Replacing Heating and Cooling in the Town of Clay

Clay counts 26,282 housing units, and its median home dates to 1978. Of those homes, 55.0 percent predate 1980, 3.2 percent predate 1940 and 15.4 percent date from 2000 onward. If your house is from that mix, ask how old its furnace is and how its size was chosen.

Heating fuel is mixed. Utility gas heats 68.6 percent of occupied homes, electricity 24.6 percent and oil, kerosene or bottled gas 4.4 percent. A quarter of Clay homes on electricity makes a heat pump a serious option for many owners. Owner occupiers hold about 71 percent of homes, so most of you are making this call yourselves.

Start with size. A like-sized swap hands your house the same oversizing the first furnace had. NYSERDA wants contractors to do their own sizing math, and it observes that plenty of older furnaces and boilers start out too big. Ask for the worksheet and the size it produced.

Then look at the chimney. Where a gas water heater shares the old flue, a new side-wall furnace strands it in a flue built for a pair. The cure costs extra, so ask each contractor to price it on its own line.

Then ask about the ducts. A house with a long duct run to one wing can leave a room cold no matter how big the furnace is. Name the room you want to fix, and see which bid answers it.

Permits are where Clay is hardest to read. Clay's Department of Codes handles building permits. Its codes page, though, gives no schedule of which jobs need one. Call or write the office about your job, and ask your contractor in writing who applies. A Clay address that sits inside the Village of North Syracuse belongs to the village office.

Two neighbors on one street can have very different systems. So start from your own basement, not from the street's average, and keep the three questions beside you at every visit.