Furnace Installation in Waukegan, IL
A new furnace here will run from October through May every year. Tell us about the house, and a licensed contractor who covers Lake County will get in touch.
Tell us about the job
It takes about a minute.
Waukegan asks a new furnace to work eight months a year
Winter nights here average 19°F from December through February, and homes need heat from October through May. That is eight months of the year your furnace has to be ready to run, not just a few cold weeks in the middle of winter.
Most homes in the area heat with gas, and any non-weatherized gas furnace built after November 2015 has to reach at least 80 percent AFUE by law. That is the floor, not a feature to shop for. Power matters too. Illinois saw 16 percent of households lose power for a full day or more in 2024, and the last ten years brought 20 winter storms and 138 damaging wind events to the state. A furnace that depends on electric ignition still needs that power to start, so it is worth knowing how your new system handles an outage before the next storm finds out for you.
- 8 months
- October through May, your furnace is on duty
- 19°F
- the average winter night it heats against
- 83%
- of homes here heat with gas, so most furnaces here burn gas
- 80% AFUE
- the federal minimum any new unit must meet
NOAA nClimDiv, 1991–2020 normals
A high-efficiency gas furnace would save about $130 a year to run in Lake County compared with a gas furnace.
Estimates for a typical Lake County home, from EIA household energy data, Illinois fuel prices and NOAA climate normals. Your home will differ.
In Illinois, HVAC licensing for homes is left to the cities and towns.
Lake County sets its own rule for who can do this kind of work, since Illinois leaves HVAC licensing to individual cities and towns. Some places require a local license before a contractor can take on a furnace installation, others don't, and what applies to your job depends on the building department that covers your address.
What protects you here is the permit process. A furnace installation in most cities and counties in Illinois needs a permit from the local building office, and the finished work gets inspected before it is signed off. That inspection is what catches a bad gas connection, which is the part of a furnace install that actually puts a home at risk. Most homes in Lake County heat with gas, so that inspection is doing real work here.
Source: Illinois General Assembly
- What size furnace does my house need?
- The right size depends on your square footage, your insulation, your windows, and your home's layout, so there's no single number that fits every house. A contractor sizes it with a load calculation that looks at your specific home, not just its square footage. Going too big wastes fuel and cycles on and off too fast. Going too small means it runs nonstop and still can't keep up on the coldest nights here, when lows average 19°F. That calculation matters more than any rule of thumb you'll find online.
- How do I know it's time to replace my furnace?
- Watch for uneven heat between rooms, a furnace that runs longer than it used to, or a rise in your gas bill that isn't explained by colder weather. An older furnace is working harder to do what it once did easily. Homes here need heat from October through May, eight months of the year, so a furnace that's struggling has little time to rest and recover between seasons. If you're calling for repairs more than once a season, that's usually the clearest sign.
- Is a high-efficiency furnace worth it?
- It depends on how long you plan to stay in the house and how much you run the furnace each year. With heat needed eight months of the year here, a more efficient furnace has a lot of hours to make that efficiency count. Every non-weatherized gas furnace built since November 2015 has to hit at least 80 percent AFUE by law, so the real choice is between that baseline and the higher-efficiency models above it. A contractor can walk through the difference in efficiency ratings for your specific home and let you weigh it against the upfront cost.