To choose the best furnace fuel for your Baltimore, Maryland, home, you should consider its cost, its availability, and the type of heater you’ll need to use it. The most common types of heating fuel are natural gas, propane, and heating oil.
Natural Gas
Natural gas is widely available, efficient, and inexpensive. It’s mostly methane, but it also contains ethane, propane, carbon dioxide, butane, pentane, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen sulfide, and helium. Before utility companies send it to your home, they process it to remove most of the substances that aren’t methane. Gas furnaces are clean, quiet, and reliable. However, they need good ventilation to remove carbon monoxide from your home’s air. In large quantities, this harmful gas can cause dizziness, fainting, and even death.
Propane
Propane comes from natural gas. It’s more costly, but you can use less to produce more heat. You can heat your entire home with propane, or you can use it to power a smaller space heater. Many propane heaters are wall-mounted, and they vent substances such as carbon monoxide through openings behind them. A special additive produces a smell like rotten eggs to let you know when there’s a propane leak.
Heating Oil
Heating oil is similar to kerosene and diesel fuel, but it’s formulated to run in whole-home oil heaters instead of portable heaters or vehicles. It usually comes from an outdoor storage tank instead of an on-demand utility service. Today’s heating oil formulations are more environmentally friendly and efficient than older heating oils, reducing soot and pollutants. Since modern heating oil must be low in sulfur, modern oil furnaces are cleaner and easier to maintain than these systems were in the past. However, you should still have an oil furnace cleaned and maintained every year.
Griffith Energy Services has an A+ rating from the Better Business Bureau and more than a century of heating and air conditioning experience. We can deliver propane and heating oil, and help you maintain your natural gas, oil, or propane furnace. For quality service from our friendly technicians, call us anytime at 888-474-3391.
