Hello all,
My husband and I need some advice on upgrading a furnace at our place in ND. Currently the house is circa 1920 and is using an oil furnace. The two years we lived in the house the furnace ran pretty much all the time and it was costing us about $800-$1000/mth for fuel oil. We are renting the house out now and would like to upgrade to a high efficiency propane furnace for a couple of reasons
1.) When we lived there the furnace ran almost constantly
2.) The house was still cold - but that was because we tried to save money by turning the thermostat down and running electric heaters - which was cheaper than fuel oil
3.) There have been two service calls for the FO furnace since we started renting the house - the first one cost us $ 800 and the second big one we are waiting on the cost - but we were told the control board went and would be around $400 for the part - not including the installation fees etc.

Since there is no natural gas available in our area of ND, we obtained two quotes from local companies last fall -with a pretty large price difference and need some advice on whether we should be switching to propane, models that would be good for propane, do we need to ask for a manual J calculation? And any other advice.

Estimate 1 is around $3400 but doesn't include electrical and
Estimate 2 is around $4700 and does include electrical.

Your thoughts are appreciated.

PS - We went and did our own manual J using an online calculator and it came in around 66K BTU. Estimate 1 indicated they would get us a Carrier 80K BTU furnace with 95% efficiency. Estimate 2 said they would install a Tempstar 90K BTU unit 95% efficiency. Neither of them provided model numbers. But the Tempstar quote said it came with a 10year warranty after registration.

Because there is such a large discrepancy between what we estimated the manual J to be and what they did we are not sure if we have not considered something they did?

Thanks for your input and advice.

Judy and John