can someone explain coverting CCF's to wood consumption?

[88rxn/a]

between last year of october to march i used around 1,000 CCF's of natural gas (national fuel)
looking at a conversion chart i google'd it said this:

cubic feet to gallons (USA) x 7.481

then,
i thought i read that 1 cord of dry hardwood = 150 gallons of oil?

so according to my calculations ill use almost 60 cords huh???
yeah, i need to go back to school....

heres a link to my conversion chart i found.
http://www.iol.ie/~discover/measure.htm

i know alot of factors come into play but id like to get a jump on wood in the spring and would like to know what im up against as far as wood consumption.

 

[Nofossil]

between last year of october to march i used around 1,000 CCF's of natural gas (national fuel)
looking at a conversion chart i google'd it said this:

cubic feet to gallons (USA) x 7.481

then,
i thought i read that 1 cord of dry hardwood = 150 gallons of oil?

so according to my calculations ill use almost 60 cords huh???
yeah, i need to go back to school....

heres a link to my conversion chart i found.
http://www.iol.ie/~discover/measure.htm

i know alot of factors come into play but id like to get a jump on wood in the spring and would like to know what im up against as far as wood consumption.

Good news: you have to look at BTU content, not volume. A CCF is about 100,000 BTU and a gallon of oil is about 140,000 BTU. You used about 100,000,000 BTU, or about 700 gallons of fuel oil equivalent. Figure 5 cords of wood......

 

[88rxn/a]

OIC, they dont tell me how many BTU's just CCF.

so thats the good news...
whats the bad?? im a noob at this? lol

 

[Redox]

CCF is a wierd way to sell natural gas as the heat content varies from source to source and throughout the year. A more accurate way is by therm, or 100,000 BTU. A cubic foot of nat gas has about 1000 BTUs, but usually a little more. Our utility measures and tracks the heat content continuously and throws a conversion factor in the bill. I guess it allows them to charge a little more as the HC varies from about 1040 to over 1100 in the winter. The 7.48 number is a pure volume conversion that doesn't take into account the fact that oil has a much higher energy density than NG.

I think nofo has your answer.

Chris

 

[88rxn/a]

i have a feeling it will be more than 5 cords.
heating my DHW, and the house will be ALOT warmer.
we kept the T-stat kind of cold last winter.
im going to be safe and have 8 ready i think. i have many pine trees that need cut early spring i will hopefully have dried for next winter to mix in with good hardwood.
thanks for helping!

 

[Corey]

You could also throw in the efficiencies of the appliances and expected btu's of your local wood to refine that number a bit:

ie - 80% efficient gas heater:
100,000,000 btu gas x .80 efficiency = 80,000,000 btu delivered to the heated space


Getting 80 million btu from a 72% efficient wood boiler with oak wood @ 24 million btu/cord
80,000,000 btu / .72 efficiency / 24,000,000 btu per cord = 4.6 cords

In this case, the numbers are pretty close, you'd probably want 5 or more cords anyway, but if the efficiency of the appliances varies a lot or your local wood species has much higher or lower btu's that could swing the numbers higher or lower.

 

[88rxn/a]

interesting...
if i only go through 4.6 cords id be a very happy camper!
im still in the process of insulating the house better.