Furnace Installation in Ames, IA
A new furnace here will run from October through May every year. Tell us about the house, and a licensed contractor who covers Story County will get in touch.
Tell us about the job
It takes about a minute.
Ames asks a lot of a furnace
From October through May, eight months of the year, your furnace is what keeps the house livable. Winter nights average 14°F here, and that kind of cold runs a furnace hard, night after night, for most of the year.
Most homes here heat with gas, and any non-weatherized gas furnace built since November 2015 has to reach at least 80 percent AFUE. That is the federal floor, not a ceiling, so a new furnace has room to do better. The area has also logged 24 winter storms and 82 damaging wind events over the past ten years, and statewide, 15 percent of households lost power for at least a day in 2024. A furnace that starts reliably matters most on the night it is needed most.
- 8 months
- October through May, your furnace is on duty
- 14°F
- the average winter night it heats against
- 63%
- 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 $90 a year to run in Story County compared with a gas furnace.
Estimates for a typical Story County home, from EIA household energy data, Iowa fuel prices and NOAA climate normals. Your home will differ.
Iowa requires HVAC contractors to hold a state license.
Iowa licenses HVAC contractors through the Iowa Plumbing and Mechanical Systems Board. The license is issued to the contractor, not to each job, so the same license covers this installation and the next one, rather than being reissued furnace by furnace.
For this job, that license is what stands behind the person doing the work. In most cities and counties, a furnace replacement also needs a permit from the local building office and an inspection once the work is done, and that inspection is what catches a bad gas connection, the dangerous part of a furnace installation. In Story County, 62.6% of homes heat with gas, so that connection is doing real work in most houses here.
Sources: Iowa Legislature · Iowa Department of Inspections, Appeals and Licensing
- What size furnace does my house need?
- A contractor has to work this out with a load calculation, not a chart based on square footage alone. That calculation looks at your insulation, your windows, your ceiling height, and how the place is laid out, because two houses the same size can need different furnaces. With winter lows here averaging 14°F, undersizing shows up fast on the coldest nights, so it's worth having someone measure rather than guess.
- How do I know it's time to replace my furnace?
- Watch for a furnace that struggles to keep up, cycles more than it used to, or needs a repair call every winter. Rust near the burner, a yellow flame instead of blue, or soot around the unit are signs the heat exchanger may be failing, and that's not something to wait on. Homes here need heat from October through May, eight months of the year, so there's not much of a stretch where a furnace can sit unused while you decide. If yours is old enough that you're already unsure, a contractor can tell you whether it's worth repairing again or replacing before it fails on a cold night.
- Is a high-efficiency furnace worth it?
- It depends on what you're comparing it to. Every gas furnace sold new today has to hit at least 80 percent AFUE, so the real question is whether it's worth paying more for a unit rated higher than that, sometimes into the mid-90s. A furnace at that level pulls more heat out of the same amount of gas, which matters most here since homes need heat from October through May. A contractor can walk through the options for your house and what each one would mean for your setup.