What will you use for heat this Winter

[Van]

Mix of gas and wood fireplace, winter temps here average in the mid 40's though last winter stayed cold alot longer than normal. We have Scana for our gas company and its Scana's last chance company so our rates are higher, aparently in Georgia you have to have a credit rating of 800 and a dozen clear open lines of credit to get on with the better companies.

Furnace will be set at 64 during the day and 60 at night with a fire stoked up before bed each night and a fan on low to pull heat out into the rooms. We have a forest behind the house so most of our wood will come from dead fall wich means freebies.

 

[mike1973]

I will never forget the last time I was in the area ,visiting a friend in Churchville, and was scolded by a disgruntled gas station attendant in North Chili. Apparently, she didn't like the way I pronounced the word Chili (chil-ee). Over the years, I have forgotten some of the good times we had fishing on the river (Black River?), but I will never forget the sour old lady telling me how to pronounce Chili.

Yep, "chi-li" and also we have Charlotte but its "char-lot"

 

[thecristman]

That's the way to do it right there. It's how people do it up here too..

The best part is that a major electric company went through the area this spring and cut hundreds of trees that were too close to power lines and then cut them into small logs and stacked them neatly along the road, and I drove by and loaded them up. One day I filled my pickup six times.

 

[navychop]

What a nice power company!

 

[navychop]

...other than cutting and splitting, it is free ...

Good wood warms you twice....

 

[fhsucade07]

My whole house is electric. It pretty much serves it's purpose as the house is only 1100 square feet. Furthermore, here in northeast Georgia, I likely won't see but maybe one - two snow events and a small bit of ice covering the pines on a few days. I've thought about someday building on to the house and putting a wood fireplace in one of the new rooms. I'm going to try and do everything I can to stay away from gas right now -- I wish I had an alternate way to operate my car...

Cade

 

[grydlok]

Fuel Oil heat, and the price is SKY HIGH!!!!

 

[Stargazer]

Natural Gas heat but we heat by wood a little as well and we are going to try to go more towards wood heat since we have 400 acres about 8 miles from where we live.

I am surprised that there was not even one mention of those outdoor wood stoves that heat large houses/buildings and can even heat your water. You load them with wood outside which makes it easier than bringing it inside your house.

 

[Bobby]

You load them with wood outside which makes it easier than bringing it inside your house.

Ok, but if it is really raining/snowing hard outside it makes it awfully nasty to keep loading the stove.

 

[waltinvt]

The main heating system is fuel oil but at almost $3/gal we won't be using it any more than we have to. That equates to almost $800 a tank which would last about 3 weeks in mid-winter if we used nothing else.

I can cut the oil bill by 2/3 by using the wood stove and two propane (gas log) stoves but propane is almost as bad as oil right now and dry wood is about $300 a chord.

Heating a house in Vermont is not a pretty picture this year with a lot of families much worse off than us.

 

[KE4EST]

Looks like this thread is about to die out for this year, with gas wining....very interesting to me.

 

[Matt9876]

All electric here but neighbor took out his propane heat and installed a nice wood burning heat unit.

 

[vanalex]

Heat

I guess it is actually electric, but we use geothermal here.

 

[Stargazer]

I look forward to the day when the new solar panels come out that are much cheaper and much more effecient.

 

[NatHlthDude]

I installed Electric Baseboard last year.
Have an Oil Forced Hot Air Furnace - But it developed a leak last year in the firebox
Man did it stink up the house when it fired up
Still saving for a new one. It doesn't look like it will be replaced this year. Maybe next year!!

Maybe I'll change over to Gas when I get a New Furnace.

 

[Derwin0]

At the rate oil prices are going, I'm beginning to wonder when it'll be cheaper to heat with electric instead of heating oil.

 

[bhelms]

Do the math. You have to make some assumptions with any heat source regarding its efficiency, and the cost of maintenance and depreciation of the installed equipment to arrive at a true cost. The U.S. Dept. of Energy’s Annual Fuel Utilization Efficiency (AFUE) measure for a new oil furnace is 83 to 94%. The same benchmark rates electric resistance heat at between 27 and 31%, and 51 to 62% for air-based heat pumps. These comparisons look at the cost of energy production and delivery, and in the case of electric most of the difference in AFUE is the loss in generation and transmission.

But you need a comparison based on the delivered energy cost to your point of use. Oil provides ~139K BTUs per gallon vs. electric ~3.4K BTUs per kw-hr. So it would take about 40.6 kw-hr of electricity to equal the heat in one gallon of oil if both are 100% efficient at the point of use. If you're comparing resistance (baseboard) electric heat to an oil furnace, then assume 100% of the electricity converts to heat in your home vs. 85% of the oil (the rest is wasted "up the stack"). Factoring that inefficiency means one gallon of oil heat would equal about 35 kw-hr of electric heat. If you're paying 10-cents per kw-hr (close to the 10.53-cents national average for residential customers), then the break-even point would be when oil costs about $3.50 per gallon delivered. This is based strictly on the delivered energy costs alone and does not include other factors like the installed cost of the heating units depreciated over time, and the fact that the oil furnace would need periodic maintenance. Heat pumps, while more expensive to install and maintain, produce more heat value than 3.4 BTUs per kw-hr, so in their comparison the break-even point would come at a lower oil price per gallon. For heat pumps the term efficiency is replaced with "coefficient of performance" and that can be as high as 4.0 (vs. 1.0 for resistance heat) when the outside temperature is "mild", but the COP falls to parity with resistance heat at around 0 deg. F. Ground based heat pumps are less costly to operate as their heat source is at a relatively constant temperature.

Heating Oil
Electric Power Monthly - Average Retail Price of Electricity to Ultimate Customers by End-Use Sector, by State

 

[stevenl]

Living in central Florida during the winter I usally go from Summer Electric bill of about 140-160 to about 70-90 during the winter. So I look forward to the winter in cutting my costs During the winter I usually just open up the house and get some much needed fresh air. At night if a cold front is coming (ya know a freezing 40 or sometimes it dips into the low 30's) I'll turn the central heat (heat pump / electric) on to break the chill so when I wake up its nice and toasty. Otherwise ill just throw on an extra blanket at night works just fine. My AC unit has a timer system so what I do is when the inside temperature drops below about 55 I have it turn on to keep the chill off. and at 6:30 AM (about 30mins before I wake up) I have it set to kick on the raise the tempature to about 65. I like to be a bit warm when I get out of bed

 

[Bogy]

Natural gas.

The house is right at 100 years old. Beautiful oak woodwork downstairs, pine upstairs, but with the same 10" baseboards and pattern in the doors and windows. Probably 50 years ago somebody had the bright idea of painting it all white. 25 years ago the downstairs was stripped. We moved in 2 1/2 years ago, and our intention is to remove all the paint from the upstairs woodwork, returning it to what it was originally. We started out almost 3 months ago on one of the bedrooms, and after several weeks of trying to strip the paint with the wood in place, I removed all the baseboards and molding around the door and windows, taking it out to the garage to strip. The whole process has taken a lot longer than we ever expected (it won't take as long to do the other rooms, I've learned how everything fits together, and how to get it off without busting it up, and I've picked up some very handy tools), and I've been using a kerosene heater in the garage to take the chill off, in order to work comfortably, and keep the temperature where the stain and varnish will dry. The past few days the outside temps have dropped enough that I have added a propane heater at times. The project will be done by this weekend, and we won't need those heat sources anymore.

Related to heating costs, when I had the windows out, including a picture window that is about 5'x6' and three other standard windows, it was very obvious that the storm windows were pretty much useless as is. Not that there was anything wrong with the windows, but the storm window frames were not sealed against the window frame. You could see daylight almost all the way around on some of them. They are now all well caulked. When I get done with this project I will be checking the remainder of the windows to see if they are in the same condition. This room seems warmer already. It's my daughter's bedroom, and she is almost always cold, so it will be interesting if she is warmer when she gets back in the room.

 

[Bogy]

A fuel a lot of people around here use is corn. That same stuff that makes ethanol burns very hot in an airtight stove.