My family has attended the same church for three generations. It’s a beautiful church with classic stained glass windows, solid wood pews, and old country charm. The families that have passed through the old church have managed to maintain it as best as they could, but there came a time when the boiler needed to be replaced. A committee was formed to select a replacement boiler, as well as the HVAC company to do the installation and maintenance. The folks on the committee were delighted to find a good heating and cooling contractor located right around the corner from the church. The contractor presented many of the choices that needed to be made, making recommendations for each. He said that we needed a boiler that was the right size for the building. As obvious as that sounded, he indicated that in the past, many boilers were actually too big for the buildings they were in. Aside from leading to higher energy costs, a boiler that’s too big for a building can lead to malfunctions. The contractor also needed to assess the windows, amounts of heat loss, and existing insulation. He wanted to do a proper heat loss analyses to get a better idea of the proper boiler to install. The next option he discussed was condensing versus non-condensing boilers. Since most churches have no need to have the building heated at high temperatures for the much of the time, he explained that condensing boilers would be the best option, since they’re very energy-efficient. And there was also the option to replace a single boiler with two smaller boilers. By having two smaller boilers, their heat output can easily match the same BTU requirement as one big boiler – and at higher efficiency.