Disappointed w/ my heating bill for 1st yr burner.

What is your attic insulation like?

Early spring!! Or now!! When I did mine it was, I thought, early spring...whew! I have a very low pitched roof and had to do all work on my stomach and back, it sucked! I am now prepped for blow in with a blanket of r-30 pink stuff. I have about an r45 now but I think r60 is required. I want to replace my ac but the air handler is in the attic. The blown in will be after the ac is replaced.

Home Depot has r30 unfaced 11.87 a roll cost me like 300 bux or something plus minus the tax thing..

Bster13 said:

Yes, 2 x 12in (in the two doorways to my stove/living room) and 1 x 18in (blowing all the way from the sunroom)

Click to expand...

you might try pulling the fans in the doorway back into where the cold air is coming from. I use a small 3" fan way back at the end of the hallway, about 10' from the door opening to the stove room. It works much better than in the door opening. Smaller fans would use less energy. I think its more about encouraging a natural draft heat exchange process, not brute wind power.

I see you have average temps listed in your chart. How was it calculated? I did a similar calculation here, but used "Heating Degree Days". You can usually look up the number of HDD for a given month for your area online, or possibly from your gas supplier.

Bster, look at it this way. You will recoup your losses, just not as quickly as you wanted. As you get more accustomed to cooler temps, you will find you cannot even sleep unless the temp is 65 or below. (Yes, I am a woman!) Also, once you seal the place up it will make a world of difference.
And the most important part of burning: You are using a RENEWABLE resource, rather than having the earth poisoned by fracking and such. Not to mention the quality work out you get, even if it is only moving and stacking!

firebroad said:

Also, once you seal the place up it will make a world of difference.

Click to expand...

+1 on the sealing/attic insulation. I had MASS save put in 6" blow in above the joist tops. Also, the sides of the masonry chimney are a wicked air loss area. They sealed it up with aluminum sheeting. You can only go so far with certian constraints, for example I have a 18 pane bow window that is basically floor to ceiling and about 9' wide. it was built by hand on-site in 1955 with the house. it has double pane glass, but its still inefficient by today's standards. Its a focal point of the front of the house, so we're no going to replace it.

Bster13 said:

Well I had been waiting on the edge of my seat for my heating bill to come in December and it hit last night:

I am disappointed to say the least. We had a dogsitter at the house using the natural gas for a long Thanksgiving weekend, but that was it. Otherwise I've been home loading the stove two times a day and I ~thought~ that heating bill would of been flatlined like November as I can't recall the heat kicking on but once....honest....and I watch the three thermostats in the house like a hawk. From heating with wood I now know my new-to-me 1957 home is poorly insulated, windows are crap, etc., but if I never noticed the heat kicking on, what gives? The only draws on Natural Gas is the cooking stove (should not of changed significantly) and the water heat (in the basement as it's always been, and just my wife and I using it.)

It's colder this same time vs. last year and there are 2 more days in the billing cycle vs. last year, but only a 55% reduction in the bill?!
So what gives?! Argh, so disappointed for all this work an $ invested.

Click to expand...

Bster13 said:

Well I had been waiting on the edge of my seat for my heating bill to come in December and it hit last night:

I am disappointed to say the least. We had a dogsitter at the house using the natural gas for a long Thanksgiving weekend, but that was it. Otherwise I've been home loading the stove two times a day and I ~thought~ that heating bill would of been flatlined like November as I can't recall the heat kicking on but once....honest....and I watch the three thermostats in the house like a hawk. From heating with wood I now know my new-to-me 1957 home is poorly insulated, windows are crap, etc., but if I never noticed the heat kicking on, what gives? The only draws on Natural Gas is the cooking stove (should not of changed significantly) and the water heat (in the basement as it's always been, and just my wife and I using it.)

It's colder this same time vs. last year and there are 2 more days in the billing cycle vs. last year, but only a 55% reduction in the bill?!
So what gives?! Argh, so disappointed for all this work an $ invested.

Click to expand...

Hardrockmaple said:

But are you more cozy/comfortable with the wood heat?

To help you feel better I just got my power bill, $487.00 for the two months of Oct./Nov. and I'm using two stoves. And, it's down 16% from last year.

Click to expand...

Well that sucks,my entire bill for a year including hot water is$400 max.

Bster13 said:

Well I had been waiting on the edge of my seat for my heating bill to come in December and it hit last night:

I am disappointed to say the least. We had a dogsitter at the house using the natural gas for a long Thanksgiving weekend, but that was it. Otherwise I've been home loading the stove two times a day and I ~thought~ that heating bill would of been flatlined like November as I can't recall the heat kicking on but once....honest....and I watch the three thermostats in the house like a hawk. From heating with wood I now know my new-to-me 1957 home is poorly insulated, windows are crap, etc., but if I never noticed the heat kicking on, what gives? The only draws on Natural Gas is the cooking stove (should not of changed significantly) and the water heat (in the basement as it's always been, and just my wife and I using it.)

It's colder this same time vs. last year and there are 2 more days in the billing cycle vs. last year, but only a 55% reduction in the bill?!
So what gives?! Argh, so disappointed for all this work an $ invested.

Click to expand...

CUT the natural gas off 100% on the heating, that will get ya there, we did & yea its cold unless you work that fire, good luck!

Bster13 said:

Actually, less cozy. It is warmer in the stove room where we hang out, no doubt, but a little colder in her bathroom (where she gets ready in the morning) and the master bedroom (mostly fine with this as we're just sleeping). The biggest kicker is the constant noise and wind storm throughout the house. U need slipper else your feet/ankles get cold. I'm moving some serious air, haha.

Click to expand...

I don't think you need to move that much air. It is surprising how much a single small fan running on low will do to disperse heat over time.

If you are still using the NG for heating I would guess that a 50% reduction in use is pretty darn good, but I can see how you would be dissapointed as you were expecting more.

What happens if you turn off the NG stove however? We got the wood stove and I have turned the breaker off to all my baseboard electric heaters. We are only heating the house with the stove. Sometimes we wake up to a cool house in the morning depending on how early we went to sleep and how late we woke up but it still is always warmer than trying to heat soley with electric heat.

It depends on when I reloaded the stove last versus when we go to sleep which as much as I want it to be a regular schedule it isn't.

The coldest we have woken up to is 64 in the morning.

When we moved in and just had electric heat it was costing us 450$ a month to keep the house at 65-66 all day and we were keeping some rooms 57-58 at night.

Now with the wood stove the basement/stove room is close to 85-90 all the time. Our bedroom in the basement/walkout is always around 75-80. Our upstairs is almost always ~71 degrees even now when it is 8 degrees outside. But it is the upstairs that takes a hit in the morning if we went to bed earlier and slept in which happens frequently an the upstairs is around 64-66 and downstairs is 75 or so.

Often I find myself loading the stove at 7-8 pm. We goto bed at 11pm-12am. Wake up at 8-9am and at best we get 8-9 hour burn times, so the house can cool down significant in the extra 2-3 hours we are sleeping. But even after 12-13 hours between reloads the stove is still 150-200 degrees with enough small coals that I can stoke a fire without having to go crazy with kindling and paper (usually just put in small splits and leave the door open for 5 minutes and the small coals burst long enough to light the small stuff off easily).

Now heating an an all electric house is 100$ a month (1900 sq ft rancher). Saving 350 a month AND keeping the house way warmer at the same time. Its still going to take 4-5 years for the stove to pay or itself, but if you think about that fact that we can't actually heat the house to 80 degrees with electric baseboard (or else have an electric bill of like 700-900 a month) then it becomes kind of a moot point.

Just turn the heat off. Put a small oil filled heater in the room she gets ready in. Put a timer on it, set it for hour or two before she gets up. Problem solved!

Have you noticed all those fans helping anything? I think they work in some layouts but not all. I pulled a fan out for the first time this year the other day. I ran it for a day and shut it off, I can't stand the cool air blowing over my feet and the degree difference I seen in the other room just isn't worth it.

This time last year we had used over 300 gallons of oil, so far this year the oil has been on five of six times for one hour at the most each time! (less than 35 gallons)
We did have to put curtains in three rooms to help with the drafts. House has never been as warm, sitting in a tee-shirt writing this.
Fire has been running 24/7 since Thanksgiving.

rdust said:

Just turn the heat off. Put a small oil filled heater in the room she gets ready in. Put a timer on it, set it for hour or two before she gets up. Problem solved!

Click to expand...

+1 That's what I would (did) do. You can even get a cheap kill-a-watt meter to figure out exactly how much it's using.

My wife has an oil radiator on low in her office, and one of those funky heat dish things pointed right at her. Although now that it isn't -20 at night, maybe the stove can actually make it that far across the house

Unless you can get under the house to install a cold air return. But then you'd have a cold source in the stove room. Hmm...