The furnace in our house is 28 years old (original to the house), and it is, frankly, on its last legs. Rather then trying to coax it through a few more years and risk it dying on the coldest day of winter, we are going to take advantage of the current federal tax credit and install a geothermal heat pump (also called a ground-source heat pump).
The great thing about heat pump is they can operate in reverse: heating in the winter, and cooling in the summer, with no additional equipment required. Our house will finally have Central AC!
(Source: https://www.epa.gov/rhc/geothermal-heating-and-cooling-technologies)
We spent a lot of time researching and looking for qualified installers. Given the limited space on our lot, we're going to have to go with vertical ground-loops (the other option being long trenches of horizontal ground-loops), but hopefully that won't destroy our landscaping too badly, compared to trenches.
It wasn't particularly easy to find good installers here in Colorado (one HVAC salesperson was planning to bring a driller in from FLORIDA for the ground loop), but we should break ground on the vertical wells in April. One hang-up is that we're going to have to upgrade our electrical utility connection from the measly 150 amps we have now to a 400 amps service. Good new is, that will allow us to fully electrify and get off natural gas entirely, as well as shift over from gasoline to electric vehicles.
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