magichappens wrote:
9 months ago, I put my entire life savings into the down payment for a
home (built in 1955) in the Oakland Hills (northern california)

My fiance and I recently found out that our monsterous 50 year old 255K
BTU furnace (70% efficiency in its day) has cracks in 4 out of 6 of the
heat exchangers and was emitting carbon monoxide (yikes!).

They no longer make residential furnaces of that size, so deciding how
to replace it has been an exercise in frustration and confusion. We
have gotten 5 seperate estimates, all providing vastly different
opinions as to what should be done to replace our furnace and
adequately and most efficiently heat our home. How is one to know who
to trust and believe? My head is spinning from all of the different
advice we've been given (which I'll detail further down in this post)

To complicate things further, our home was custom built by the previous
owner, and has a very unique open floor plan on the upstairs level,
which constitutes about 2600 sq feet of the home. There are 11
registers and 2 large returns on the upstairs level (although both my
office and our dining room have NO registers and we've been told they
can't be added) The downstairs level accounts for approximately 600
square feet and contains our family room (which has a single register
in it)and a guest bedroom with no registers in it.

The entire length ot the house, on both levels, has floor to ceiling
windows facing south that provide a breathtaking panoramic view of the
bay. However, they are older windows, with metal frames, and are very
inefficient -- the house loses a lot of heat when it is cold through
those windows, yet when the sun is out the vast southern exposure beams
through the house, heating it sometimes to the point where I literally
feel like a dog locked in a car on a hot summer day. We are in the
hills, and it can get windy, meaning it can get super cold at night.
Yet when the sun is shining, it actually heats up to the point that by
mid-afternoon I'm opening windows because it's too warm -- even in
November (although once the rainy season starts it will be cold all the
time -- I know this from our first month in the house, last February,
wherein we got a $550 PG&E bill that almost gave me a heart attack...
-- after that I had tried not running the heat, but even with wool
sweaters my fingers were still too cold to type and you can't operate a
touchpad with gloves on..)

We have a home warranty, which should cover the cost of replacing the
furnace, although it turns out that the list of uncovered items is much
larger than what is covered..

Much snippage

I don't usually get involved in these, but I'll weigh in
with my thoughts FWIW.

Forget the warranty co. They are going to screw you out
of any meaningful settlement. The deductible or whatever
they choose to call it will likely cover most of their
out-of-pocket cost.

I think you should be factoring in the projected heating
costs for the next few years in your thinking. I bet they
will overwhelm you with fuel costs headed nowhere but up.

Here's what I would do:

Gotta have *some* heat for this winter. Bet you can get
a 100K 80% for $2000 or so.

Close off areas you don't have to occupy for the winter.

Do *whatever* it takes to cut heat loss from those windows.
Even if it's ugly.

Spend your cash on:
New energy-efficient windows.
Wall insulation (blown in). I bet there is little or even
none in there now.
Ditto for attic insulation.

For your office with no heat, consider alternatives like
Hydronic (hot water baseboard) delivered from a household
water heater. If you can run copper tubing to the area,
it should be possible. Or a thru-the-wall gas heater.

I realize time is of the essence. But don't be panicked
into thinking that you MUST have a heating plant big enough
to offset all the BTU losses right now.

IOW, a Spartan approach.

Jim