Pellets versus Oil versus Propane versus Coffee&Bagel

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The US just about now is able to satisfy 50% of their oil demand by domestic production.

Also interesting. My issue with shale oil and fracking is the impact on the ground itself. We have had a shall we say, 'mini boom' on well drilling right here (in my backyard almost). While we did not allow geophysical exploration on our owned land, the land owner across the road did and a drilling company sank a hole about 500 feet from us.

First off, it was drilled last fall and winter. It's a noisy operation that goes non-stop, 24-7 with no let up. We live in a very rural setting (farming) and we aren't accustomed to noise and commotion, let along bright lights at night (the drill rig is all lit up with huge lights at night). Not on my property but plenty close....

The driller literally tore up a field getting in and out, put in an all weather access road to the wellhead but the heavy trucks tore up our road real bad, so bad, it's still rough a year later.

So they drilled the well and it was a dud so they came back in this last spring and deepened it some more and hit oil....

Meanwhile, our well water went decidedly down hill in quality. We now have 'red' water where we had no issue prior to the drillers. I'm think that they somehow impacted the aquafier. We've lived here almost 40 years with no 'red' water. Hard to prove or disprove I suspect.

Interestingly, they were pumping the well 24/7 and pulling at least 3 tanker trucks of crude out everyday until the oil (gas prices) started to slide, then they shut the well off, locked the chain link gates (around the well site) and haven't been back since. That tells me it's a definite 'for profit' operation. Playing a waiting game with the oil.

I'd have preferred it to be a 'dry hole' myself. The stuff stinks. We can smell it when the wind blows our way, which it usually does and there is a gas flare that burns too. Really disrupted our way of life and we had no choice.
 
Same conversation that cord wood burners have about the cost of fuel acquisition. Love it. As the name of a friend's bar (TANSTAAFL) in Texas says, There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
 
Actually looks pretty interesting and reading the reviews on various units, might be a viable alternative. One reviewer was using farm diesel (red dyed ULSD) to fire his. In as much as I normally keep 1000 gallons on hand, I could theoritically plumb my diesel tank into one.

I had a bad experience with one of those portable keroscene heaters long ago, thats what got me started on solid fuel stoves actually.

Not sure they are even sold anymore.
What style of portable? Torpedo or wick? I have a very old Jungers single burner stove that is a wonderful heater was sold as a kitchen heater. Reduced many gallons of tomatoes in fall.
 
What style of portable? Torpedo or wick? I have a very old Jungers single burner stove that is a wonderful heater was sold as a kitchen heater. Reduced many gallons of tomatoes in fall.


Wick, I think. Was an upright with the fuel tank on the bottom. I almost burned the house down. Came real close. It malfunctioned and started leaking...bad scene...... I have a huge torpedo heater out in the barn, but thats pressure fed I think. It will roast you out and stink you out at the same time.... Sounds like a rocket engine......

The referenced heaters in the preceeding post look interesting. Actually look like a solid fuel stove, could be a Harman look-alike....
 
Also interesting. My issue with shale oil and fracking is the impact on the ground itself. We have had a shall we say, 'mini boom' on well drilling right here (in my backyard almost). While we did not allow geophysical exploration on our owned land, the land owner across the road did and a drilling company sank a hole about 500 feet from us.
......................................

I'd have preferred it to be a 'dry hole' myself. The stuff stinks. We can smell it when the wind blows our way, which it usually does and there is a gas flare that burns too. Really disrupted our way of life and we had no choice.

Sorry for you and your family. Maybe a good time to sell get out of dodge city before the mayhem starts up again.
 
I thought it was time for some of the newbies to face the COLD hard facts using today's prices.

Every morning when you put a bag of wood pellets in the stove your are saving approximately:
$1.50 per bag if you pay $300 per ton of wood pellets
$2.50 per bag if you pay $240 per ton of wood pellets
How much did you pay for coffee and bagel this morning? :)

One bag of wood pellets equals 2.5 gallons #2 fuel oil equals 3.75 gallons propane (approximately)

#2 Fuel Oil produces 138,500 BTU/gallon
Some pellet produce 8,800 BTU/lb or 352,000 BTU/bag = 2.5 gallons of #2 fuel oil
Other pellets produce 8,100 BTU/lb or 324,00 BTU/bag = 2.3 gallons of #2 fuel oil

Today's approximate prices:
$3.00 per gallon of #2 Fuel Oil
$2.19 per gallon of Propane
$6.00 per bag of wood pellets at $300 per ton
$4.80 per bag of wood pellets at $240 per ton

Bag of wood pellets versus #2 Fuel Oil versus Propane
$6.00 bag of wood pellets versus $7.5 #2 Fuel Oil versus $8.20 Propane

If you consider that most Propane is 10% more efficient to burn than fuel oil then you get
$6.00 bag of wood pellets versus $7.5 #2 Fuel Oil versus $7.38 Propane ($8.20 times .9)

Note a few years ago we were paying a lot more for #2 fuel oil and wood pellets could be had for only $200 per ton or $4.00 per bag.

Full disclosure: The price of #2 fuel oil can be cheaper than $3.00/gal. Propane cost was based on my sons neighborhood in southern NH that negotiated a locked in price of $2.19/gal for this winter.
O.K. Now, I have three pellet stoves and am very happy with them; as supplemental space heaters. I understood that that was what I was getting when I installed them. But you have to remember that the oil or propane furnace typically has multiple vents in rooms throughout the house. So the heat is spread via hot air to a much larger portion of the house. The only way you can realistically make a comparison here is to set a test facility that monitors usage and equal cfpm airflow.
 
Don't the energy calculators make you wonder? Your numbers should match up fairly close unless something is wrong or the assumptions are wrong.

Wrong size central heating unit, very leaky basement, a central heating unit that has BS claims. List goes on Im sure.

Yeah, they do make me wonder. I've given it some thought before, I've even personally looked at the heat exchanger on my furnace and as far as I can tell, it looks pretty darn clean to me. I suppose there could be funny business inside the tankless coil I'd never know about, but our water is pretty good (IE: we don't have really hard water that might clog the coil with deposits.) In the case of my house, we have baseboard heaters and I think the 150 some feet of roughly 1-1/2" black iron pipe that feed the heaters lose quite a lot of heat. Last year, when the system was getting heavy use, the basement temperature was about 5 degrees higher than it is this winter where we are using the pellet stove for 95% of our heat. So, right there, we have quite a lot of efficiency being lost that couldn't possibly be put in those calculators. As oil continues to fall, I have been considering insulting all that pipe, but when oil was still $3.50 a gallon, and I decided to install a pellet stove, it didn't seem worth it because it would still likely have been much more expensive to use oil than pellets.

I do believe that, if my furnace was in my living room and moved the heat across the exchanger as my pellet stove does, then and only then would the energy calculators be accurate enough that I wouldn't have to worry about real world vs. theoretical numbers for efficiency (and as I said earlier, it isn't as though I think the numbers from the calculators are wrong, I just think they need to be viewed in context with the rest of the heating system, and not just the raw efficiency of the appliance.) Incidentally, it would probably scare the pants off everyone if you had a furnace in your living room that had a window on it like a pellet stove. Those things produce a wicked looking flame!
 
Wick, I think. Was an upright with the fuel tank on the bottom. I almost burned the house down. Came real close. It malfunctioned and started leaking...bad scene...... I have a huge torpedo heater out in the barn, but thats pressure fed I think. It will roast you out and stink you out at the same time.... Sounds like a rocket engine......

The referenced heaters in the preceeding post look interesting. Actually look like a solid fuel stove, could be a Harman look-alike....
Had a neighbor that left the access open on the double wide on the north side and was freezing his pipes. He got a 300,000 btu torpedo heater and shoved it under and lit er up. PERMANENTLY!
 
Don't the energy calculators make you wonder? Your numbers should match up fairly close unless something is wrong or the assumptions are wrong.

Wrong size central heating unit, very leaky basement, a central heating unit that has BS claims. List goes on Im sure.
All the energy calculators I have seen EXCEPT the one I referenced above do NOT take into account the duct work for central heating systems. If you play around with the duct work location and insulation, you'll see it makes a huge difference in cost.
http://www.buildinggreen.com/calc/fuel_cost.cfm
 
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All the energy calculators I have seen EXCEPT the one I referenced above do NOT take into account the duct work for central heating systems. If you play around with the duct work location and insulation, you'll see it makes a huge difference in cost.
http://www.buildinggreen.com/calc/fuel_cost.cfm

They also dont take into account when you walk by your furnace or boiler its warm nearby that heat is not going into a conditioned space in most cases. The efficiencies are based upon combustion analysis not heat exchanger efficiency. Thats always a advantage of a stove its in a conditioned space.
 
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I have been getting 2 - 2.5 days per bag of pellets running the stove for 4 hours in the morning and 4 in the evening. The house will stay between 69-73 degrees. If I run the LP furnace the same length of time set at 69, it will cycle 3-4 times per hour. LP usage is 3 gallons a day. Our local LP price is $2.50 delivered so the cost per month is $225.00. Pellets are $4.00 a bag and a jug of starter gel is $9.00 for a total of $69.00 a month. So even if pellets go up a buck per bag and LP comes down a buck, I'd still be better off with pellets. I don't figure in my gas for hauling pellets because we're at the Home Depot at least once a week so we grab 5 bags each time we're there. I also like the stove for toasting the BVDs, jeans and shirt before getting dressed in the morning.
 
My pup likes to toast her buns in fromt of the stove too........ Her preferred spot in the great room.
 
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They also dont take into account when you walk by your furnace or boiler its warm nearby that heat is not going into a conditioned space in most cases. The efficiencies are based upon combustion analysis not heat exchanger efficiency. Thats always a advantage of a stove its in a conditioned space.
You'll notice in 'my' calculator that it rates the exchange efficiency at 100% while the stove efficiency is another %.
 
I have been getting 2 - 2.5 days per bag of pellets running the stove for 4 hours in the morning and 4 in the evening. The house will stay between 69-73 degrees. If I run the LP furnace the same length of time set at 69, it will cycle 3-4 times per hour. LP usage is 3 gallons a day. Our local LP price is $2.50 delivered so the cost per month is $225.00. Pellets are $4.00 a bag and a jug of starter gel is $9.00 for a total of $69.00 a month. So even if pellets go up a buck per bag and LP comes down a buck, I'd still be better off with pellets. I don't figure in my gas for hauling pellets because we're at the Home Depot at least once a week so we grab 5 bags each time we're there. I also like the stove for toasting the BVDs, jeans and shirt before getting dressed in the morning.


I didn't know it got cold in Arizona. I was hunting out there 2 years ago and it got cool at night but was warm every day....
 
Prescott snows on a regular bases I believe.
 
Prescott snows on a regular bases I believe.

We were closer to NM. Next fall it will be Orem Utah. Should be fun. Always wanted to go wolf hunting.
 
A lot of people associate AZ as a hot sandy desert type state. It's like that in the southern parts. PHX, Tucson, Yuma, etc; North of PHX a ways it changes drastically into mountains and cooler climates and can snow. Flagstaff and other places are much different than what comes to mind when AZ is mentioned. Entirely different climates and terrain altogether.
 
I didn't know it got cold in Arizona. I was hunting out there 2 years ago and it got cool at night but was warm every day....

It was 24 this morning and a high of 45. I was building a workshop in the back yard today. As long as the wind isn't blowing and you're in the sun, it's warm. Here's a picture from my back yard of the San Francisco Peaks in Flagstaff, 80 miles away.
 

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It was 24 this morning and a high of 45. I was building a workshop in the back yard today. As long as the wind isn't blowing and you're in the sun, it's warm.
It's warmer here in KY and still 44* now at 11:11 PM although a week or two ago we were seeing single digits at night and highs in the 20's. Well below averages. I have some very good friends in the PHX area Glendale and others in Scottsdale specifically and they have a cabin in the mountains too. Been out there a lot.
 
How much have you cut your fossil fuel usage by? How many pellets are you now burning?

Simple subtraction will get you your savings.
 
Prescott snows on a regular bases I believe.
As does Flagstaff and most of the North. When I lived there it was great. Phoenix warmth and 2 hrs North you could have a snowball fight and ski. Heck, Even Tucson has a ski slope too as I remember.
 
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