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So, how are you heating your home this winter?

3K views 30 replies 19 participants last post by  boboswin 
#1 · (Edited by Moderator)
It'll soon be fall here in the northern US, and of course, Canada. I'm understanding that fuel oil and gas, will be up this year, and quite a bit. I'm on gas, so I'm better off than the fuel oil guys, but still.

My best friend has put in a wood stove last year, and man, his house is like 85 all winter - with the windows open! It's really too much! He says he can't control the heat, but really?

I wish you could get a mini-wood stove, about the size of a bag of groceries, that worked on little wood pellets that auto-feed. Water would be circulated thru the stove, and then thru a radiator inside my gas furnace, right near the blower motor. Just turn on your furnance fan, and you should be able to extract that heat. I'm no HVAC guy, but I think that's reasonable….

Are you doing something to augment your heating this year? I'd like to hear about it!
 
#2 ·
I used to heat my home with wood (about 20 years or so ago). We had a homebuilt hot water system to circulate water through the fire box to take the heat from the wood stove in the shop/garage through underground insulated pipes into the house. Worked great and we could burn just about any fuel; the house required about a million BTUs per day so we went through a lot of wood etc. I now live in a house about 1/4 the size and don't do any where near the work to keep it heated (mind you it is a newer home, better insulated etc).

I think living in the city is very different for burning wood, imagine if everyone burnt wood to heat their homes….the smoke would be worse than a forest fire and it would happen all winter long. Not great for folks with asthma or other respiratory conditions. Geo-thermal seems to be an interesting alternative…not great for the high latitudes (and continental climates like in Manitoba here) but perhaps a way to lessen the dependance on NG. I like the idea of electric heat, especially if it could be derived from wind…but again in the city it would be difficult to have a wind turbine with sufficient capacity to power an electric furnace…I think.
 
#3 ·
Yeah, geo-thermal interests me as well. I understand the basics of it, using the heat of the earth. I wish we could drill down, say, 1000 feet, and be able to heat water to boiling at that point; then you could use a steam generator. I think you'd have to drill down a heck of a lot farther than that to accomplish that amount of heat though.
 
#4 · (Edited by Moderator)
We installed an outdoor wood boiler and run the hot water through underground insulated lines into the house, through a 200K BTU heat exchanger and then use the hot-water baseboard heat. We burn about a cord of firewood a week and I load the boiler about once a day. It is nice since the wood scraps can go right into the furnace. The boiler also heats the garage and snow-melts the driveway. We put in a new driveway at the same time and ran the pex lines through it. Kind of like outdoor radiant floor heat. It won't melt the 8" of snow off of it, but after snow-blowing you turn it on for a couple of hours and it gets rid of the leftover little bit and any ice that accumulated. Also when the boiler is burning the hot water runs through another exchanger which keeps the hot water heater hot so we burn less gas heating our water. Also just installed an 80K BTU hot water heat exchanger in the basement so I can keep the shop warm and keep the first floor floors a little warmer in the winter.

There is also a NG backup boiler in the basement in case we have to go away and no one is around to load the outdoor furnace.

The previous system used an indoor wood-burning boiler but we only got 3-4 hour burn times so unless you got up in the middle of the night, you would go to bed with the house at 72 and wake up with it at 60.

We also looked into the geo-thermal since we have 10 acres and laying the pipe would not have been an issue, but it would have ended up costing twice as much and we would have had to install a forced air setup in the house.

One season of heating costs about $1500 for the wood and about $200 for the NG which we run in October as needed and in May as needed. We light the fire in the boiler on November 1st and burn until we are out of wood or the temps are above 50 at night.

Our weather, we get about 5' of snow a year and typical overnight temps are in the teens. The house is 150 years old so insulation stinks. We just installed new triple-pane windows a couple of winters ago and that really helped alot, but there is still room for improvement.
 
#8 ·
Geo-thermal is just a heat exchanger (like your fridge) using the Earth as the heat source…you don't need it to be boiling water just warmer than the outside temp. I think in places like Iceland they use natural/volcanic steam to heat offices/apartment buildings…I guess you could do the same in Hawaii…if you needed to heat in Hawaii :)
 
#9 ·
We use natural gas with wood for a secondary source during the winter. It helps to keep the costs of heating the house down. I have radiant in floor heat in the shop. I can see us burning more wood than past years due to increases in natural gas prices. We got a call from a buddy a couple days ago asking me to clear part of his land so he can remove some gravel. Ended up with 4-5 full cord of birch that will be ready for next winter (2009).
 
#10 ·
I've got a dual fuel setup that uses a 13 seer heat pump down to 40 deg. then the propane kicks in using a 95% eff. furnace. I sure wish we had natural gas here. I supplement all this with a wood stove which pretty much handles it as long as it's over freezing outside. Heck, if I didn't have two cold natured women living here, the furnace would never be used. Oh well.
 
#12 ·
UPSIDE: We turn the Air Conditioning OFF in mid January and February, open the windows and hope for a cool day. I think we have used the heaters in the house 3 times in 27 years.

DOWNSIDE: We have the A/C on 10.5 months a year and this time of the year, I can not work in my shop past noon. It's in my uninsulated, non-air conditioned garage.
 
#15 ·
She has caused quite a stir. I can remember buying raffle tickets from her three years ago when she was helping the high school hockey team at one of the local gun shows. My wife used to see her at the store on a pretty regular basis. We probably won't be rubbing elbows nearly as often now. She will be a great vice president.

As for our winters, well they are great. Lots of snow, beautiful mountains and lots of projects lined up.

Mart
 
#17 · (Edited by Moderator)
We heat with 2 tanks of propane, I just filled up in August $840…OUCH! that will last us until we fill up again in Januuary. I am trying an alternative method to hopefully supplement heating our basement this year, a solar pop can heater since we have a south facing window. if interested. I am going to set on the 10 deep window sill. Maybe I'll post it as a project.
 
#18 ·
we used to burn wood… I didn't want to be doing all that work in my older-age so to supplement our oil furnace I bought a propane stove. Last year it (first winter with it) we saved about $600 I think.
 
#19 ·
I live in a rather large home, five bathrooms, lots of big windows, very high ceilings, no real protection from the winter winds and sits atop a platue which is the highest point in the county and its dead center of the snow belt.

We have forced air/propane which last year hit 70 cents a litre and knowing that the price of propane is pegged to price of a barrell of oil (despite being a waste product?) and that the price of a barrell of oil has doubled since last winter probably means that our heat bill might double…...........which means out heat bill is going to be bigger then most folks mortgages

If work continues to be as busy as it is now I will get an indoor wood boiler by "Greenwood Technologies", put it in the shed part of the barn and run a line to the house, put a radiator type heat exchanger in the return air duct of the furnace….............and free heat. I would also get free hot water, free clothes dryer, heat the pool and the shop. We have 14 acres of hard and soft woods and another 150 acres of hardwoods a few hours drive north.

When someone presently asks "How is your heat bill?"........................I shudder
 
#22 ·
We use a wood pellet stove. I love it had it about 3 years now, with the price of propane going over four $ a gallon we save piles of money.
The forced air heater runs us about $425 to $450 a month to run. The pellets cost around $300 for a pallet at 50 bags per pallet thats almost 2 months of fuel at less than half the cost of propane.
I installed one in the wood shop also, They are a lazy/very busy guys fire place. thermostat controlled and clean only once a week….he he he, I love it.
Jim
 
#23 ·
One odd thing about this discussion is that there seems to be no interest in insulation and barrier materials?

Just whacking the energy into a building for A/C or heating can be and expensive exercise.

I built my new shop with 2×6 walls and 2×8 ceilings and 2×10 floors. All cavities are fully insulated to R22.
I can heat the joint up with a Bic lighter. (exageration but..)

Bob
 
#25 ·
Our house is 8 years old, insulated to the hilt, air tight and heated with a fuel oil boiler and baseboard radiators in every room. I had the foresight when I designed (Dadoo do plumbing as well) this system to zone off certain areas and control them with their own thermostat. I also installed a propane gas log fireplace for ambiance but have heated this house to 84 one winter evening when it was -20 outside! These gas logs are non-vented and 100% efficient. We will now use it to supplement the radiators this winter but only while we're home. So the living areas are 72 and the bedroom is a constant 68 and the spare bedrooms are 55. The garage/shop is also on its own zone and stays at 45 in the winter, but I can up that to 70 within' a half hour as there's a forced air (hot water) heater in the upper corner. The radiators thru-out the house are adequate, but in the way considering the placement of furniture. Radiant floor heating is the new thing and supposedly much more efficient. We will be converting to radiant floor heating this fall. Fuel oil is now near the $4.00/gal range. I kept all my receipts for the first 3+ years and find we burn an average 1000 gallons per year in fuel oil. So this years heating bill will be around $4000.00! That my friends is unacceptable.

I've also recently been considering a coal fired boiler system to supplement the fuel oil boiler and have found that most of the makers are at least 6 months behind in orders. I'm wary of coal as it was coal that produced the acid rain that poisoned the Adirondacks! But I hear that the Anthracite coal they use burns cleaner than fuel oil!

What I really want to get my hands on is a Hydrogen fired boiler! Some day when we're easily able to convert water into hydrogen then our cars and trucks and houses will all use it. Just imagine having an endless supply of fuel for your boat!
 
#26 ·
We are heating with 2 pellet stoves this year, one in the basement, and one on the main floor. We are heating about 3500 SQ ft. We heated the entire house last year with one pellet stove, however the basement was a little cool. And at the moment that is where my shop is. I won't be freezing this year though. We are in Norther Wisconsin so it gets a little chillie. We are figuring on 2 bags a day for both stoves, and that will be keeping the house at 75 degrees all winter. My dog hates to be cold.

Ray
 
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