Attic Furnace Enclosure
The good news is that some installers understand this problem and seek to address.
Attic furnace enclosure. High efficiency furnaces aren t usually recommended for an attic. A furnace can be installed various places in a house in a basement an attic a garage a ground floor utility room or outside the walls. Most of the issues that furnace might experience in an attic are due to extremely cold weather in this poorly insulated space. Most updated central air conditioned homes have a new air conditioner split system meaning the ac is broken up into parts.
Air ducts lose a fair amount of heat through leakage so shorter lengths are more efficient. That would be a medium sized furnace. It will not require long lengths of pipe to deliver heat to the rooms as a basement furnace does. The horizontal furnace may also be suspended from the joists using 3 8 all thread rods with pieces of angle iron underneath the furnace to form a hanging rack at both ends and the midpoint.
When you place a furnace in the attic to take advantage of its. A while back i wrote about the incompatibility of putting an atmospheric combustion furnace in a sealed attic. Well mainly it s a way to save space. So why put an hvac system up in the attic at all.
The rods need to be of sufficient length to allow for proper clearances from combustible materials. Divide that number by 50 to find the maximum capacity appliance you could put in the attic and you get 64 000 btu hr. An outdoor unit which houses the fan condenser and compressor and an indoor unit which holds the evaporator and fan. If the attic has a floor area of 800 square feet and an average height of 4 feet for example the volume would be 3200 cubic feet.
An attic furnace is closer to the upper stories of a multi level home. If you don t have a crawl space or a basement then it can be a challenge to place a furnace on the ground floor of the structure. A furnace can suffer from a drop in energy efficiency if it s in an unconditioned space such as an attic. Furnaces in basements.
Most often the attic is sealed by installing spray foam insulation at the roofline thus bringing the attic inside the building enclosure and turning it into conditioned space directly or indirectly. But you could put only one in this attic. Attic furnaces take advantage of the closer proximity to use shorter lengths of air. Attic hvac systems save space.