Insulation or High efficient furnace
Well, when you want real toasty warmth in your house and all you are getting is air that is heated only slightly or 50% even after doing all that you can do to make your house feel better, you become desperate and starts to look for more answers and solutions and only thing that comes to my mind is insulation and more insulation or replace my 80% furnace with new 90% or higher efficiency furnace. One of these options should fix our problem.
I know why my house feels cooler no matter how high we set our thermostat at, even though my furnace is acting like the way it supposed to, but for me to fix these problem would be a monumental tasks. Plus, I don't have the right tools or the expertise to fix them. Not only that, I am not rich either to have a contractor to do them for me.
Let me tell you what my dilemma is with my house. First of all, my house was built in 1921. It is a two story house, the living space is only 20ft x 30ft, has two bedroom on the top floor, living room in the first and basement in the bottom. So, imagine almost perfect cubes stacked up on top of each other. Because we spend most of our time in the living room, our time is spent sitting directly on top of our basement. Our basement has so many problems, which I have been fixing as much as possible. One of the major problems with my basement is air infiltration especially through its hollow cinder blocks walls on all four sides. Because our exterior walls sits right on top of our basement cinder blocks all the way around and having little interior walls but 85% exterior walls. As a result of our hollow cinder blocks' air infiltration hitting the bottom of our rim joists, our walls feels cold. There is ton of outside air running through the basement walls. Even though I've done my best to plug them up, it is still a problem.
As a result of all this, my house is unevenly heated. Half away up from my floor it feels cooler and half away upto the ceiling, its okay. After all this, I have my thermostat at 75F. When its around 50'ish or above outside, my 80% furnace doesn't put out much heat at all or hardly any. The colder it is outside the better the heat coming out of my furnace. After all my effort in resolving this issue, I really have two options at this time, either spend all of my savings on a new high efficiency furnace or spend it on insulating all of my basement walls with insulation by hiring a contractor.
I have 80% Arcoaire brand furnace.
What do you think I should do? Thanks in advance.