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QUESTION:Our mobile home is an older 14 x 70 on a double lot; the former owner added
an extra bedroom, a 12 x 29 family room and an 18 x 24 attached garage along
one side of the original building, and reroofed the whole place. We live in
Canada, and as you might expect, our climate makes the natural gas furnace
in the original unit pretty underpowered for the unusually large living
space. There's electric baseboard heating in the extension, however, and a
separate gas heater in the garage, so the heating gets us through the winter
here on the prairies, where the temperature can easily fall to - 40 Celsius.
There's even a fireplace in the family room, for that matter. The extension
is actually a permanent frame building, with a drywalled interior and a
knotty pine ceiling - quite rustic!
We're proud of this home; it's unique and attractive, but it requires pretty
high maintenance, especially because the add-ons make the roof structure
complicated, so it's a lot of work to keep the joins sealed properly. Also,
the sheer size of the place makes it hard to keep up with the cleaning
chores. We've been considering starting over again eventually with a new
unit, which we would leave in its original one-piece factory configuration,
rather than extending it.
Now, finally, to my question: Do any of today's mobile homes come with
electric heating installed instead of gas or propane? I'm not talking about
an electric forced-air furnace here, but heavy-duty baseboard heating, the
240-volt kind, which is what we have in the family room. If some units do
have this kind of heating, can they withstand our bitter cold winters?
Natural gas is no more economical here than electricity, and furnaces tend
to be noisy, too. Since our climate is very dry, the forced air in the
winter can be rather uncomfortable, too.
ANSWER: Here in Canada, all water lines in mobile homes are susceptible to freezing
during winter, regardless of the heating method, but we use heat tapes, and
all mobile homes in this park are required to be properly skirted, too.
The kind of heat I was talking about, however, doesn't use water - it's
electric baseboard heating, consisting only of heavy-duty elements and
wall-mounted thermostats. Perhaps what you thought I meant was the hot
water baseboard heating commonly found in apartment buildings.
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