We've been on an annual budget plan for years where they bill you a fixed amount each month, and then we ante-up any overage in July and they issue an adjusted rate for the next year based on current cost. My monthly was $182/mo. but now it's $454/mo. effective July. Our boiler uses oil for both hot water and baseboard heat, and it's not like we can just rip it out and replace it with all-electric stuff without a huge outlay.
I'm really torqued over this. If you're a heating oil consumer, prepare yourself to take it in the rear.
Holy Moly! Is your landlord Blackrock?
Get a mini split heat pump. Easy to install and cheap to run. Throws out so much heat in the winter we dont use the baseboard heaters for the most part and it gives A/C in the summer.
yea they really are awesome. and you can get ones with multiple heads for different rooms.
Should make accomodatioms for wood-waste oil stove to, might aswell if your building from scratch
Thats smart.
Wood stove and plant your yard to trees. Trees grow really fast plus which it's free.
In a few years you'll have free fuel for the whole winter.
Fast growing trees are very weak. Be careful where you plant them
Still gonna be 10 yrs
Research you propane company , they can be the biggest rats.
If you can buy the propane tank and get someone to install it, it will put you in the drivers seat instead of being held hostage to on or the other. If the propane co does the install, you are theirs until the end of time.
We are out west and Propane has gone through the roof. High demand I think.
Thanks for the tip! We live in Alaska and rely on heating fuel to heat our home, our fuel costs are 300% what they were a year ago.
I have family in the Fairbanks area, and family friends in Anchorage. I hear the same pain coming through fren.
Great suggestion. Mr. Cool and others have install videos. They're not hard to install and are much more efficient. I woud also suggest a wood burning stove. Back in my younger days up in the PNW, I was able to heat my whole house off of a wood burning stive. I know a full cord or two hardwood isnt cheap, but it will be more effective price wise than $500 a month.
Soon it will cheaper for you to just start burning dollar bills for heat. Gov are the real terrorists.
https://files.catbox.moe/lae5kh.jpg
Interesting thought, at what point would this become a tenable solution?
I guess you'd need to figure out the BTU output of $1 worth of oil vs BTU output of burning $1.
We just topped off our heating oil tank with 1500 liters that cost us 2000 euros. The 1500 liters is roughly a year's worth of use for us.
Our primary heating is firewood which you absolutely cannot get anymore. Thankfully, we have quite a bit stacked up already.
Pillage construction sites? House const. here is a 40ft bin a week in waste material
"Just turn down your thermostat to save money" Does not work!
In a cold Winter (MI) at 72 degrees my furnace runs constantly to maintain temp.
At say 65 degrees it still runs constantly to maintain temp.
The only "savings" is the brief time period when you actually turn it down from 72 to 65.
Insulation is one helluva money saver. Just got foam in the walls. Doesn’t settle like blown in fiberglass. Fiberglass also doesn’t seal, just acts as a heat pillow.
How well insulated a house is does not matter for what I am saying.
If you take two identical houses and one thermostat is set at 72 and the other is at 65, the furnace will run the same amount of time on a cycle to maintain the temp set. So it will cost the same in fuel to maintain either temp setting
Oh I completely agree. But to those with uninsulated houses, fix yo’self
You can lower the temp of your water heater so it’s not constantly trying heat it to up 140 or whatever - a plumber once told me in the 80s when electric was high that you can turn off the water heater at night then flip it on the the morning an hour before you shower. It did lower our bill. For oil ones just lower down to 100 degrees
I guess "constantly" was a poor choice of words.
My point is the furnace runs the same amount of time to maintain 72 or 65, because it comes on when the thermostat drops one degree and goes off once it reaches the set temp.
Fuel usage is identical, so how does it save money by lowering your thermostat?
Maybe in your scenario but the OUTSIDE temperature is what really matters and how much insulation is in the attic. Heat rises.....right into the attic and out the roof. Check around your neighborhood after a snowfall and see who's house loses the snow the fastest OFF the roof. Dead give away...not enough insulation. And that will VERY Much affect your heating bill! And how hard your furnace has to work to keep the temperature up at 72. Which to me is way to high...68 and a sweater works good for us.
Also depends on the efficiency of the furnace, and tech used in it. For a while there it was considered cheaper to run the furnace at lower power, but near constantly vs. It going full bore for a while, then shut off, then blast, then off.
Holy Shit! More than doubled!
I'm going to be using my fireplace a whole lot this Winter.
That will "really" help climate change!!!
Get a fireplace blower insert.
Normal fireplace loses 90% of the heat up the chimney.
Blower inserts are inexpensive. Basically, they are steel tubes (normally replaces the wood grate at bottom of the fireplace) and a blower attached to blow air through the tubing, then sends the heated air back out into the room.
The fan blows air through the tubing, the coals and fire heat up that air from room temperature to well over 150 degrees... then sends it back into the room. A good fireplace insert can easily heat up 2 to 3 rooms, and only uses the electricity for the fan itself. Even a small fire will get a room toasty warm in no time.
I live near Houston, Texas, so heating in winter isn't a big issue here. In Kansas, I had a blower insert in the fireplace for winter. Let me tell you, when the fan is on high, it can get uncomfortably hot to sit within 10 feet of the fireplace. That's the cheapest, easiest way to use your fireplace and to heat a large portion of a home.
Yes, they are great. So is something that will heat water, even just a kettle.
Thanks, I'll definately look into that.
You can get a decent insert for around $400 or so for a wood burning fireplace. However, if you can't afford that... look on YouTube.
Plenty of people built their own fireplace inserts. It's not hard. One made his from old trampoline frame tubing. If you have access to a junk yard, you can probably find old water pipe. A muffler shop can bend it for you if needed. It doesn't even need to be fancy.
You already probably have a cast iron grating in your fireplace. I actually prefer the fireplace inserts that just sit down near the coals or on the back fire bricks of the fireplace. (I don't like the u-shaped kind that is above the fire... makes it harder to load firewood). You can simply take your cast iron grating, and get three tubes (5' long each should do it). Bend them each in a U-shape and mount them to the bottom of the cast iron grating (simple metal hose clamps would work great for this, or use tie wire). Have both ends of the three tubes extend out of the fireplace by about 6" on each side.
You can get a good forced air fireplace blower for less than $100. Set it up, then make a small manifold to blow air into the three tubes on one side of the fireplace, and let the air come out on the other end. It works really well to make a discharge manifold to connect the pipe ends on the outlet side, but it's not absolutely necessary.
You aren't using the fireplace in the summertime anyway, so now is a great time to take out your fireplace grating, figure out how you want to set up your tubing and get a blower fan. Good weekend project for someone while you watch TV or sit in air conditioning. Plug in the blower, test it out a few times and make sure it works like you want.
When winter comes, try it out early and make sure it gives you the heat you want. Remember that it's all about surface area of the tubes exposed to the fireplace heat. You may find that 4 tubes gives you exactly what you want.
You can always buy professionally made units online, but if money is tight, it's really easy to build your own using simple parts, re-used (scrap) tubes that you bend yourself and mounted onto your existing cast iron fireplace grating.
I feel like this is a good idea but I am having trouble visualizing it. How are you not blowing smoke through/into your house? There is just something I am not seeing. Ive did a lot of redneck engineering but just cant see whats going on, even if I understand the primary principal.
We stopped level billing and our electric bill went from over $440/month to $180. Then, we got a notice from our electric company that due to high energy costs, blah, blah, blah, our rates would increase. This month's bill was $350 - still not as high as level billing.
My electric bill doubled over the last month. I got sticker shock!
amazing free heat
What used to cost about $450 to fill our heating fuel tank less than a year ago now costs $1,100. We're fucked this winter.
Yup, where I am 1000 litres (264 US Gal) of heating oil is $1200 and this is in the summer when it is usually at its lowest.
1000 litres (254G) will last maybe 8 - 10 weeks during the harshest times in winter.
Just had a woodburner installed at great cost, but there's so much free wood around it makes sense.
TVA dam 1/2 mile away as the crow files. Generating all the time.
I recently heard that we dont get our electricity from it! Researching it.
My dad many years ago added a wood-burning stove to his oil burning furnace. Basically, he used the wood to reduce oil consumption. He did this and reduced his heating costs near zero/monthly. It took some effort to fuel the wood stove, but he saved enough to replace the oil burning furnace for a NG burning furnace. He kept the wood burning stove for the NG furnace just in case.
Where are you in the country. This is downright scary.
Holy hikes Batman!! My sister is on a similar plan for natural gas, I'll have to ask about it next time I see her.
Crickey that's a helluva jump! Sorry to hear my man, please don't go jumping off Nakatomi Plaza... lol
Yipey Key Yea MF'er
Look into alternative diesel maybe? Not that veg oil crap but you can literally smelt plastic down into a crude-ish diesel
This is very bad for many Americans. There is no way households can compensate for those types of increases In Conjunction with all of the other increases we’re incurring! I thought out electric bill was high but shit, that is brutal!
Be sure to say “Thanks Biden” every time you pay more for anything! Gas, food, oil, mortgage taxes etc!
Let's Go Brandon!
Burn less oil. A lot less. (live in Texas, so I may be talking out my butt, but still a shot)
Are you using electric blankets? If not, do that instead. Allow the house to get pretty cold at night, but sleep under an electric blanket.
They did this at my dad's house in southern Arkansas. They were out in the country and didn't want to fuss with propane. (propane used for home heating runs out fast) They rarely used the electric heat. (because generating heat conventionally with electricity is expensive) After the fireplace went out at night, everyone just snuggled in beds under electric blankets.
I grew up with nothing but wood heat. If that fire went out.....But my folks always banked it and hoped it last until morning when that Hardy father of mine got up to start the fire. Always slept good though.
I didn’t live with my dad, but he was an early riser. There would be a fire there in the morning.
I do this. You can get these that run off 12V, and charge a solar generator that will replace the energy from the blanket on all but the cloudiest days. It’s actually very comfy.
Problem is if your house has high / low thermal weight (not the right word, but you get the picture). Some houses take a lot to warm up and some houses don’t. If you have a house that is hard to heat up, keeping it warm is much better, if your house is easy to warm up, then cycling the thermostat is more efficient. The easiest way is to try it out each way one year apart, trying to find similar months (may not be same month based on heat and cold waves) temperature-wise. Then compare cost. I’m sure people online can just look at a house and tell how you should operate your thermostat (based on age/location).
You may be able to burn kerosene instead.