Free checklist
Furnace installation checklist
A gas furnace is a combustion appliance. The safety checks come before comfort.
Written by HYRE HVAC Research Desk Primary-source research, data analysis and fact checking
The short version
Use this furnace installation checklist to confirm the sizing, venting, gas and combustion checks are done and recorded. A new furnace should be sized from a load calculation, vented to the maker’s instructions, tested for gas leaks and combustion, and handed over with CO alarms working. All gas work is for a licensed contractor.
Why does a furnace install need its own checklist?
A furnace burns fuel inside your home. Its venting, gas connections and combustion settings decide whether exhaust leaves the house safely, as well as how efficiently it heats.
DOE notes that a modern high-efficiency furnace vents differently from an older one, and that changing furnaces can leave an existing water heater on an oversized chimney. Those are details worth seeing in writing.
Safety first
Leave the house, then call your gas utility or 911 from outside.
CPSC’s advice. Test them after the install.
Never DIY.
Before install day
DOE notes many systems are oversized.
DOE: high-efficiency condensing furnaces run 90% to 98.5% AFUE.
A 90%+ furnace needs its own vent. DOE advises relining a chimney when a remaining water heater would vent into an oversized flue.
Who pulls it and books the inspection.
On install day
ENERGY STAR lists gas pressure, burner combustion and heat exchanger checks.
Handover
Gas pressure, temperature rise, static pressure.
Questions
Do I need a permit to install a furnace?
What is temperature rise?
Does a high-efficiency furnace need a new vent?
Where should CO alarms go?
Written and audited by
HYRE HVAC Research Desk
Primary-source research, data analysis and fact checking
We are a research desk, not a sales floor. We read the federal microdata file, the statute or the manufacturer data sheet ourselves, and we publish the figure with the document it came from and the date we retrieved it.
Where a number cannot be traced to a primary source, we publish the shorter page and say what we could not verify.
The counts below are generated from the published pages themselves, last counted October 26, 2026, and they are what we have actually published rather than what we intend to.
- 18
- studies published
- 15
- federal sources read and cited
- 15
- studies published with their full dataset as CSV
- 51
- jurisdictions reproduced against EIA’s own tables
How this desk works
- Primary sources only. Federal data comes from the agency that collects it, in the file that agency publishes. We do not cite an article that cites a source; we download the source and compute the figure ourselves.
- We validate against the agency before we publish. First, we use each federal microdata file to reproduce the agency’s own published tables. Our cooling research reproduces EIA’s state estimates and standard errors for all 51 jurisdictions. That check caught a variance formula that was off by a factor of four.
- Every estimate carries its uncertainty. These are survey figures, not counts. Standard errors are computed from the replicate weights the federal file supplies and printed beside the estimate. An estimate too imprecise to publish is reported as such rather than printed.
- Nothing is typed by hand. Prose, tables and charts all read from one dataset built by script, so a number in a sentence and the same number in the table below it cannot disagree.
- We publish the data, not just the conclusion. 15 of our 18 studies offer the full computed table as a CSV download on the page, so you can check the analysis or disagree with it. A study without a row-level dataset gets no download link and claims none in its structured data.
- We correct in public. Where we have published a figure wrongly we fix the figure, rewrite any analysis that rested on it rather than patching the number underneath it, and leave a dated correction note on the page.
- We do not install or sell HVAC equipment, and we take no payment for placement, ranking or a favorable mention. Nobody buys a position on this site.
Data as of Sources checked October 26, 2026. Authorship on this site is organizational: the analysis belongs to the desk rather than to a named individual, and we do not publish credentials we do not hold. Our editorial policy sets out how we source, date and correct what we publish.
Sources & retrieval dates
Planning a furnace install?
Tell us the job and your zip code. Contractor matching is still being built, so this is an inquiry, not a booking or a service call.
HyreHVAC is a publisher. We do not install, repair or inspect HVAC equipment and hold no contractor licence. Nothing here replaces an on-site diagnosis by a licensed contractor. Sources are cited with the date they were checked.