Disappointing heating bill analysis

begreen · Feb 21, 2014

Good news on the block-off. Try running the fireplace on medium, you may get more heat out of it. Best to buy it and get it stacked asap. If you can get a mix of maple, beech, birch or ash that will dry faster. If oak or hickory, plan on not touching it until 2015-2016.

johnpma · Feb 21, 2014

As long as your furnace is set up as "cold start" for your DHW it is somewhat efficient. However you are still burning oil to heat DHW which is expensive especially if the family likes to take baths. The new hybrid DHW units can be purchased for around $1100 which you get most of that back here in Mass. It's heat pump technology and from what I've heard works well. I had tankless in my new boiler which I disconnected and installed a energy smart electric HW tank. It monitors usage and makes HW prior to monitored needs by the household. This way you are not wasting energy to have the HW sit in the tank.

How about air circulation in the house? I cut a vent in from the living room to our second floor and boexed it our with metal and insulated behind it. Gives us very good circulation of hot and cold.

branchburner · Feb 21, 2014

tekguy said:
on oil only did you keep the house as warm as burning with wood?

Great point. Even when we did crank the oil heat up high, the forced hot air was awful heat by my reckoning... hot at the ceiling, cold on the floor, always too dry... we seem to have many fewer colds in the household in the past four years after going from oil to wood.

Never tried grilling a steak on the hot air duct, either.

begreen · Feb 21, 2014

Sounds like the house has a cold floor or the hot air system is misinstalled. Done right the heat should be very even. Is this an old coal heat system conversion? Maybe insulate the basement or the floor if it's a crawlspace?

Bobbin · Feb 21, 2014

The toughest lesson we had to learn was the, "red oak lesson" (cue: Dennis, time for you to laugh). Just because your wood has "set" for an entire calendar year doesn't mean it's really ready to burn. Where you live (maritime climate for us=humid=longer to "dry") is a huge variable when "seasoned" firewood is being discussed. "Seasoned" can mean one year split/stacked, but if you live in a maritime climate that's not "dry" by a long shot. (ask me how I know)

We use stoves. One in the house, one in my shop (barn). Chimneys for both buildings are interior, and the buildings are both 6" stud wall, fully insulated, with truss rooves and heavy overhead insulation. I can only speak for our circumstance and I know diddle about inserts/exterior chimneys/etc..

I do know, however, that once you are "familiar" and comfortable with your particular stove/insert you quickly learn how to "massage" its use to suit your desired heating needs. For example: we use an oil boiler and a furnace to maintain the 2 buildings at a desired "base" temperature (no water to the barn, so 45 degrees mid-winter w/ programmable thermostat). Time has taught us when to start a fire and how "big" it ought to be. The size of the fire has little to do with how effective it can be as a "secondary" heat source. Sometimes we really load the stove(s), sometimes we light smaller fires. But we always burn the stoves "hot" because that's most effective with Woodstocks (heating the soapstone mass). Rekindling is no big deal for us because the boiler/furnace is "on call"; in the event of a power outage we simply feed the stoves as required to maintain heat to the buildings. If the stoves "go out" before the interior temperature falls too low for our taste/comfort we simply start a new fire (more kindling, less cord wood). These are the lessons time has taught us and this how we've used wood heat most effectively for our particular circumstance. What will work for you is what will keep you most comfortable!

begreen · Feb 21, 2014

A very useful project this spring would be a proper woodshed. We move our stacks into the woodshed for final drying. That ensures good cover and ventilation and nice dry wood all winter long.This shed holds 6 cords of wood.

KB007 · Feb 21, 2014

Something's not really adding up, but you proly already know that.

You mentioned you have a couple of small fans moving the air around. Do you have (or could you make) a floorplan and show where the fans are? It's natural for people to want to try to "move the hot air" out f the room, but it works far better to push the cold air into the room and let convection currents naturally move the hot air to where it needs to be.

+1 on slowing down the blower, somehow (again, science is funny sometimes) using the blower on low seems to get more effective heat out than when the blower is running away on high.

Wood - yep, get some that's seasoned and plan somehow to get ahead by 1-2 years. Not only does it burn way, way better, you also have a little safety net in case you can't get some 1 year. It's a lot of work, but buying truck loads and CSS yourself will be cheapest overall, and is kinda fun if you can do it with a buddy.

How good are your overnight burns? When we started, I found we had n problems with daytime burns, but it took some time to keep the furnace from coming on in the wee hours. It's thoes hours between midnight and waking that will kill you on oil. The fire dies down and the furnace kicks in if the temps drop low enough. On the same train, where is your thermostat? Ours is right near the insert in our LR, so it naturally tends to stop the furnace from starting up.

Do you have any way of data logging your furnace run times? It would be great to see when it's coming on to figure out what's going on.

mass_burner · Feb 21, 2014

DouglasB,

Are u able to tell when the furnace comes on? For me its during the night while we're sleeping to maintain 64d temp, since stoves are separated from the bedrooms. Other than that and a brief startup time between 7am-7:30 AM, the stoves do all the heating. This will be my first full season and so far I've used 150 gals since early November. Looks like I'll use 50 more, so that's 200 probably until end of March. This was an unsually cold year. Compared to year with no wood heat we used 3+ full tanks, that's 525-600 gals. So I roughly cut my oil usage by 2/3. Wood I harvested myself.

For $2.18, I can burn 1 1/2 NIEL's (N. Idaho Energy Logs) that will last 6+ hours. My oil gun burns .5 gal/hour, cost for that burn time in oil would be $11.

DouglasB · Feb 21, 2014

KB007 said:
It's natural for people to want to try to "move the hot air" out f the room, but it works far better to push the cold air into the room and let convection currents naturally move the hot air to where it needs to be.

Hmm. Not sure if I can easily draw up a floorplan at work. Basically, it's a two-story colonial with stairs right in the middle of the house. Rectangular footprint. Fireplace is on the main floor, on one side. The middle of the main floor is taken up by the stairs and a powder room, but otherwise the whole floor is open-concept -- i.e., you can walk in a big circle around the exterior walls of the main floor without going through a doorway. Main floor is approximately 850 sq. ft.

We position one fan at the top of the stairs, pointing down toward the main floor, pushing cool air down. At the bottom of the stairs, there is another small fan at floor level, pushing cool air toward the fireplace.

KB007 said:
How good are your overnight burns? When we started, I found we had n problems with daytime burns, but it took some time to keep the furnace from coming on in the wee hours. It's thoes hours between midnight and waking that will kill you on oil. The fire dies down and the furnace kicks in if the temps drop low enough. On the same train, where is your thermostat? Ours is right near the insert in our LR, so it naturally tends to stop the furnace from starting up.

Our typical day is something like this: I wake up before everyone else and get the fire going (like 5:30-6:00am). Insert has heated up and the blower has kicked on by the time everyone else gets up. We keep the fire going all day, trying to do complete burn cycles, as opposed to feeding it every hour or two. We let the fire die out in the early evening, which means the blower keeps pushing out warm air until about bedtime.

I was trying for overnight burns at the beginning and was having some success, but haven't been trying lately. It seemed wasteful to me to keep the fire going all night, because that resulted in the main floor (unoccupied at night) being warmer than it needed to be. It seemed to make more sense to let the main floor cool down overnight (from, say 70-72 degrees down to 57-58 degrees), relying on the boiler to keep it from getting too frigid, and then heating the space up again in the morning.

Admittedly, this means that the boiler works overnight to keep the upstairs bedrooms comfortable at night. I expected that, and therefore knew that we weren't going entirely off of oil.

Each floor has its own thermostat. The main floor's thermostat is about 10-15 feet away from the fireplace.

KB007 said:
Do you have any way of data logging your furnace run times? It would be great to see when it's coming on to figure out what's going on.

That would be a very useful piece of data, but I have no idea how to gather it.

begreen · Feb 21, 2014

mass_burner said:
For $2.18, I can burn 1 1/2 NIEL's (N. Idaho Energy Logs) that will last 6+ hours. My oil gun burns .5 gal/hour, cost for that burn time in oil would be $11.

Wood is cheaper and NIELs are competitive when oil is expensive. But I think the math needs some refining.

1.5 NIELs is 17.20 btus/hr minus say 25% for a 75% efficient stove or 12,900/hr.. In comparison oil has 140,000 per gallon and the system is more efficient. So let's say it is outputting 70,000 btus/hr minus 20% or 56,000/hrs. If that is the case and if 12,900btus/hr is sufficient heat, then the oil furnace is only going to be running. 23% of the 6 hr period or 1.38 gal of oil burned or roughly $5.24 for 6 hrs..

isipwater · Feb 21, 2014

mass_burner said:
DouglasB,

Are u able to tell when the furnace comes on? For me its during the night while we're sleeping to maintain 64d temp, since stoves are separated from the bedrooms. Other than that and a brief startup time between 7am-7:30 AM, the stoves do all the heating. This will be my first full season and so far I've used 150 gals since early November. Looks like I'll use 50 more, so that's 200 probably until end of March. This was an unsually cold year. Compared to year with no wood heat we used 3+ full tanks, that's 525-600 gals. So I roughly cut my oil usage by 2/3. Wood I harvested myself.

For $2.18, I can burn 1 1/2 NIEL's (N. Idaho Energy Logs) that will last 6+ hours. My oil gun burns .5 gal/hour, cost for that burn time in oil would be $11.

Hi, I also live in SE Mass and I am wondering where you harvest your wood. Is this from your property?

maple1 · Feb 21, 2014

DouglasB said:
Indirect hot water tanks are actually one of the more efficient solutions, because there is no exhaust pipe on the hot water tank and hence very little heat loss. We use not much oil during the summer months. And in any event, the numbers I posted up top are for the winter months only, when you would expect our hot water setup to be the most efficient.

That depends on what kind of boiler it is hooked to. Is it a cold start low mass boiler?

I guess my point is - there is less loss of efficiency in heating your DHW with your boiler if your boiler has to be hot to heat the house anyway.

mass_burner · Feb 21, 2014

begreen said:
Wood is cheaper and NIELs are competitive when oil is expensive. But I think the math needs some refining.

1.5 NIELs is 17.20 btus/hr minus say 25% for a 75% efficient stove or 12,900/hr.. In comparison oil has 140,000 per gallon and the system is more efficient. So let's say it is outputting 70,000 btus/hr minus 20% or 56,000/hrs. If that is the case and if 12,900btus/hr is sufficient heat, then the oil furnace is only going to be running. 23% of the 6 hr period or 1.38 gal of oil burned or roughly $5.24 for 6 hrs..

hey thanks, i didn't quite know how handle the furnace cycling on/off. i definitely buying a pallett this spring for next year.

mass_burner · Feb 21, 2014

isipwater said:
Hi, I also live in SE Mass and I am wondering where you harvest your wood. Is this from your property?

the supply I'm now is from a huge tree we took down on our property. also 1/4 cord a neighbor didn't want anymore. but i'm looking for next years supply now. figure even spruce would dry before next year.

Fanatical1 · Feb 21, 2014

I was in your situation at one time, using an insert to supplement the heat of the furnace. I also was disappointed that the furnace still ran more than I anticipated as did the gas bill. I later began to use the insert for more of "shoulder season" heater when the temps were 35 degrees plus. At this outside temperature I knew the furnace would not run and I would be 100% heating with free wood which I have access to.

thechimneysweep · Feb 21, 2014

Reading this post, it occured to me to approach it from another angle:

DouglasB says, if last year had been as cold as this year, he'd have burned 518 gallons of oil (70,448,000 btu's worth)
This year, while augmenting his heat with his FPX 33, he burned just 434 gallons (59,024,000 btu)
So, after correcting for outdoor temperature, the FPX replaced the heat from 84 gallons of oil (11,424,000 btu)

According to the manufacturer, the FPX 33 produces that many btu's from just over a half-cord of seasoned White Oak, or 2/3 cord of seasoned Spruce.

simple.serf · Feb 21, 2014

Just to put it in perspective for you, If we were to have used oil exclusively this winter, we would have been filling our oil tank every 1.5- 2 weeks. Our bill would have been around 1600/Month. I got one top off in January for $650. I'm on a ridge and deal with high winds daily in winter.

My solution involves burning a LOT of wood, but I take a week off every spring and cut for two years in advance. I'd rather take that week off to process firewood than work the amount of OT I'd need to for oil.

Laurent Cyr · Feb 21, 2014

I started burning last year. I didn`t have enough wood, and i ended up burning sub=par wood. This year has been REALLY cold. And we are used t cold winters here in Québec.

We have averaged billing too, and we saved $900 off what we used to pay. So that is a saving of $75 per month (we have woods too, but not much). I will have to scrounge eventually. Buying wood here is not an option. A face cord is $100, and I burn at least 4 cords of wood per winter. Even buying 2 cords wouldn`t make sense.

I will need to focus on insulating the house more, and get rid of the drafts, among other things, if I want to maintain my savings.

Laurent

Phoenix Hatchling · Feb 21, 2014

johnpma said:
I despise OIL Expensive and dirty

Why would you say oil is dirty? Burns cleaner just looking at all three flues--- pellet, wood stove and oil burner. No clean out to do. No ash to vac. No sooty glass ever. You get some water vapor during a burn and that's it. As far as being expensive goes, that is all relative. Move to Europe for a couple years and you'll be coming back screaming for the oil man to filler up to the brim. Everything has it's niche, and some are necessary evils. Consider it cost of existence. Live comfortably and within your tolerance or joy of putting in effort to achieve that.

Doug MacIVER · Feb 21, 2014

Phoenix Hatchling said:
Why would you say oil is dirty? Burns cleaner just looking at all three flues--- pellet, wood stove and oil burner. No clean out to do. No ash to vac. No sooty glass ever. You get some water vapor during a burn and that's it. As far as being expensive goes, that is all relative. Move to Europe for a couple years and you'll be coming back screaming for the oil man to filler up to the brim. Everything has it's niche, and some are necessary evils. Consider it cost of existence. Live comfortably and within your tolerance or joy of putting in effort to achieve that.

some of us don't have money to burn!

maple1 · Feb 21, 2014

Phoenix Hatchling said:
Why would you say oil is dirty? Burns cleaner just looking at all three flues--- pellet, wood stove and oil burner. No clean out to do. No ash to vac. No sooty glass ever. You get some water vapor during a burn and that's it. As far as being expensive goes, that is all relative. Move to Europe for a couple years and you'll be coming back screaming for the oil man to filler up to the brim. Everything has it's niche, and some are necessary evils. Consider it cost of existence. Live comfortably and within your tolerance or joy of putting in effort to achieve that.

Can't find anything that is any dirtier if you get a spill. Or a leak.

Then it could also maybe be approached from the 'green' 'fossil fuel = bad' angle...

Phoenix Hatchling · Feb 21, 2014

maple1 said:
Can't find anything that is any dirtier if you get a spill. Or a leak.

Then it could also maybe be approached from the 'green' 'fossil fuel = bad' angle...

We're talking about burning aren't we? Not a spill. He'll for that matter what was worse than the forest fire raging out of control taking peoples lives and homes. Same thought process your applying.

Phoenix Hatchling · Feb 21, 2014

Doug MacIVER said:
some of us don't have money to burn!

Why would you burn money? Wealth is relative as my post said.

Charles1981 · Feb 21, 2014

Last year barely got under 20 degree days the entire winter. This year it was almost 30 days straight of below ZERO days and 95% of the past 3 months have been below 20 degrees.

I do think the severe winter has to factor in some ways but again I rely on the wood stove as my only source of heat. We have baseboard electric as the "main" heat source, but we haven't turn those suckers on once yet.

Can you describe your setup more? Square footage of house, where is the stove located, are you running the stove 24/7?

Your stove has a 2.2cu foot firebox. They are rating it up to 2,000 sq feet but I think that is pushing it. If your house is only 1500 square feet though I would expect better results but if it is 2500 or larger than I would say we are within reason.

Definitely have more wood on hand in the coming years so you can eventually be burning with truly seasoned wood (Makes all the difference in the world when a good portion of your potential heat isn't being converted into evaporating water into steam). And hopefully a more mild winter. Everyone I know has heating bills that are almost double last year (gas or oil) and most of my neighbors have run out of wood for the first time in 15 or so years talking with them. So this winter has been something so the fact that your costs are down a little I think is an indicator that although you can't quantify it fully you probably did save a significant more amount of money than you can really know.

Charles1981 · Feb 21, 2014

well...ignore my questions I seemed to have missed this entire page until after I replied!

I would try and go back to keeping the stove running overnight even though that area is not occupied at night so you aren't starting from a cold fire each morning. And I think in coming years with more seasoned wood you will get better burn times and more heat than you experience this winter.

Edit: after reading your description of the layout of your house I think it is really important to burn overnight. I think that is where a lot of your oil heating is going to...keeping the house warm at night.

Disappointing heating bill analysis

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