[TheDude]

What would running an electric space heater cost per month in comparison? Ala JD's tips - pile on the blankets, stay in one room, electric heat, insulate windows.

[PhebaAndThePilgrim]

Good day from Pheba, from the farm:
Here in midwest Missouri farm country there are propane tanks all over the place. Propane is a very popular way to heat houses in rural areas. Propane heat is more comfortable than electric heat. I heated with propane space heat for years.
Right now we are heating with an exterior wood stove that heats hot water and pumps the hot water through pipes in the house. The most comfortable form of heat I have ever lived with. We keep winter temp in the house at about 65. We burn less wood with the lower temp and I have become so used to 65 degrees that I literally smother in homes heated to 70 or above.
The wood stove also heats our house hot water. This month our electric KWH were 450. We have cut it in half and are trying to get free of the grid.
Some folks paint their propane tanks. The cutest one I ever saw was a pink one, with a pig face at one end, and a tail painted on the other. Watermelons are also popular.
Very expensive to fill the tanks. I will find out what it is costing now and get back to you.

Pheba

[MarkJames]

I own a heating fuels sales, service and installation company in Upsate New York. Most of our customers in areas where natural gas isn't available have oil fired hydronic heating systems. Fuel oil has 140,000 BTUs per gallon in comparison to Propane @ 91,000 BTUs per gallon, you can store up to 660 gallons in your basement tanks, plus the quality and longevity of the furnaces, boilers and water heaters that burn fuel oil or kerosene is unmatched. It's not uncommon to see boilers well over 50 years old still in service. One of the most popular efficient setups is a three pass horizontal boiler such as a Buderus, Viessmann or Burnham with indirect water heater and outdoor reset control. The Energy Kinetics System 2000 series oil fired boilers are popular as well. They don't make many gas fired furnaces in the same league with a Thermopride oil fired furnace.

With oil fired furnaces, boilers and water heaters you can also choose the burner and control package, so you generally have the choice of a Beckett, Carlin or Riello burner with most modern oil fired equipment. The parts like transformers, igniters, primary controls, burner motors, oil pumps and cad cells are interchangeable on many Beckett, Carlin, Wayne and other older burners which makes stocking parts and emergency service much easier. Since burners and controls are seperate from the boiler or furnace, you can also install modern retrofit burners with oil solenoid vales, and primary controls with pre-purge, post-purge options on older equipment. This also comes in handy when doing emergency service.

With fuel oil, kerosene and propane you can choose to install more, or larger tanks and fill them when the prices are lower off season. Many companies offer pre-buy and price capped fuel sales as well. The efficiency of modern oil burning equipment is excellent. Gas fired equipment has a higher AFUE rating, but AFUE isn't an accurate measure of hydronic systems that also produce domestic hot water and the gains in efficiency are offset by the lower BTU value of the gas. Fuel oil and Kerosene are also very safe fuels. You'll rarely hear of a fuel oil explosion, or someone getting CO poisoning from an oil fired system. Since oil fired systems are generally serviced every year, they tend to be well maintained. Gas customers generally don't call for service until their system stops working, they smell gas or their CO detectors have gone off.

There are many full service, COD and mom and pop oil companies in the Northeast, so you can shop for either price, minimum delivery, service, emergency service, installations, service contracts etc. If you're a will-call customer that has run out of fuel you can always pick up some kerosene or diesel to get by until you can schedule a fuel delivery.

[Kingcoal]

King Coal is running all NG?!

Hehe sounds like you made a good call on that one.

Maybe that paradigm will go this way...

(The coal being too valuable liquefied into fuel)

coal delivery -> oil delivery -> wood/pellets delivery -> wood stripped from abandoned suburbs delivery -> no delivery (customer is dead)

-G

Yeah I guess my handle should be KingNG. There are two local furnace companies (EFM and New York Boiler) that make auto feed coal furnaces, but coal is too much work. You have to empty the ash pan EVERY day. But it is cheap around here. I know a guy around here that heats his whole house with one and spends about $300/year! Eastern PA is one of the few places in the nation where they still deliver coal to your house, all you need is a little window that leads to your coal bin.

I think that gas will be around for a while because the gas industry predated the natural gas industry. "Municipal gas" was a byproduct of the carbon industry. Steel manufacturers needed pure carbon and in the process of extracting the carbon from coal produced carbon monoxide and hydrogen which was pressurized and sold to homes. After a while, gas became so popular that "gas houses" sprung up all over the place. Gas houses took waste coal, mixed it with water, cooked it and made gas out of it.

[LoneSnark]

Yep, a friend of mine in PA has a coal furnace. He loves it, rediculously cheap since they deliver in his area. Even works if the power is out since he is using radiators instead of forced air. But it is a lot of work.

[lateStarter]

Yep, a friend of mine in PA has a coal furnace. He loves it, rediculously cheap since they deliver in his area. Even works if the power is out since he is using radiators instead of forced air. But it is a lot of work.

Give me a break. What in your mind constitutes 'a lot of work'? Spending 15 minutes/day scooping up some coal residue (as opposed to freezing to death)? We spent about $800 USD 2 years ago buying 2 different types of coal that is still keeping us warm.

I agree that radiators are highly under-rated. 65 or less during the day (why did god create sweaters?) and some good blankets at night (buy a good sleeping bag and you can survive almost any weather). I'm more worried about food than keeping warm... As in: hey, I'm still alive even though the temp last night was -35 C. Damn, I don't have anything to eat....

I did note that last year Poland (largest coal deposits in CEE) was buying its coal from Russia. It was cheaper to import than to produce locally.

Who knows what will happen next week. Good luck, keep warm!

[WisJim]

Here's an interesting site to use to compare fuel costs--plug in the cost of your fuel, the efficiency of the appliance, and get a result in BTUs so you can figure out if LP is cheaper than electric than fuel oil, and at what point it makes sense to change fuels.
http://www.hearth.com/econtent/index.ph ... alculator/


I remember having a winter job when I was a kid ( early 1960s) that involved checking people's coal furnaces when they were on Christmas vacation. Checked morning and evening, shoveled a hopper full of coal, shoveled out clinkers, made sure the feeder was working right. A lot easier than shoveling in coal every few hours, but still kind of dirty. More like taking care of a wood furnace if I remember right--we use wood now, but the coal furnace watching was a long time ago.

[lateStarter]

WisJim,

My wife almost elected to go with some kind of system that fed the coal/dust/residue into the furnace slowly (I guess from some kind of hopper - sounds similar to pellets in the US) that would allow you to be away for several days, but still keep the house warm enough to keep the pipes from freezing.

My question was: what if the electricity got turned off? I don't want to depend on a system that requires electricity, although I would agree that the electric system will be the last to go... Especially here in Poland.

I'd rather live next to a forest and have a decent stove/fireplace and a good sleeping bag. Our new house is only 100 square meters and we are insulating like crazy. We will starve to death, before we freeze to death....

[mos6507]

You guys actually want to go back to coal? Do you want the cities to get blanketed like modern China now? It's bad enough coal is used for electricity generation considering everything bad we know about it now.

[vfr]

Have 3 of these vent free back up gas heaters.

http://www.comfort-glow-comfortglow.com ... crn18.html

Made 2 manifolds with ball valves that can be added to my forced air gas supply and to the gas line of the water tank. These heaters require no electric. I used some these heaters week when a bird got into my forced air furnace and destroyed the turbo fan. The repair man took 3 days to get here and fix it. Was a good pre-winter test of the back up heat system since it was only in the 30's...it could have been single digits or lower.

Also have 3 space heaters that run on propane.

http://www.northerntool.com/webapp/wcs/ ... 577_211577

They run for days on a 20 pound cylinder.

And have 4 mini electric heaters

http://www2.northerntool.com/product/1017213.htm

Just wished I had some wood fired back up heat. But the houses nowadays are not set up for peak fossil fuel issues and are pretty much run by NG. Will give the wood stoves some thought once we get to later periods of code orange. or if we ever get any disruption in NG from shortages.




Take care,


V (Male)

Agnostic Freethinker
Practical Philosopher
Futurist
Urban Homesteader

[Revi]

We were talking about the situation here in Maine. Right now the average price for #2 heating oil is at $3.28 per gallon. The average house has a burner that uses about 3/4 a gallon per hour. Next year heating oil will be around $4 a gallon. That means the average house will need to use $3 worth of oil an hour for say 10 hours a day. $30 a day just to stay warm. $210 a week just for heat. Our winter lasts about 6 months around here, but only serious cold for 3 months. $2520 for the coldest part of the winter plus 1260 for the other 3 months of cold and you get $3780 just to stay warm in a small house next winter. That's the best case scenario.

Peak oil hits home hard in Maine. We all need $4000 just to keep from freezing to death.

[MarkJames]

The average home in Maine must be poorly insulated and/or the average furnace, boiler, boiler/tankless combo, boiler/indirect combo or boiler/outdoor-reset combo must be really oversized or very inefficient to use so much fuel per day.

If our average fuel oil customers burned that much fuel, we'd have to put more trucks on the road.

[oowolf]

It has been technically possible to build houses that require no off-site fuel for heating--even in Maine and Montana--for a hundred years or more.
The only reason such houses weren't built: You can't make money selling fuel to people who don't need it.
Same reason automobiles were invented--so standard Oil et. al., can make money.
In the so-called developed nations, the primary reason for existing is to make money by selling people stuff they don't really need.

[misterno]

Here is my take on this

1) If all said about oil and NG is true, meaning they are getting more and more expensive and this will continue, then sometime in the future, the cost of heating will be so high that people will be forced to move south.

As an example somebody calculated that it costs $3/hr to stay warm and what if this goes up to $10/hr, would you still live in Maine? This is impossible.

2) Someone said propanes are a way to go. What I do not understand is propane is a byproduct of oil so if oil goes up propane should go up too. Isn't that so? So what is the difference from heating oil? Can someone elaborate?

[dinopello]

Maybe their systems were built so well they just never saw the need to switch them out. I'm not really in the 'NorthEast" here, but my home is only about 100 years old. I am told that it probably had a coal-fired boiler when the house was built in 1905 and at some point had an oil one put in (the controls for that are still in the basement) and now I have a 25 year old natural gas boiler (radiator heat).

[bonehead]

Bought my house four and a half years ago when heating oil just crossed over the $1.00 a gallon mark.This was before i ever heard of peak oil.Since then i've done everything in my power to get the most out of every gallon.Looking back,i'm not so sure i would've bought the house knowing what i know now,but there really aren't many alternatives when you factor in the cost of a new system.Guess i'm just stuck with it for now,but i can see these oil dealers in my area going out of business in the near future as their product becomes just too expensive.

[Tyler_JC]

Even with a relatively mild winter here (in southern Massachusetts), it costs well over $1000 per month to keep the house warm.

It's not a large house by any strech of the imagination (just a basic two story cape house of about 2200 square feet) and it is very well insulated.

But with heating oil at $3/gallon, it's become a money trap.

I'm trying to convince him to invest in a solar water heater and after the last heating oil bill...he's warming up to the idea.

[Permanently_Baffled]

Even with a relatively mild winter here (in southern Massachusetts), it costs well over $1000 per month to keep the house warm.

My god , seriously!? $1000 a month to keep it warm?

Blimey - I had no idea!

My natural gas bill (central heating, combo boiler) costs at the very most £150 ($300) for 3 months. Last winter - the 6 months from October to March cost £300 ($600).

I have a 4 bedroom semi detached house, good insulation - not sure how many square feet, but being in the UK I suspect it is very small by US standards.

At $1000 a month I would be financially ruined! I can see now why so many US consumers are struggling!

[FoolYap]

Even with a relatively mild winter here (in southern Massachusetts), it costs well over $1000 per month to keep the house warm.

It's not a large house by any strech of the imagination (just a basic two story cape house of about 2200 square feet) and it is very well insulated.

But with heating oil at $3/gallon, it's become a money trap.

$1000+ a month? You're getting a 300 gallon tank filled monthly? Something seems wrong. Our two-story is about 1800 square feet, in central MA, also well-insulated, and not burning through the fuel oil nearly that fast. Granted, we commute, and turn off the heat when gone.

What temperature are you keeping the house? Ours is set a bit high for my tastes -- 68F on the first floor when we're in it, off when asleep; 65F on second floor at night. I also have a small attached workshop that is heated off the same system, that I generally keep at 50F. And, I supplement with a woodstove as long as the firewood lasts, whenever outside temps get colder than about 20F. But, we produce all out hot water from the same boiler, and both DW and I like long hot showers.

So, what's going on over there? Got lots of glass? Got window covers? Checked for air leaks around foundation, pipes & wires piercing the shell, outlet boxes on exterior walls? Wish I knew what to suggest to help...

--Steve

[Revi]

The average home in Maine must be poorly insulated and/or the average furnace, boiler, boiler/tankless combo, boiler/indirect combo or boiler/outdoor-reset combo must be really oversized or very inefficient to use so much fuel per day.

If our average fuel oil customers burned that much fuel, we'd have to put more trucks on the road.

You're right. The average burner is only on about 1/4 of the time, so the average house only burns about four and a half gallons a day, so that only costs them about 15 bucks a day. If heating oil goes up, it could be over $20 a day next winter.

I read someplace that the average house costs around $3000 to heat every winter now.

Most houses in Maine are old and the furnaces look like they came off the Titanic. A lot of people live in old, not very well insulated trailers as well.

Fortunately, we are the most forested state in the nation, so a lot of people burn wood. If it wasn't for the wood we would be in more trouble than we are now.

I agree, it's a hard place to live with heating costs going up so much. The average person may not be able to stay in Maine without burning wood. I don't know what the answer is. There's a reason why not many people live here.