Furnace Installation in Scranton, PA
A new furnace here will run from September through May every year. Tell us about the house, and a licensed contractor who covers Lackawanna County will get in touch.
Tell us about the job
It takes about a minute.
Nine months of heat, down to 19 degrees
Scranton asks a furnace to run from September through May. That is nine months a year, with winter nights averaging 19°F. A furnace built for milder places gets no rest here.
Most homes in the area heat with gas, and any non-weatherized gas furnace made since November 2015 has to hit at least 80 percent AFUE. That is the floor, not a feature. Lackawanna County has also seen 16 winter storms and 127 damaging wind events over the past ten years, and across Pennsylvania 15 percent of households lost power for a full day or more in 2024. A new furnace here is doing real work, on cold nights and through weather that can knock the power out.
- 9 months
- September through May, your furnace is on duty
- 19°F
- the average winter night it heats against
- 64%
- of homes here heat with gas, so most furnaces here burn gas
- 80% AFUE
- the federal minimum any new unit must meet
NOAA nClimDiv, 1991–2020 normals
A high-efficiency gas furnace would save about $160 a year to run in Lackawanna County compared with a gas furnace.
Estimates for a typical Lackawanna County home, from EIA household energy data, Pennsylvania fuel prices and NOAA climate normals. Your home will differ.
Pennsylvania requires contractors to register with the state.
The state registration puts the contractor's business on file with the Bureau of Consumer Protection. Nobody tests their gas or furnace work to get that number, and nothing about their skill is checked before they're handed it. No town in Pennsylvania can layer its own HVAC license on top of that, so the registration is the only state-level record that exists on a contractor anywhere you go here.
What actually protects you on a furnace install is the permit. Most local building offices require one for a furnace replacement, along with an inspection once the work is done, and that inspection is where a bad gas connection or a bad vent run gets caught. With most homes in Lackawanna County heating with gas, that gas connection is the part of this job worth paying attention to.
Source: Pennsylvania General Assembly
- What size furnace does my house need?
- The right size comes from a load calculation, not a chart based on square footage. A contractor measures your walls, windows, insulation, and ceiling height, then factors in how cold it gets here, down to 19°F on a winter night, to figure out how much heat your house loses and how much the furnace needs to replace. A furnace that's too big will short cycle and wear out faster. One that's too small will run constantly all winter and still not keep up on the coldest nights.
- How do I know it's time to replace my furnace?
- Look at the age first. Most furnaces last 15 years or so, and past that point, parts get harder to find and failures get more frequent. If yours is turning on and off more than it used to, running longer to reach the same temperature, or you're calling for repairs more than once a season, that's a sign the furnace is on its way out. Since homes here need heat from September through May, a furnace that fails mid-winter leaves you without heat for months of the year, not just a few weeks, so it's worth replacing before it quits rather than after.
- Is a high-efficiency furnace worth it?
- It depends on how much you run your furnace and what you're paying for gas, so a contractor can walk through the actual numbers for your situation. What's true everywhere is that every non-weatherized gas furnace made since November 2015 has to hit at least 80 percent AFUE, so even a standard furnace today is fairly efficient. High-efficiency models go higher than that, and with 64.2 percent of homes here heating with gas across nine months of the year, the difference in fuel use adds up more here than in a place with a short, mild winter.