The 1970s: Tracking The Solar Blip In Recent Heating History
The past 25 years have brought changes to the heating industry that most of us wouldn’t have thought possible, or necessary, in the mid-1970s.
Condensing furnaces just a whisker shy of providing 100% efficiency were only in the imaginations of manufacturing engineers until 1980. Air-to-air heat pumps were improving in the 70s, but many in the industry remained skeptical because of past equipment problems. Electronic solutions to efficiency problems, in the form of setback thermostats, variable-speed motors, and system control modules, were tomorrow’s answers.