Hi all,
I'm a first-time home buyer here in Connecticut. I just saw a great house at the right price, but I'm worried about its combination heating setup.
The house is small, a little over 1,300 square feet. Originally it was just 1 story with an unfinished attic, but the investment company that is selling it converted the upstairs into 2 bedrooms and a bathroom.
However, they were too cheap to extend the house's main heat source, an oil furnace, to the upstairs. Instead they put in electric baseboards in the upstairs bedrooms and bathroom. Each of the 3 rooms upstairs has a separate thermostat, and there is 1 thermostat for the oil heat downstairs.
Heating with oil is expensive these days, but then in New England heating with electricity is even more expensive. My worry is that the combination of paying for both electric heat and oil heat each month will be more than I can afford.
The house should be well-insulated, since it has all brand new windows, but I probably can't be sure until I live through a winter in it. My questions are:
Since the baseboards heat around 1/3 of the house, will the cost of heat-related electricity roughly be 1/3 of the cost if baseboards heated the whole house?
And the same question for the oil-heated part of the house, will the cost of the oil roughly be 2/3 of what it would be if oil heated the entire house?
Basically I just want to know if I'm going to be paying a lot more for heat than I should be because of this combination heating setup.
Jim