Why is oil space heating so popular in the Northeast USA?

Revi · Fusion Joined: Apr 25, 2005 Posts: 3098 Location: Maine

Woodstoves are the way to go around here. Unfortunately the price of a cord of dry wood has gone up to $275 around here. That's still half the cost of the oil you would need to heat that much, plus you are only heating one corner of the house so you save a bunch by keeping the rest of the house chilly.

Unfortunately not everyone has a woodstove or access to wood, even here in the most forested state in the nation.
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Roy

Wood heating is a good option, as long as most of the people in NE aren't doing it.

How long would those forests last if the majority of the people in New England decided, for whatever reason, that heating with wood was a good idea? Or they were forced to go to it due to a lack of availability of heating oil or coal?

I'd say no more than 5 years before the area looked like it did before the advent of coal burning -- ie nearly treeless.

NE is too densely populated (northern Maine excepted) for them to use anything but coal or oil right now. There just aren't enough trees in this country for the majority of folks to heat with wood sustainably.

We've outgrown our carrying capacity for heating as well as food, thanks to hydrocarbons.

So to answer the OP's question, heating oil is used because of its high energy content, portability, relatively clean burn (compared to coal or wood), and low cost for most of the years that it has been used. Coal was too dirty and there isn't enough forest there to supply the millions of people with cordwood for heat. NG is too difficult to transport as other posters have noted.

FoolYap

Kingcoal

The Northeast, being the oldest part of the country, relied on coal heat for years. Sometime around WW2, home heating oil became cheaper than coal. A huge infrastructure already existed in the coal delivery business. It was a pretty simple switch for the coal guys to deliver oil instead of coal. It's a very similar business model. These former coal guys started installing oil furnaces all over the place. Oil was the cheapest way to go, even cheaper than NG. As recently as the late '90's, you could buy oil for 75 cents a gallon, making it cheaper than NG. Boy have times changed. 2 years ago, I had a NG line run to my house. UGI, the local gas company, installed it for $140 if I simultaneously put in a NG heater. I went wild and installed gas all over the house. My hot water, stove, clothes dryer are all NG now. I've saved a fortune and the switch has already paid for itself at least once. Right now, NG is the way to go. It's still cheap and plentiful, though that might change in the future. The problem with NG is the depletion curve of a typical well is very sharp.
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gnm

King Coal is running all NG?! Shocked

Hehe sounds like you made a good call on that one.

Maybe that paradigm will go this way...

(The coal being too valuable liquefied into fuel)

coal delivery -> oil delivery -> wood/pellets delivery -> wood stripped from abandoned suburbs delivery -> no delivery (customer is dead)

-G
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TheDude

What would running an electric space heater cost per month in comparison? Ala JD's tips - pile on the blankets, stay in one room, electric heat, insulate windows.
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PhebaAndThePilgrim

Good day from Pheba, from the farm:
Here in midwest Missouri farm country there are propane tanks all over the place. Propane is a very popular way to heat houses in rural areas. Propane heat is more comfortable than electric heat. I heated with propane space heat for years.
Right now we are heating with an exterior wood stove that heats hot water and pumps the hot water through pipes in the house. The most comfortable form of heat I have ever lived with. We keep winter temp in the house at about 65. We burn less wood with the lower temp and I have become so used to 65 degrees that I literally smother in homes heated to 70 or above.
The wood stove also heats our house hot water. This month our electric KWH were 450. We have cut it in half and are trying to get free of the grid.
Some folks paint their propane tanks. The cutest one I ever saw was a pink one, with a pig face at one end, and a tail painted on the other. Watermelons are also popular.
Very expensive to fill the tanks. I will find out what it is costing now and get back to you.

Pheba

MarkJames · Tar Sands Joined: Dec 25, 2007 Posts: 63

I own a heating fuels sales, service and installation company in Upsate New York. Most of our customers in areas where natural gas isn't available have oil fired hydronic heating systems. Fuel oil has 140,000 BTUs per gallon in comparison to Propane @ 91,000 BTUs per gallon, you can store up to 660 gallons in your basement tanks, plus the quality and longevity of the furnaces, boilers and water heaters that burn fuel oil or kerosene is unmatched. It's not uncommon to see boilers well over 50 years old still in service. One of the most popular efficient setups is a three pass horizontal boiler such as a Buderus, Viessmann or Burnham with indirect water heater and outdoor reset control. The Energy Kinetics System 2000 series oil fired boilers are popular as well. They don't make many gas fired furnaces in the same league with a Thermopride oil fired furnace.

With oil fired furnaces, boilers and water heaters you can also choose the burner and control package, so you generally have the choice of a Beckett, Carlin or Riello burner with most modern oil fired equipment. The parts like transformers, igniters, primary controls, burner motors, oil pumps and cad cells are interchangeable on many Beckett, Carlin, Wayne and other older burners which makes stocking parts and emergency service much easier. Since burners and controls are seperate from the boiler or furnace, you can also install modern retrofit burners with oil solenoid vales, and primary controls with pre-purge, post-purge options on older equipment. This also comes in handy when doing emergency service.

With fuel oil, kerosene and propane you can choose to install more, or larger tanks and fill them when the prices are lower off season. Many companies offer pre-buy and price capped fuel sales as well. The efficiency of modern oil burning equipment is excellent. Gas fired equipment has a higher AFUE rating, but AFUE isn't an accurate measure of hydronic systems that also produce domestic hot water and the gains in efficiency are offset by the lower BTU value of the gas. Fuel oil and Kerosene are also very safe fuels. You'll rarely hear of a fuel oil explosion, or someone getting CO poisoning from an oil fired system. Since oil fired systems are generally serviced every year, they tend to be well maintained. Gas customers generally don't call for service until their system stops working, they smell gas or their CO detectors have gone off.

There are many full service, COD and mom and pop oil companies in the Northeast, so you can shop for either price, minimum delivery, service, emergency service, installations, service contracts etc. If you're a will-call customer that has run out of fuel you can always pick up some kerosene or diesel to get by until you can schedule a fuel delivery.

Kingcoal

LoneSnark · Intermediate Crude Joined: Nov 15, 2007 Posts: 504

Yep, a friend of mine in PA has a coal furnace. He loves it, rediculously cheap since they deliver in his area. Even works if the power is out since he is using radiators instead of forced air. But it is a lot of work.

lateStarter

WisJim

Here's an interesting site to use to compare fuel costs--plug in the cost of your fuel, the efficiency of the appliance, and get a result in BTUs so you can figure out if LP is cheaper than electric than fuel oil, and at what point it makes sense to change fuels.
http://www.hearth.com/econtent/index.php/articles/fuel_cost_comparison_calculator/

I remember having a winter job when I was a kid ( early 1960s) that involved checking people's coal furnaces when they were on Christmas vacation. Checked morning and evening, shoveled a hopper full of coal, shoveled out clinkers, made sure the feeder was working right. A lot easier than shoveling in coal every few hours, but still kind of dirty. More like taking care of a wood furnace if I remember right--we use wood now, but the coal furnace watching was a long time ago.

lateStarter

WisJim,

My wife almost elected to go with some kind of system that fed the coal/dust/residue into the furnace slowly (I guess from some kind of hopper - sounds similar to pellets in the US) that would allow you to be away for several days, but still keep the house warm enough to keep the pipes from freezing.

My question was: what if the electricity got turned off? I don't want to depend on a system that requires electricity, although I would agree that the electric system will be the last to go... Especially here in Poland.

I'd rather live next to a forest and have a decent stove/fireplace and a good sleeping bag. Our new house is only 100 square meters and we are insulating like crazy. We will starve to death, before we freeze to death....
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mos6507 · Fission Joined: Aug 03, 2007 Posts: 2966

You guys actually want to go back to coal? Do you want the cities to get blanketed like modern China now? It's bad enough coal is used for electricity generation considering everything bad we know about it now.

vfr · Tar Sands Joined: Dec 31, 2007 Posts: 95

Have 3 of these vent free back up gas heaters.

http://www.comfort-glow-comfortglow.com/heaters/crn18.html

Made 2 manifolds with ball valves that can be added to my forced air gas supply and to the gas line of the water tank. These heaters require no electric. I used some these heaters week when a bird got into my forced air furnace and destroyed the turbo fan. The repair man took 3 days to get here and fix it. Was a good pre-winter test of the back up heat system since it was only in the 30's...it could have been single digits or lower.

Also have 3 space heaters that run on propane.

http://www.northerntool.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/product_6970_211577_211577

They run for days on a 20 pound cylinder.

And have 4 mini electric heaters

http://www2.northerntool.com/product/1017213.htm

Just wished I had some wood fired back up heat. But the houses nowadays are not set up for peak fossil fuel issues and are pretty much run by NG. Will give the wood stoves some thought once we get to later periods of code orange. or if we ever get any disruption in NG from shortages.

Take care,

V (Male)

Agnostic Freethinker
Practical Philosopher
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