Cost of oil

We updated the oil boiler to a new 90% eff at the same time updating the wood stove to one that heats more ( not all) of the house more efficiently.
Based on $2.00/gallon HHO I figure my red and white oak stashes are worth $250/cord. ( they didn't cost me that ) If someone was to offer me $300-$350/cord for I would be hard-pressed not to take advantage of the untaxed real and theoretical capital gain.

Lower cost HHO does make it easier to listen to the boiler running on not-so-cold days.
Still nice to sit by a hot stove when it is snowing out .

I'll probably burn a little less as long as HHO stays low. But not a lot less cuz every gallon I don't use is still money in the bank to use for other things, especially since some of my wood is fairly close to "free". (although some of the red oak was closer to $80/cord)

I was looking around for a used pellet stove for the work shop ( unheated currently ) but with current pellet prices a wood stove is looking more practical financially despite the on/off convenience. Still mulling this over.

Love burning wood for heat. Much warmer house and the wife loves sitting by the woodstove. Propane or oil would have to be much cheaper for me to even consider it.

Dix said:

At less than $2 US a gallon, I'll set the T stats @ 62 F, and work the house temps up from there. Save fire wood, save $$$'s? I'm good with it.

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Exacty my game plan. Heating goes in my stack of bills, so there's no real incentive for anyone but me to haul wood or pack the stove unless I disconnect the thermostat remotely through my cell phone using a z-wave module.

But it doesn't come to that, often.

BrotherBart said:

And our co-op made the brilliant move a few years ago to break away from a long term agreement to purchase power from a group because it was depending too much on natural gas. And got us long term committed to generation plants using coal.

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BrotheBart: What was the impact on cost? Isn't coal still cheap or was it a bad move since NG got cheaper than coal?

btuser said:

Exacty my game plan. Heating goes in my stack of bills, so there's no real incentive for anyone but me to haul wood or pack the stove unless I disconnect the thermostat remotely through my cell phone using a z-wave module.

But it doesn't come to that, often.

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Your stack of bills? Who pays your other bills for you?

Dix said:

At less than $2 US a gallon, I'll set the T stats @ 62 F, and work the house temps up from there. Save fire wood, save $$$'s? I'm good with it.

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The problem I have supplementing with wood is the inefficiency of constantly starting up a cold stove. It wastes wood, takes longer to get the fire going, and results in the need to clean the flue more often. That's why shoulder season is harder on us die-hard wood burners.

I also think it's harder on the stove and it actually takes more effort to burn part time.

I am on NG and intend to burn more wood this year with a second stove. Expect to have a little learning curve with how much heat to put in the basement and not get too hot upstairs. As long as I am healthy enough to process my own firewood, I will use as little of the public stuff as possible. Hoping with 2 stoves this year to use very little NG but we will see. The winter wind eats this house up so I may be fooling myself...we'll see

Wood heat for me has its benefits with cost savings but its more of a lifestyle for me, so I will keep going full bore, plus 70deg with wood heat feels warmer than 70deg oil heat, I know I'm crazy lol.

I think that burning part time is harder than burning full time, so I won't do anything different this year. I'd rather load a hot stove a couple times a day and have it set in 30 minutes than deal with a cold stove all the time. And the forced air heat from my furnace isn't nearly as pleasant as the warm glow of my stove.

mass_burner said:

Your stack of bills? Who pays your other bills for you?

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Long story short I'm a kept man.

I have electric heat and the price of electric has not dropped. I will burn the same amount of wood, the wife likes that she can have the house as warm as she likes with out me complaining about the cost. I also have a pellet stove but that rarely gets used, just to noisy (Harman P68) also checked the price of pellets at the local Home Depot the other day and they were $270 a ton. That is up almost a $100 from when I purchased the stove just three years ago. I wish now I would have got a LP stove for backup.

@btuser, my wife and I also split up which bills we pay, we have been married 40 years and it has worked for us. That way she does not complain if I spend $100 on some labor saving device (tool) and I do not care if she spends a $100 on a new purse. Major purchases we discuss.

[quote="brokenknee, post: 1975163, member: 2125"

my wife and I also split up which bills we pay, we have been married 40 years and it has worked for us. That way she does not complain if I spend $100 on some labor saving device (tool) and I do not care if she spends a $100 on a new purse. Major purchases we discuss.[/quote]

What difference does it make who pays the bill, it still got spent. It seems that splitting them up creates more work.

I usually spend my money to save money. The wood stove is along that line of thinking. First year burning in the new house was 2008 when heating oil dipped to 1.50/gallon. Still, there I was scrounging for pallets and burning green oak (start your wood pile BEFORE you're serious about burning wood) and loving all that "free heat". Chainsaw, chaps, woodshed, insert, liner, brushes, sticks, cap, etc and I'm 5k into a new hobby. Saved squat first year, then better, then better, then it got to be work and I remember my father's incursion into wood burning back in the 1970s. Now my philosophy is to keep the thermostat at 62 and start a fire when I get home. No more burping heat into an empty house while I'm at work. The weekends are for burning, but with 3yrs of wood on hand I don't sweat starting up a cold firebox. When we remodeled the kitchen I opened up the wall between the family room where the stove is located and the rest of the house. Now we don't need fans anymore and the heat is much more easily distributed. I still bring home pallets when I find them. Got a stack of about 20 waiting to get chopped up. I thought by now the wife would be after me to reduce the eyesore but last time I took it down she berated me for chopping up "the baby dogs" jungle gym. The chase the chipmunks into them and spend hours whining about it.

Thought about a fire this weekend, house was 65. Winter's coming, and I'm not ready.

mass_burner said:

What difference does it make who pays the bill, it still got spent. It seems that splitting them up creates more work.

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My wife an I have been together for 25 years. We're still getting to know each other.

btuser said:

My wife an I have been together for 25 years. We're still getting to know each other.

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By all means.

fire_man said:

The problem I have supplementing with wood is the inefficiency of constantly starting up a cold stove. It wastes wood, takes longer to get the fire going, and results in the need to clean the flue more often. That's why shoulder season is harder on us die-hard wood burners.

I also think it's harder on the stove and it actually takes more effort to burn part time.

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I think I qualify as die hard, to be honest .5 years broken heat pipe, heating with firewood only, yeah, I think I got this chit down, but that's my opinion

It's just more economical to use the OB to maintain the house at 62 F, AND run both stoves December to March.
Gives me time to build up the firewood arsenal, for when the tides turn.

And they will.

btuser said:

I usually spend my money to save money. The wood stove is along that line of thinking. First year burning in the new house was 2008 when heating oil dipped to 1.50/gallon. Still, there I was scrounging for pallets and burning green oak (start your wood pile BEFORE you're serious about burning wood) and loving all that "free heat". Chainsaw, chaps, woodshed, insert, liner, brushes, sticks, cap, etc and I'm 5k into a new hobby. Saved squat first year, then better, then better, then it got to be work and I remember my father's incursion into wood burning back in the 1970s. Now my philosophy is to keep the thermostat at 62 and start a fire when I get home. No more burping heat into an empty house while I'm at work. The weekends are for burning, but with 3yrs of wood on hand I don't sweat starting up a cold firebox. When we remodeled the kitchen I opened up the wall between the family room where the stove is located and the rest of the house. Now we don't need fans anymore and the heat is much more easily distributed. I still bring home pallets when I find them. Got a stack of about 20 waiting to get chopped up. I thought by now the wife would be after me to reduce the eyesore but last time I took it down she berated me for chopping up "the baby dogs" jungle gym. The chase the chipmunks into them and spend hours whining about it.

Thought about a fire this weekend, house was 65. Winter's coming, and I'm not ready.

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Holy "carpola" . . . in 2008 heating oil prices up here were going through the roof and were close to $4 in some places . . . while I had always wanted a woodstove those prices were the motivation I needed to get one.

I have two 275 gallon tanks that I haven't filled for 7 or 8 years and the last time I put any in was three years ago. I am considering buying 200 gallons and worse case is I can run my Unimog truck on it (for off road). I do plan to run the boiler a bit longer in the fall and earlier in the spring so that I can warm up my office when the rest of the house doesn't need a lot of heat. I used the minisplit last winter as much as possible to see what it would do but expect I will not run it unless them temps are above 30.

You guys are getting the experience we have had for years on gas. I burn wood recreationally, not because I need to. Mostly on the weekend. If I cant scrounge a lot of it for free it doesn't make much sense financially.

firefighterjake said:

Holy "carpola" . . . in 2008 heating oil prices up here were going through the roof and were close to $4 in some places . . . while I had always wanted a woodstove those prices were the motivation I needed to get one.

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You're remembering the highs of Winter 2007/2008 but not the lows that came Winter 2008/2009.



Regardless, those shocking 2007/2008 prices were what prompted me ( and many others ) to not only replace old oil boilers but to spend the extra on the more efficient ones. Many also switched to nat gas.

One of the reasons I can heat with a wood boiler, a wood stove, a minisplit and an oil boiler. No matter what, fuel flexibility and storage is the key so I can jump to the best option. Natural Gas is seductive option for some but all indications are that unless a lot of new pipelines are built quickly in New England, the price of gas is going up. I don't have to worry about gas, too much darn rock in northern NH with too low a population density.

btuser said:

Now my philosophy is to keep the thermostat at 62 and start a fire when I get home.

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I have a 3500 sq ft 1738 ranch with the stove installed where the center chimney used to be before they ripped it out and replaced it with a small chimney for a coal furnace back sometime in the 19th century, and later retrofitted an oil furnace sometime in the 20th.

Weekdays, I'm up at 5am and out the door at 6. I get home between 4 and 5p, and I hit the sack around 9-10p. During the winter, I principally live in the center portion of the house (bed, bathroom, central room where the stove is installed, which doubles as my dining room). I use an electric blanket on "L" with a comforter on top.

In the winter, I leave the oil furnace at 50, mainly so the pipes don't freeze when I'm not home. I usually have hot coals when I get home from work, so I can get a fire going quickly, and it takes perhaps an hour to get the chill out of the section of the house I use in the winter. By bedtime, the house is a balmy 80+. One last load before bed, dialed all the way back, leaves me with large coals by the time I get up.

If I had the option to convert the oil boiler to natural gas, I would... even if it were slightly higher in price than oil. Its the convenience factor. Last winter, I got a delivery of oil the day before we got a 3' snow dump, and it snowed every 3 days for almost a month. I had snow drifts up to the roofline on my barn, and half-way up the front windows of my house. My oil fill lines were buried under the snow. Two months later, I got a delivery, but only after I dug a ditch down 4' of snow so the guys could get the oil fill hose to connect. They pumped in 220 gallons ( I have two "stubby" tanks plumbed together, I can't get a full-size tank down in my basement), so I was pretty close to empty.

With gas, although there may be a price premium, I never have to worry about running out. Unfortunately, the main ends up the road about 150' from my house in the next town over (my house is on the town line) and the gas company has no plans to extend it further, not cost effective.

I use propane for backup heat and cooking, propane is currently between $0.99-$1.15 per gallon delivered in the Salt Lake area. At that price, my goal is to avoid firing up the stove until November except during our usual October snowstorm or two. Usually I start burning by mid September, but at that price and with the mild weather we've had, using propane makes more sense.