Originally Posted by
raharra
Thanks for all the advice.
As far as why do we have electric furnaces in Nebraska, I could say that we just got electricity last week out here in the Boonies, someday we hope to get this Internet stuff that everybody is talking about. Up till this point we were still burning cow chips & sod grass. Pretty easy to troubeshoot a cow chip furnace.
The type of furnace that are installed in a residence depends on where you are located. If you are within city limits, you have the choice of Natural Gas or electric.
Out on the farms, the majority of them use Propane with a few older ones using electric heat. If the customer lost utility power for a couple of days, most farmers have some sort of generator and "double throw" disconnect so they can power up a few small appliances until they get utility power back. A propane furnace typically uses about 10 amps to keep the house from freezing up; well within the capacity of even a small generator.
If the customer has a big enough generator (usually driven off the Power Take Off of a tractor), he will be able to feed an electric furnace with a portion of the heaters turned off.
There are a few old units that burn fuel oil, but they are few and far between. Nobody likes the smell and the price is higher than other fuels.
We had a streak of "pump & dump" ground water based heat pumps with electric backup heat strips in a few new houses that we wired in the past 5 years, but I am pretty sure the initial install price scared most customers off.
That is pretty much the sum total of what I know about furnaces.
Rick