Home Heating Options for Rural Midwest Residents?

[Charles Spitzer]

corncobs?

[amdroe]

[barry]

First- minimize losses. Insulate & seal like it was important. Note that exposed masonry basement, and windows are major avenues of heat loss, via infrared.

Second- invest in efficiency of burner and furnace. You may want to start with a "clean sheet."

Third- install clock-thermostat and learn how best to use it. And how deep a setback your system can recover from.

Fourth- provide reduced heating to rooms that can accomodate it. Can be as simple as closing register or rotating baffles above baseboard heater. Hanging a sheet in a hallway can greatly reduce airflow between sides.

Fifth- consider some "sweat equity" in the limited effort rqd to operate pellet stove or corn stove.

HTH, J

[Duane Bozarth]

....

What's the definition of "midwest" here? Might change the choices significantly and in particular, the ordering.

Propane is, of course, the "no-pipeline" natural gas. Prices increases will be higher than increases in NG even, I expect in most places.

If efficiency is high on the list at the expense of higher initial cost, one might consider ground or (if available source) water loop geothermal systems. Obviously, there are at least partial if not total solar contributions that could be utilized depending on house, location, desired investment, etc.

In a nutshell, there are more imponderables than data provided to answer... :)

[Larry Caldwell]

The obvious first choice is to upgrade the whole house to modern energy standards. A complete insulation envelope, U36 or better windows and doors, and a 90% efficient furnace will drop your fuel oil bill back to

1990 levels. Unfortunately, that means a substantial cash outlay up front, with the payback being continual over a number of years. If you can do it, you may as well upgrade the insulation, because energy prices will continue to rise for at least another decade. If you think fuel oil is expensive today, just wait until 2015! Over the long run, try to develop multiple sources of heat. A pellet stove (aka corn stove in the midwest) is a good alternative fuel, but will cost you a couple grand to get one installed.

I know one old codger who salvaged and reconditioned a 1940s sawdust burner hypocaust. He modified one of those big round grain bins as a sawdust bunker, and the grain auger was easy to adapt to feed a small (8'x8'x6') sawdust bin that supplies the sawdust burner auger. You can still get truckloads of dry sawdust dirt cheap around here, because nobody burns the stuff any more. It's not free, but his heat bill runs about $400 a year, and the price hasn't gone up any. He already had the grain bin, the concrete slab and the grain auger to get the sawdust into the bin. If you started out from scratch, the installation would cost $20,000 or more, so his solution is not for everyone.

The point is, there should be under-utilized energy resources in your area. In the midwest, seed corn has been the traditional fuel of preference. Pellet stoves can be modified to burn corn, and most stove stores should be able to fix you right up. As more corn goes into fuel production, prices may change. If there is a ready source of coal in your area, you should look at that too.

[No]

best in terms of what - Convienience and up front costs are a factor.

If it were me, I would probably just look at upgrading the oil system to a more efficient unit. Everything else remains the same. next - I would would compare that to propane. I would not go with electric although it may be cheaper this year it certainly wont be in the long run IMO. I would not use pellet, wood or any other similar devices as a primary heat source. Too much work IMO.

[bry623]

Wood buning stove, or pellet burners would be cheap. I am stuck with propane and propane accessories.

[Christina Peterson]

An efficient furnace with hot water base boards is my recommendation. Oil is high, but so is any other fossil fuel derivative. The more processing (eg, propane vs natural gas) the higher the price. So, oil still gets my vote.

I like base board heat, especially for the extreme cold, because if the bottoms edges and corner are warm the whole house will be warm. My husband, whose house was smaller, liked the Monitor 91 oil stove with thermostat, partly for its simplicity.

We have "emergency, back up" wood heat in our/my house, per our insurance policy, which we will use as our primary heat source. But we're not buying the wood (except for gas for the truck and saws, etc, and a little help). Keep in mind that there is a cost to wood heat in labor, and especially time and attention. The time to care acquire the wood, stack and care for the wood, and also the time to attend the fire. Wood heat is not as care-free as oil heating and requires much more attention, monitoring, thinking. It's easier to get the house (and all your clothes and furnishings) smelly from smoke, for example.

No matter what the electric rates are, they are usually based on fossil fuel (oil, coal, etc) costs to produce the electricity. As such, the rates are generally higher than the cost of power that's one step less processed (ie, the oil costs).

Unless you live where you can get thermal, solar, wind, or other less standard power, or natural gas, we're pretty much stuck with some variation of oil. We're not going to be able to stop using it soon, so we need to use it the most efficient way we can. And of course the same is true for coal, wood, etc.

There are furnaces that use multi-fuels (eg, McDonalds' old french fries oil, waste oil from car motors, etc), but I don't know much about them.

(Is there a difference between boilers and furnaces?)

Tina

[Jonathan Grobe]

Currently I heat with heating oil with an old, inefficient furnace and with the massive increase in energy prices I am looking at alternatives. Natural gas is NOT available in my small town. Any thoughts on the various alternatives which are available and which is the best?

Thanks.

[Wooly]

Electric heat exchanger? Propane furnace plus blown insulation and new windows?

Wooly Who grew up in an 1812 Illinois farmhouse...BRRRRR!

On Tue, 13 Sep 2005 16:25:42 +0000 (UTC), Jonathan Grobe spewed forth :

+++++++++++++

Reply to the list as I do not publish an email address to USENET. This practice has cut my spam by more than 95%. Of course, I did have to abandon a perfectly good email account...

[Larry Caldwell]

So put the decimal point in if you want, I don't care. Nobody but a total idiot would get confused by the spec.

As in "radiant floor"? :-)

Haven't been around long, have you? A hypocaust is a convection furnace. It has at least one duct to every room, sometimes two or three. It looks like a huge octopus sitting in the basement.

[Beachcomber]

It might be a good idea to have multiple alternatives so that you are not freezing your ass off, if, for example, the power goes down in one of those Midwest blizzards...

Alternatives are propane, wood furnace, lots of fireplaces, pellet stoves, air exchange heat pump, ground source heat pump, electric baseboard radiant heating, your existing heating oil furnace (as a backup). There are various tradeoff's, for example, an air exchange heat pump may not be much more complex than installing an air conditioner, and might work just fine when it's 45 F outside. But it will be pretty much useless at -10 F.

What's best depends on local conditions and prices in your area. For example, do you have a cheap and readily available source of firewood?}

Where I live (in Oregon), there are many small towns along the Pacific Coast that are too small to have a gas utility. In most cases, the fuel of choice is propane. YMMV...

Beachcomber

[nicksanspam]

US U36 would be about 36 times less insulative than a single pane window.

As in "radiant floor"? :-)

Nick

[DrLith]

You might want to look into the corn furnaces. I think they are among the more pricey alternatives in terms of initial layout, but they're inexpensive to run. One bushel of corn produces about the same amount of BTUs as 4 gallons of fuel oil, so you can use that to compare the actual fuel costs based on prices in your area. Wood pellet stoves are another similar alternative (a lot of corn burning stoves are basically slightly modified pellet stoves), but seeing as your in the rural midwest and all...well, you get the picture.

[me]

Do you know of a source of a good portable radiant elect heater?

Something that is up in the air and point DOWN?

I once bought a electric radiant floor model. It worked OK but I think a key thing abt radiant heat is that you mount it somewhat high and have it pointing down. Agree?

[Neon John]

You didn't say where you live soooo...

Take a comprehensive approach. (This is deja vue all over again from the 70s :-)

First, according to what you can afford, cut down your energy need. Eliminate air infiltration. Insulate. Cover windows with plastic. Caulk. Weatherstrip. Install E-glass thermal pane windows. Close off unused or little used rooms.

For heating, instead of heating the whole house, heat only the occupied rooms. Use radiant heat instead of hot air. Radiant heat heats you and objects it strikes and not everything. A radiant heater placed over your favorite TV chair will heat you (and yer babe) and the chair but not the whole house. For stationary activities, consider an electric throw or blanket. Really nice to snuggle up under :-) Turn the heat down at night and use electric blankets. I like it cold so I heat my place only enough to keep the pipes from freezing and then use all of the above at various times.

These guys make some really nifty radiant heaters:

I use the ceramic surface burner heaters that mount of propane tanks for spot heating. They have all sorts of warnings about not using these indoors but they work fine, do not emit CO (a detector is vital, however), require little outside air and work great. I started using the smaller model back in oh, 1983 or thereabouts. If you don't want a propane tank indoors then sit it outside and run a line in. The heater uses ordinary 11" of water low pressure propane.

Consider several methods of heat all at once. Passive solar heating isn't difficult if your house faces the right direction. Active collectors if your house doesn't face the right direction. Simple collectors to heat air can be built from common building materials. This month's Home Power magazine

a good article on building a convection driven (no fan) solar hot air collector using black screen wire, clear corrugated roofing and some lumber. You can buy this issue online now or you can wait a month and download it as the sample issue.

The guy who wrote the article built a collector that completely heats his shop for about $500.

For radiant heat, compare the price of electricity and propane and choose accordingly. The ceramic surface burner propane heaters are very efficient. I heated my whole house one winter when I had wholesale propane available.

If the prices are OK, consider wood heat. I buy hickory wood here for $100/cord delivered, split and stacked. About $80/cord if I would go pick it up. A high efficiency catalytic wood stove can heat a few rooms for a cord or two a winter. Especially if combined with other methods.

I suggest building a spreadsheet to compare the various energy costs, including the initial cost to get set up. If you have several methods of heating at your disposal, you can pick the one or ones that are the cheapest at any given time.

To summarize, reduce the amount of heat you need and look at multiple alternative methods. Notice that I didn't include being uncomfortable. No need to freeze all winter if you put a little thought into the problem.

John

[me]

Oooo..... you don't mind using these inside?

Id be a bit concerned abt it

Surely you don't run them when sleeping right?

Like you tho....I want something portable.

I wish I could find some kind of portable heater that is highly mobile but has some kind of neat venting to the outside

[Edwin Pawlowski]

There is talk of a possible pellet shortage due to the increased use.

[nicksanspam]

How arrogant. Nobody but a total idiot would leave the decimal out :-)

The Romans built hypocaust radiant floors. There's one in Bath, England.

Nick

[Eric Gisin]

Got to be the stupidest post in this thread.

At today's oil prices, biodiesel is 30% more than fuel oil.

Normal people do not make biodiesel. They do burn biomass directly.