oil or electric for home heat?

[sailboy21]

I was reading a report from my city electric department concerning the cost of electric versus fuel oil heating. Where I live, those are the only two viable options you have. No gas, propane, wood, pellet, geothermal etc...
The report says that when fuel prices are above $2.50 - $2.70 that electric is cheaper. The current rate is 9.8 cents / kwhr last time I checked, home heating fuel for #1 or #2 is around $3.55. Electricity supply is 80-100% hydro.

Through my whole life I have been taught to only use a space heater for temporary use, turn it off when you leave, turn off the lights etc...
According to what I have just read, I should leave everything on, plug in the space heaters and set them to high! Thats the beauty of electric heat, its essentially 100% efficient, and so are regular light bulbs!! I'd toss out those crappy CFL light bulbs but I'd be afraid of getting in trouble with the EPA.

Sound right or is it electric company propaganda??

[Valiente]

Propaganda, as far as I'm concerned, but then I have natural gas heating hot water rads, which is more pleasant than forced air and probably more efficient.

I had electric heat baseboards in more than one apartment, and when I had to pay for them (on top of the rent), I found them very expensive indeed.

We had oil heat when I was a kid, but it went out in most places 25 years ago in favour of natural gas in Toronto. I rarely see oil trucks making deliveries anymore, but I certainly recall my parents' house having a 400 gallon tank in the basement. That took two fills per winter, I think.

[sailaway21]

Sailboy,
It depends a lot on your circumstances. In general, electric is the least cost efficient while heating oil and natural gas are comparable in cost but gas has less maintenance assosciated with it. Propane is generally substantially higher than natural gas.

Those fuel oil prices you cite, if they are reflective of the market rate, seem rather high. If you are looking to install a new furnace I'd still stick with oil. It takes a great deal of wattage to heat a house and, once installed, you'll be stuck with a generally higher bill for the long term, regardless of any competetive advantage it has now. Usually with oil or propane one can acheive a substantial savings by buying during the summer and locking in a rate with a supplier.

If what you are asking is, instead, can you dial back the oil furnace and benefit from using a space heater the answer is a qualified yes. It can save you money but it will involve only heating those rooms you're actually using and you cannot, of course, let the basement or other rooms get too cold or you'll be freezing pipes. The biggest savings one can practically make is in the area of insulation, draft reduction, and dialing the thermostat down. Programmable thermostats are inexpensive and will pay for themselves just in the number of times they dial your heat back when you're not at home and forgot to turn down the heat. I live in Michigan and my stat kicks the furnace on between 6-7am and then returns to a 55 degree setting through the day. It takes a really cold day for it to kick on then during the day. At 5pm it comes back on and takes the house up to 68 and kicks off at 10pm. My stat is a 5+2 model so that it is programmable for two seperate cycles on weekdays versus weekends. As I type this, the furnace has been down to 55 degrees since 10pm and it's after 2am; slippers and a sweater make me quite comfortable. A lot of people are in the habit of running around indoors lightly clad and are always turning the heat up and that practise can cost you literally hundreds of dollars a year. Some even leave the heat up while in bed! You can buy a good down comforter or two for what that'll cost you.

As Val supposes, hot water heat is the most efficient and a well designed system can allow a very pleasant heat without as large a reduction in humidity as found with forced air. Proper zoning will allow the user to dial back infrequently used rooms. The only negative to it is that people used to forced air are unable to stand over a register and warm up quickly and hot water heat does warm a room more slowly. You also need a seperate system for forced air -air conditioning in the summer.

You are getting 100% efficiency, with electric heat, out of a rather expensive heating method. Modern forced air systems regularly acheive 90% or better efficiencies though. Most people find that electric heat is only cost effective if used for sporadic heating of a three seasons room and the like; it's a cheap add-on for that extra room.

To be sure, you'll have to do a cost analysis of the utility rates and what a house your size generally uses to heat with either. You'll need to, in essence, convert wattage used to BTU's produced to compare them.

[CapnHand]

This spreadsheet is from the Forestry Industry so should be unbiased relative to electricity or fossil fuels. It allows comaprison of fuel costs.

http://www.fpl.fs.fed.us/tmu/resourc...calculator.xls

Using 9 cents/kWh, the break even point for #2 FO is $3.10/gal and for #6 FO it's $3.34/gal. I'm not sure what it uses for heating effieciency. The article you read may be using 100% for electricity and 80% for fossil fuels which is valid.

Any way you slice it, it's expensive. I'm glad we have less expensive natural gas. We recently got a new programmable thermostat that lets the house cool off during the day when we're not home and at night when we're sleeping. Should pay for a case of beer or two for sailing season.

[sailboy21]

Thats for the advice. Yes, fuel oil here is much higher than average, as is everything else. Last month I burned 50 gal #1 and 50 gal #2 (oil fireplace, and furnace). Thats a big heating bill.
I ordered a kill-a-watt meeter. Yesterday I plugged in a 1000 watt electric heater, and put it relatively close to the furnace thermostat. The furnace hasn't run ONCE. According to the kill-a-watt it has used 15 KWHr.. So about $1.50 in cost. The house is nice, and the .1GPH fireplace keeps everything comfortable. I was reading the specs for the furnace. I couldn't find a burn rate, but I did find that it draws 7 amps current while running. That is the same as the 1000watt heater!!! So no only does the furnace suck oil like crazy, its killing the electric bill too, and that energy is wasted. If I end up burning 50 gal #1, and only 10 #2 or so I think I will be at least a little more happy. Fun with numbers.. only problem is the numbers = big dollars at the end of the month. $500/month total utility for a 3 bedroom house, family of 3. Thats why Alaska gives you a couple grand just to live here!

[Valiente]

Originally Posted by sailaway21

As Val supposes, hot water heat is the most efficient and a well designed system can allow a very pleasant heat without as large a reduction in humidity as found with forced air. Proper zoning will allow the user to dial back infrequently used rooms. The only negative to it is that people used to forced air are unable to stand over a register and warm up quickly and hot water heat does warm a room more slowly. You also need a seperate system for forced air -air conditioning in the summer.

Correct. The "undried air", however, being slightly more humid, has a warmer "feel", and 18 C/66 F at my house is more comfortable than in a forced air house at 66F, because it will be dry, colder-feeling air.

As you can likely tell, I keep the house quite cool by North American standards, not only because I'm a cheap-ass, but because I would rather wear a sweater than a T-shirt when it's snowing outside. I think a cool house temperature is healthier, and I find most houses stinking hot in winter.

We don't have A/C in our house...it would be prohibitively expensive and would involve a lot of fairly destructive renovation. Ironically, we have A/C on the boat, so on the hottest days, we move aboard at dock.

Were I to design a house today from the ground up, I would use both passive and active solar, geo-thermal heat, a heat pump and radiant heat in the floors, which is really the nicest heat of all, I think. I would use a couple of efficient fire-boxes to supplement this, because I would be in the woods, halfway up a south-facing slope.

[Freesail99]

I built a 6000 sq. ft house. I put into it a 5 zone oil heating hot water system. I had R28 in the walls and R 50 in the ceilings. I still burned a lot of oil. I did put in a 1500 gallon tank and found that I could buy oil in the summer sometimes at less the 1/2 the price i was at in the winter. The house also had 3 wood burning fireplaces with inserts that helped with the cost of heating as we had plenty of trees on the farm.

[Valiente]

Jeez, that's a huge house. Me, I need a bedroom, a closet, a kitchen, an office with enough shelving to hold my books, one giant bathroom with a drain in the middle, and a workshop some distance from the house so the inevitable explosions keep the windows intact...

[sailboy21]

Originally Posted by Valiente

Jeez, that's a huge house. Me, I need a bedroom, a closet, a kitchen, an office with enough shelving to hold my books, one giant bathroom with a drain in the middle, and a workshop some distance from the house so the inevitable explosions keep the windows intact...

My uncle built a 2 room house inside his pole barn. His wife got a little upset that he never came home so she called the building inspector.
True story

[Freesail99]

That house I built even had 6 bathrooms...... no waiting ...... ever.