Gas and Oil Home Heating Furnaces - Need advice on the best two stage gas furnace brand

We are in need of a new furnace. Our current one is 20 yrs old and is still working so we have some time. Existing furnace is 67,500 btuh in and 55,000 btuh out. AFUE 75%. It has provided adequate heat for the home.

We want a two stage gas furnace for a 2 story 2,000 sq ft home built in 1989. We would like one with at least 90% efficiency. No variable speed needed. Just heat not A/C. Current furnace is located in garage and the new horizontal venting could go out and no windows near where the vent could go.
What is the best brand for us? And how many hrs would it take to install? Any ideas how to buy the furance direct to save money?

Personally I favor Carrier as a brand or one of Carrier's other brand names --- Payne, Bryant or Day and Night.

Not because they are necessarily better than other brands, but simply because they make the most furnaces. this has two implications that are good for homeowners:

1) It means that if repairman can fix ANYTHING, they will probably be able to fix Carrier furnaces, because they see them so often and tend to get to know the problems they have.

2) Because there are so many around, repairman tend to carry the parts that tend to go bad for Carrier furnaces around with them. That means that if you need a part when the repairman comes Friday evening, he may well have the part needed to complete the repair with him at that time. For other brands, he may not beable to get the part until Monday, maybe later, and will have to make a second trip out to complete the repair.

In my opinion for a gas fired furnace there is no "best brand". The best furnace is the one properly sized for your house & installed by the best installer around. I've said this at least a thousand times & I'll say it again:
I'd rather have the "cheapest" equipment installed by the best installer than the "best" equipment installed poorly.

As primarily a service guy I prefer to stay away from equipment with a bunch of proprietary parts & lean more toward those for which I can get parts almost anywhere. Some of the worst for specialty parts are Carrier (sorry S/P), Lennox, & York. Naturally that list changes from area to area depending upon what is popular in your area. Here the Carrier distributor is a real pain to deal with & has no after hours parts availability whereas with Tempstar, Ducane, Armstrong, & some others, I can get parts 24/7 if I'm in a real jam.

You can't stop a "TRANE"Beer 4U2

I agree Grady that the brands you mentioned are selective in parts distribution. I'm on the fence with that argument however. I can't decide if easily and sometimes publicly available equipment and parts is good for our trade or if the practices of some companies to protect their dealers by selling only to them is better. In the long run, the customer is the tiebreaker for me. If I can find his part at 10 AM on Sunday, he's going to call me next time. Some companies, in my opinion, are overselling themselves. We all want to make a comfortable living, but for me I want to also be able to sleep at night.

i agree that most manufactures make a quality furnace. to me its more important about the support after you bought the heater . i would shop the service company and let them sell you the furnace . a good service compay will alway get you back on line 24/7 . You need an expert if you want the right furnace.

It's nice to see how much unambiguous unanimity there is on offering advice on a furnace brand....

IMHO York has the most bang for the buck. And if you are really a tree huger, they have the only 98% gas furnace on the market.

Most of the guys already given good advise, A dealer that will be there to stand by the products that they put in, and them to be able to get parts quickly, and not wait 6 days for the parts to be shipped from a suppler they get from another state.

My word advise, be sure they do a load calc (Manual-J) on your home and not "Oh, we done this style of home all over town, we put in a 100,000 in them" My guts say you may need a 60k furnace.

And the best thing you can do for your two stage furnace is get a Two stage T-stat to match with it.

Most of the guys already given good advise, A dealer that will be there to stand by the products that they put in, and them to be able to get parts quickly, and not wait 6 days for the parts to be shipped from a suppler they get from another state.




A lot of good installers aren't necessarily the best people for doing repairs and maintenance.

As a furnace repairman, I specialized in doing REPAIRS and didn't dabble in doing installations.

Unfortunately, quite a lot of heating contractors seem to be in the repair business primarily to be in a position of recommending that pretty much any equipment that encounter be replaced ---whether it needs it or not.

Personally, I thought my position of doing repairs only was an advantage for customers, since my bias was to repair their equipment rather than replace it. If people wanted an opinion on whether to replace what they had, I was always glad to provide that opinion.


Reading through this thread makes it pretty clear that there is no consensus that one brand is notably better than another. There IS a good reason for looking around for an honest and competent installer, just as there is a similar good argument for finding honest and competent service providers in general.

I still like the bias I have towards Carrier equipment that I described earlier, for the reasons I gave.

Just curious do you also like ICP/ARCOAIRE HEIL/TEMPSTAR FURNACES ALONG WITH THE OTHER CARRIER BRANDS YOU MENTION. That would be why carrier is number 1 in furnace manufacturing with all these other brands under the same umbrella.

Sheesh --- have all those other brands been absorbed by Carrier?

No---- those furnaces are entirely different than the Carrier-BDP brands I described earlier, so the advantages I see in having those brands does not apply.

And again --- I don't claim I'm ***right*** by having those biases. They are advantages for homeowners I saw as a repairman. But other people might see advantages to other equipment.