fixed with inexpensive parts. Two of the biggest makers of mobile home furnaces Duo-Therm and Intertherm (best known for their oil furnaces) offer a line of replacement parts and maintenance kits.
Buying Tip #2: Compare the electrical requirements. The power needs of an oil-based furnace may be very different than ones for a gas or electric one. And understand that a trailer or mobile home that is several decades may have to some electrical upgrades done if you install a newer or more powerful model.
Buying Tip #3: Stay with name brands. If possible only buy a used furnace from a leading company like Duo-Therm, Coleman or an Intertherm. Some of these companies have been in the business of manufacturing mobile home furnaces for over 50 years. You will improve your chances of getting a good replacement from a company with a long history of making solid and durable products.
Mobile Home Furnaces Buying Tip #4: Beware of the true costs. If you are switching from one power source to another you need to take all the modifications into considerations. For example for most families the cost of moving from an oil-based mobile home furnace to a natural gas one would be very expensive.
Since this would involve removing the oil lines, tank and furnace plus installing new gas lines or a new propane tank, etc. But the cost of installing a working electric furnace on the other hand may be more manageable.
In the end it really doesn’t matter what type of mobile home furnace you currently have, when it’s time, you may be better off to replace it with a similar used model or an electrical one.
