woke up and my wife told me she smelled a strong oil smell and shut off the furnace. i'm so groggy and out of it in the morning i have no idea. she told me to "check it out", whatever that means. I go look at it. It's a furnace allright. half a tank of oil. i call emergency service and tell them and they tell me 6 hours. i noted some soot on the outside, but these things are so filthy that who knows when it got there and how long it's been there. my theory was it sooted up because that's what happened last time we had oil smell (turned out the cause then was the wrong size nozzle installed). It's been very cold here lately due to an arctic snow blast. single digits a few nites. teens in the days. well, today when the oil smell happened, it was a balmy 31 when we woke up. turning the furnace off all day waiting for the guy to show wasn't a big deal. strategically placed electric heaters and a roaring fire in the fireplace ensured that it never really got cold. he took the guts of the furnace apart and it all looked good. no significant soot or anything. he suggested that it could be a cracked heat exchanger but didn't check it per se. after he got the furnace back together he said there was one more thing he wanted to check. he started examining the run of pipe to the exhaust stack and discovered a 2-3 inch gap. i recalled a dead bird i found in the sealed off furnace room a month or so ago. couldn't figure out how it got in there and threw it in the trash. well i guess we know now. so he squished the pipes back together and secured with a sheet metal screw. no more gap. i have no idea if this fixed the problem. it may make sense. i've felt like $#!+ all day with a sore throat.. my wife complains that it's worse when she goes upstairs. i have a few windows open, downstairs and up. With a huge roaring fire trying to suck everything out through the chimney. oh and i ran out and bought a second CO detector, just in case the one i have is broken. i just hope it fixes the problem. if it doesn't, do i just keep calling techs back until i find someone who can figure it out? how do you check a heat exchanger? (all he said was it was hard to see into my unit 'cos it's so small) is there a reason why we haven't noticed "oil smell" until the first normal temperature day following an unprecedented coldspell? i'm a couple hours from easton, pa, how much does our forum moderator charge? ;)

Oil won't kill you silently like gas will. You have the warning sign that leaking oil-combustion fumes provide before it kills you...obnoxious odors. In that respect, you're fortunate that you have oil heat. You are risking your life, and I'm not the type who goes around trying to scare people.

If your heat exchanger was cracked, you'd be getting soot INSIDE your house. You're lucky. Soot can be caused mainly by not enough air supply to mix with the fuel oil. Cleaning properly usually fixes that problem. With the modern burners, oil burns with zero smoke. It's pretty easy to get a no-smoke burn, so I wonder why the tech made that comment. Sometimes lint or animal hair can block the air supply at the burner. Maybe a bad nozzle. Does your air supply come from outside, along with the exhaust pipe? If so, maybe a bird nest, or other critter built a nest over the inlet. Check along the lines of improper air supply. Oil may be high, but I still think it's cheaper than electric. A heat pump might be a better choice.

First of all, electric, propane, and coil costs vary across the country. You need to research the rates for each fuel in your area and make a decision accordingly. I will warn you to watch out for propane though; that stuff is pricey and may end up costing you more to run than oil. The equipment sizing in your quotes is indeed all over the map and you need to look into that. The way Manual J load calculations work is: garbage in, garbage out. Assuming all the contractors actually did Manual J and not some other load calc, the only explanation for the different sizing is that they used different values. I would ask to see the calculations so you might be able to see why they vary so much. 40K Trane (TUH1B040), 60K Trane (TUH1B060), 80K Bryant, 85K Thermo Pride, 100K Thermo Pride, what a mess. Actually the 100K Thermo Pride and 80K Bryant will be similar in output because of the differences in efficiency, but the other quotes are all over the place. As for one Trane contractor saying the furnace needed to be moved to the attic and the other didn't, that could be because of physical size differences between the 040 and 060 models quoted? Not really sure what's going on there though. For the heat pump quotes, you are seeing air handlers quoted larger than the outdoor units because the efficiency of the system is higher when you do that. You do sacrifice some dehumidification in the summer, though. Variable speed air handlers are more efficient than multi speed models, and are better at dehumidification. I would strongly recommend going with one if you can swing it. Comfort R is included on all Trane variable speed air handlers and is just a marketing term for the ramping profile on the blower for better dehumidification. It is an OK way to dehumidify, but a better way in my opinion is dehumidify on demand. This lets you set a humidity setpoint, and the system will slow down the variable speed blower when you go above it. You do not need to use a Trane thermostat for any of the system's functions to work. The Trane 803 is a rebranded Honeywell VisionPro 8000 which can only overcool to dehumidify, which is not optimal at all. I would want at least the VisionPro IAQ on any of the systems you were quoted with a variable speed blower. That way you will be fully taking advantage of the equipment you paid for. Heat strip sizing is covered in the Manual J load calculation. They say to size it to 80% of the whole heat load for the home. Some contractors prefer to size to cover 100% in cases where the heat pump fails and you need it to meet the whole load. I'm sure the companies would be happy to give you prices without the maintenance plan. That would be the first place I would go to cut costs. I am not really a Trane guy so can't comment on issues (or lack thereof) with the TAM7 Hyperion air handlers. Hopefully someone else here who works with Trane more can answer that. This post was edited by hvtech42 on Tue, Oct 14, 14 at 15:25