Is the hearth.com fuel calculator back up and running?

[John Ackerly]

My group reviewed fuel calculators a few years ago, and we are updating the blog, as calculators seem to come and go. The hearth.com link doesn't work in our blog. Unfortunately, there are still way too many biased ones used by stove manufacturers, which don't help consumers get common sense estimates.

We will also post info about new EPA list of certified stoves soon. The new stove list has some errors in it, and includes an outdoor wood boiler for some reason. Some new Chinese pellet stoves are incorrectly listed as non-cat wood stoves (with efficiencies of more than 80%). We thought a new Wolf Steel stove was mistakenly listed as a catalytic stove because it was 63% efficient and put out 3.3 grams an hour. But apparently it is their new catalytic stove.

Thanks for any info about hearth.com calculator - which was one of the best. And any other fuel calculators that folks think are good.

 

[begreen]

This one John?
https://www.hearth.com/talk/calculators/fuel-cost-comparison

 

[John Ackerly]

Yes, thanks BeGreen. Wasn't easy to find on the site, or maybe I was just too impatient. Anyway, just looked at it again and its as good as I remember it being.

 

[velvetfoot]

The EIA had a nice spreadsheet on its website, but removed it about a year ago.

 

[Highbeam]

Is it just me or is the LPG fuel source broken on the link?

 

[Lake Girl]

Will let webfish know ... it's missing it's price entry.

 

[iamlucky13]

On the results page, the "Back to Fuel Cost Comparison Link" is to a non-existent page.

Also, the 95 million BTU per year the calculator uses for the annual heating cost calc seems high, and since it varies so widely, I think a worthwhile improvement to the calculator would be to allow annual BTU to be set by the user, but auto-filled at some value like the other fields.

The DOE's Residential Energy Consumption Survey says the average heating energy use in the US is 38.7 million BTU per year. However that includes homes in non-heating climates to screw up the numbers. For the NE and Midwest regions, the averages are just shy of 60 million BTU annually, so that seems like a good starting value.

Due to their methodology, heat pumps probably skew the figures low by 5-10 percent, so 65 million BTU would also be a fair value.

Source "Consumption and Expenditures" tab / "By end uses" / Table CE3.1
http://www.eia.gov/consumption/residential/data/2009/index.cfm?view=consumption

 

[iamlucky13]

Thanks for any info about hearth.com calculator - which was one of the best. And any other fuel calculators that folks think are good.

I personally like this one because it is very user-configurable (and I've modified a copy significantly for my own uses), but it requires a spreadsheet program that can read Excel spreadsheets (OpenOffice, LibreOffice, and Google Calc are free options). It's admittedly not quite as easy to use as the Hearth.com calculator:
https://catalog.extension.oregonstate.edu/ec1643

You may also notice the wood species it lists are specific to the NW, the default prices are a bit low, and some sources list lower BTU content per cord than shown there. Fortunately, the user can change all of those.

I just noticed it uses 60% efficiency for some wood species and 80% for others. I emailed the author to suggest he make them all the same.