Heating Costs - Oil or Gas

[Henry]

What do you spend on heating your snow country home? I'm getting ready to build the CEO her dream home at our place in Central PA (and live there full time). I'm trying do do a little budgeting for heating costs. I'm thinking about either Gas or Oil forced air heat. Am I nuts? I hear about soaring heating oil & LP prices......

I'm going to build a 1700 Sq. Ft. Home (well insulated) with a basement.

[RichZ]

If I were building a new house, I'd set up a heating system with wood. Either one of the outdoor wood boilers or they have indoor ones, too. Wood is a renewable resource, and the prices should be fairly stable.

[EJB]

I agree with Rich...wood should definitely be considered if feasible. In an ideal setup I'd have an oil furnance daisy-chained with a wood furnace so that when I ran out of wood, or needed to go away for a few days, the oil would take over for me. and when I restarted the wood furnance, the oil furnace would take a rest.

I currently have oil with FHW and I am in the market for a wood boiler that I can add-on. I spend about $2500-$3000 per year on oil (heat and hot water), and have a lifetime of wood for free out back so it won't take long to pay me back I'd imagine.

[RichZ]

Holy Crap!!!!! [img]/forums/images/icons/shocked.gif[/img] [img]/forums/images/icons/shocked.gif[/img] [img]/forums/images/icons/shocked.gif[/img]

$2500 - $3000 per year for heating oil???!!!

Man!!! How big is your house????

I used less than 500 gallons last year when it was super cold, and we didn't want to use our woodstove, because we were afraid our basement pipes would freeze without the oil burner coming on!! This year we light up the woodstove every night, so we'll use much less than that.

You gotta get yourself a good woodstove!!!

[Airedale]

In PA I would go with coal, plenty of it, fairly cheap, no cresote, long lasting fires.

[EJB]

Actually, I checked my last few bills, and last year, which was much colder than normal, we used about 1600 gallons, so maybe we are closer to $2000 in a bad year. If I remember correctly, in a "typical" winter we used around 1300 gallons. The house is not "huge" at least not by todays standards, but it does have 5 bedrooms(all of which are full!)

So even if I pay $2000 per year, I figure I can save at least $1500 per year by using wood...maybe more (I get my hot water of the furnace too, so we burn oil all summer long).

[Henry]

Everyone,

Thanks for the feedback!. I like the idea of a dual mode system, using a wood-fired system and a back-up oil burner. The ability to tradeoff between the two seems like it would give you a LOT of advantages, such as:

Oil
- When you are away for a few days
- When you're not feeling up to tending the wood-stove
- In the summer when you only need hot water & no heat

Wood
- When the Oil gets too expensive
- When you feel like getting the exercise from chopping wood

Currently on our property we've got a small pre-fab home (70's era double-wide) that's heated with a Taylor Water-Stove (e.g. a wood-fired boiler). See: Taylor Water Stove

We're only part-time residents now, and while it makes heating the place esentially free there are two big disadvantages for us. First, when we leave the place in the winter, we have to drain the boiler and then load a 50% antifreeze solution into the in-house hot-water radiator system. Second, running a low-fire during the summer months for hot water generates a lot of creosote.

The dual wood / oil system would make these kinds of issues go away.

Thanks,
Henry

[rbhollabaugh]

Why use oil or gas?
That's the wrong question.
Use solar. It works.

Rich

[Pat]

While passive solar is a good consideration, and will pay back, a tighter house with engineered ventilation for IAQ is almost as important as insulaltion. Have a reliable experienced HVAC engineer, not just a plumber/installer/salseman do the math for you if you don't want to have to become a temporary expert. You will need either an HRV or an ERV (Heat/Energy Recovery Ventilation) system if you build the house tight enough to be energy economical.

I have been asked many times what is the best fuel to go with for space and water heating. My stock answer is a tighter house with more insulaltion. It will make your home easier to heat and cool. If you don't need cooling and you have an abundant cheap and easy wood source, the economics might favor easing up on the tightness (skipping the ERV or HRV) and not going quite so far with insulation and be willing to burn a lot more wood.

If you will be using a significant amount of A/C then you are back to needing to do tight, getting the mechanical ventilation system, and upgrading the insulaltion.

Someone correct me if I go to far wrhong here, but... Don't oil and gas prices loosely track each other. Even natural gas and electricity are coupled pretty well in some areas where utilities use gas to meet air quality. They burn so much they drive the price up which raises the cost of electricity. If you are in one of those areas, oil might be a more stable comodity but it isn't likely you will find any of the major heat producing comodities, oil, gas, or electricity to be a reliable bargain. If you are in a big hydroelectric zone or otherwise have low electric rates that's a different story and a ground sourced heat pump might be a good deal.

I was going to use three of them but Lennox came out with an air to air unit with 19 SEER and only one remains in the plan now.

Other ideas related to heating include lots of thermal mass inside the home. Slab floors with adequate insulation under them and extending out a bit to break the thermal short circuit to cold-in-winter surface dirt. This will help smooth out temperature fluctuations from a variable heat source like a wood stove. Lots of thermal mass under and behind a wood stove is a good thing. If you are thinking of one of those remote wood fired boilers, you could do in-floor hydronic heat and be really comfortable.

You might want to check prices and stability of the availability and the pricing on wood pellets for a pellet stove. They are quite competitive in some areas. Pellet stoves can be had with automatic ignition and variable speed augers with thermostatic control. Yup, you can even use them with a computer type setback programable thermostat.

Thermal characteristics of windows and doors are important. Low E glass usually has a good payback and U-values of about 0.40 or less are desired to help keep the windows from being to thermally lossy.

There are free software tools to help with some of this stuff.

http://www.efficientwindows.org/

is handy to get recommendations for your general area of the country.

http://windows.lbl.gov/software/

Various free Government sponsored software tools... RESFEN (Residential Fenestration, I think) is a good aid for window selection. It was used to produce examples for the eficient windos site above.

There is more to heating with wood than meets the eye. Now that I qualify, in some venues, as a senior citizen I am getting more particular about what I spend a lot of time and energy doing. I made a personal choice to not embrace the whole WOOD burning lifestyle. That is what it is in some form no matter if you even have your wood delivered, stove ready.

I almost had myself convinced to do a rotational harvest on several acres where I could raise fast growing species that would literally produce a never ending renewable wood supply for our use. Then I assessed my time and effort required and thought of all the things I'd rather do and opted out of wood heat. Please no flames! I have nothing bad to say about folks who chose to devote so much of there time to the various aspects of wood heat. If you like it, fine. It is as good as or better than a lot of other hobbies and passtimes. I have been there , done that, and have moved on. If I had cheap coal handy and a good autofeed thermostatically controlled furnace available, I'd sure consider coal.

For a while I considered modifying a pellet stove auger system to feed shredded paper. It would likely require slowing the draft fan a bit too. Then you would suscribe to all the junk mail possible (to a separate address, separrate mail box tilted to dump the mail into a big collector, trash can) and run it through a shredder and into a big hopper to feed the stove. Cheap heat!

[img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] Pat [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

[Jaeger]

The wife and I are also getting ready to break ground on the "homestead." [img]/forums/images/icons/grin.gif[/img]

We're going with a couple of systems. A forced hot air oil furnance, a boiler (oil) for radiant floor heat, a large fireplace (more looks than heat), and a large coal stove in the basement for backup / supplement.

I can always supplement the oil by running the furnace fan, and using the coal stove.

Just some ideas. Coal is cheap and burns a long time. In fact it's not as messy as wood.

Good Luck [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]