For comparison, I'm up in Connecticut, and my heat and hot water is natural gas. Bills for the past few months: Nov 100 Dec 225 Jan 368 Feb 383
House is 103 years old, 1450 sq. ft., I know there isn't any insulation in the walls.
To the OP: Is your propane furnace hot water, or hot air? If hot air, have you given any consideration to geothermal? With 5 acres, you have enough room for horizontally-placed loops.
It is forced air. Yes I thought about geo. However I would like ot install myself due to the majority of cost being labor. Not sure if you can buy them that way.
Lets talk of heating your home with wood:)
assume the wood is FREE:) You can cut and gather it without paying for it
Now lets talk about the downsides:( You must cut then wood, haul the wood home, split the wood. stack the wood. Then carry it indoors when needed. Manage te woodburner.
Then carry all all the ashes.
Now combine ALL your hours of work to burn the free wood.
Most often you could work a minimum wage job and be ahead money wise........:(
If it is around the house and you want to get rid of it or don't value your time you are ok. I got lots of free wood and did not have to go too far for it. Being retired it gave me something to do with my free time. I don't burn very much either. Maybe about a stack 4 feet high, 4 feet deep and 10 feet long. I mostly like to keep some around incase the power goes out.
While working I liked what one fellow told me. It was a lot easier for him to sit at his job for about 8 hours overtime a month than it was for him to cut the wood.
Another had to figure in all the doctor bills when his back went out.
And if you want to compare the cost of heating with different fuels, there's lots of web sites around like this one:
It's a little tricky when your supplier breaks out distribution and cost of electricity. You'll need to look at your last few bills, divide the total paid including taxes and fees, but the number of kilowatthrs used to get a good number.
The recent spike in propane cost is not a good number to use for comparing fuels. This heating season I've bought over 1000 gallons so far and the price has not changed - $2.10 a gallon. I expect my next (and probably last for the season) fill will be higher, but it won't be $4 or $5/gallon.
New math?
er. However, I lease my tank from Southern States and they come unannounced to fill it up. I had it filled up in October, I think that bill was 600 bu cks. In January they came again. That was 741 bucks. I just had a bill left on my door where they came the other day and the bill was another 700 buck s. On the last bill it showed propane is 3.30 a gallon I believe.
th charge plus the rate is .06560 during the winter. I am not sure how to c ompare these two, but I am assuming electricity is cheaper in the long run?
er. And I do use a lot of hot water with two girls in the house and I will admit I love my showers. But I have only a 1500 square foot house. It was b uilt in the mid 90's and everything is insulated as well as I can. (Althoug h my walls are only 2x4).
ing to convince my wife to let me install a wood burning fireplace with a w ater heater option. (I actually found a company that sells a fire place tha t is a wood burning furnace)
f due to installation costs. I have 5 acres which is plenty room for the fi eld lines. However, in my area there are very few basements. (I only have a crawl space). I am not sure if one of those can be installed in a crawl sp ace or not.
can choose which one to utilize based on the rate because things vary so w idely. Maybe if I were to install an electric furnace somehow still keeping the propane furnace under the house where I could easily switch from one t o another.
Can you get budget billing on the propane? We did that with our fuel oil an d pay an average monthly rate all year, based on our usage the prior year, and settling any overage or underage in August. It takes the shock out of t hose enormous bills when they fill the tank twice in a month.
Paul
Solar for heating, as opposed to solar for electric? I don't know of anyone up in this area, NJ using solar for heat. They do have high efficiency solar collectors now that are vacuum evacuated, can work at colder temps, etc. But just the fact that I don't see any deployed here would suggest they're probably not practical, but it would be interesting to look into. They would match up better to hot water heat, not sure how well they would work with forced air.
Installing solar electric and using that for heat probably doesn't work so well either. Typical system on a house here is maybe 6KW. That's not a lot of heat and the systems are still expensive.
You like 293 x .0656 = $19.22 better? :)
I tend to agree. On a slightly different topic, I get a kick out of people buying those little bundles of a few pieces of wood for $10 that you see at supermarkets, hardware stores, etc. It's a convenience thing, so I guess if you need a fireplace going tonight for enjoyment and don't have any wood, it's OK. But another aspect of that is most people think they are also getting some heat for the house from it. The typical wood burning fireplace installed in a builders house today doesn't heat the house much. It's not designed to heat, so the vast majority of the heat goes up the chimney. At the same time, air has to come into the house to replace what's going up the chimney, so cold outside air comes in and if the fireplace isn't one that pulls that from the outside, then it comes in from air leakage in the rest of the house. Meaning depending on what kind of fireplace you have, you could be increasing your furnace usage. So, while thinking you're saving some bucks, you could be actuall spending more.
I did not mind doing that for a number of years when I was yhounger. It was good exercise, cheaper than any gym membership. At some point though, I found that pushing the buttons on a thermostat and writing a check to the oil man was easier. I've not burned wood for at least 10 years now.
You can't run two generators in parallel on the same circuit. It's AC and to do they they would have to be in sync which they will no tbe.
We've been there, done that. That was my initial reaction too. And it's true in most cases. But as others have pointed out, there are generators that allow this, eg the Honda EU which the OP has. They use a special control cable between them to keep them synchronized, which being inverter based, is easy to do.
How old is the furnace? Efficiency?
NJ here, forced air and WH on nat gas. 3100 sq ft house
Nov20 to Dec20 $145 Dec to An $155 Jan to now $178*
I haven't been billed for the last month yet. I just read the meter and applied the same gas price as for last month. Could be higher, because gas price may have gone up
WH is about $17, that't the summer bill. Before getting a new 93% furnace a few years ago, I had bills that were probably 2X those.
same circuit. It's AC and to do they they would have to be in sync which they will no tbe.
I don't have a link to the info, but I've heard some models of Honda have a way of synch the two generators.
Per Stormin Mormon:
EU2000 and EU3000 for two.
I've got an EU2000.
I bought two packs last summer to take to camp. Most of the wood at camp was damp or wet. As I found, the two packs were almost as worthless, they were damp too. Inside that plastic wrap.
Greg
You can't sync generators. They do it on the output side with inverters. The price for this equipment seems outlandish.
Should it be called alternator ?
Greg
My brother claims he saves a lot by using electric vs oil. He only uses it on bottom floor, but is still over 1000 sq ft.
It's becoming scary. Local news reports IDT raising rates, like triple for electric generation. How many more will be doing the same. Peoples bills have doubled.
Greg
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