Alternative Ways to Heat a Ranch Style House

Passive Solar

• Passive solar heat can keep a house warm with no technology other than efficient, properly placed windows and good insulation. Adding a south-facing conservatory or bay window to your ranch house allows large amounts of sunlight to enter your home. The rays of the winter sun, which is low in the sky, will naturally heat your home interior. The more you improve the insulation in your walls and ceilings, the more of this heat will stay inside. Passive solar is a low cost method of heating with low environmental impact.

Solar Panels

• A more technically advanced method of using the heat of the sun to heat your home involves panels that are mounted on the roof and connected to a grid of pipes in the floor. Water or an antifreeze solution circulates between the panels and the floor. The liquid is heated in the panels and distributes the heat inside the house as it circulates through the floor. Panel systems are more expensive and complicated than passive solar systems, but they can keep the house warm even when less sunlight is present.

Wood Stove

• If your ranch house is located on a large property with a wood lot, you can cut your own wood and heat your home using a wood stove at very low cost. In a split level house, the wood stove can be installed on the lower level and the heat will naturally disseminate throughout that level and rise to the next level, warming the entire house. It's also possible to install a wood burning furnace in the basement and transport the heat through the house using ducts, in the same way that an oil burning furnace works.

Geothermal

• Geothermal heat works by drawing heat up out of the ground and sending it into a building. Some geothermal systems use a deep well, while others use a series of pipes that are laid horizontally about 4 feet underground. Geothermal heating is relatively expensive to install, but quite inexpensive to run once it's in place. The heating ducts for a geothermal system can be distributed throughout a ranch house just like a normal furnace's ducts, enabling you to heat the entire house or to shut some ducts off and heat only certain rooms.