I know some of you use other fuels to supplement your wood. Heating my home without using wood would have cost me the price of 600 gallons of #2 fuel oil. I just had my summer fill yesterday and the man put in 97.8 gallons at $1.99 per gallon cash price. That was for the entire 15-16 winter. What amounts are the rest of you having to buy for your summer fill? Saving a thousand dollars goes a long way to help pay for all of the wood gathering toys, or is that tools
One of the guys in my wedding used to burn over 5000 gallons of oil a winter heating his old house. Then again, it was 8500 square feet and the oldest part dated from 1742 and the furnace had been converted from coal. He sold in 2000 and this is what it looks like now...
I burned 250 gallon of #2 last year. but that was heat and hot water just fuel oil my house uses about 600 in 12 months.. so I easily saved 350 gallon but house is way warmer with wood. oil only stats set to 62!
I had my tank topped off mid May. Took 152 gallons. Previously filled in August '15. Cook stove and furnace. My old cook stove had valves on the pilots that I shut off in the summer as we always grill outside. Kept the house cooler and saved pane. Sure wish this newer stove had the valves.
We burn about 40 gallons a year, shoulder season bumping it on for 10 or 15 minutes in the AM and then it goes back to off. We don't burn wood till it gets cool, in the low 30's usually the end of Oct. We like it cool in the house in the fall after sweating all summer.
Wow if that place had acreage and was sold cheap enough that could be made into something.. I know I'm
At the time of the sale it had over 1000 acres, it was sold to a group that developed a golf course. The house was to be the centerpiece of a resort and conference center but the developers went bankrupt before that occurred. All the outbuildings except 1 pole barn being used for storage have been demolished. He did very well on the sale and I doubt that he would ever find anyone to pay close to what he got. His father was in the timber business and cut and milled enough lumber off the property to pay for it. This is an aerial view of one of his mills in the early '70's.
In a twist of irony, my mother's family had a connection to the prior owners. A couple had bought the property in 1897 from the wife's father, she lived there until her death in 1960 at 103 when my buddy's father purchased it. It turns out that my grandfather and the former owner's son were both physicians in Nwe York. My mother remembers her family receiving Christmas hams from the son in the 1930's that were sent north from this farm.
I've posted in other threads about how incredible the savings on furnace oil are for us in a mobile home. In a nutshell, we burned about 120 gallons from October until sometime in June this year. A best case scenario before the wood stove, would be at least another 240 gallons, more on a cold year. For the most part, the furnace is having nappy time for 18-20 hours a day, depending on if I make a fire before bed. Then the furnace might not cycle for 4-5 hours. If the water lines weren't in a chase on the bottom of the floor, I could use less oil. Not sure if it makes sense, but a cord of poplar seems to equal/replace 100 gallons or so of furnace oil. Winter furnace oil is only available starting sometime in mid October, so we can't watch prices to get a deal. I might add our oil usage average start to end was 2.8 liters a day.
Heating oil BTU content is 13,900,000 BTU for those 100 gallons. Yellow poplar comes in at 16,000,000 BTU per cord so it is slightly ahead of those 100 gallons of oil. After raw BTU you need to look at heating appliance efficiencies. My guess is that an oil heater need not have as hot a flue as a wood stove so its thermal efficiency will be a bit better.
The oil furnace is a rebuilt Intertherm MAC 1265?, so the efficiency must be pretty poor. I don't recall the efficiency on an Englander 17.
Ive never used heating oil so I find these conversations interesting. I have forced air natural gas with an original 1983 furnace that gets a bit of work when its below -25c or in the summer when just a little shot in the arm will suffice. We also use a few oil heaters that we plug in at the furthest parts of the house during the winter but we dont see much impact on our power bill. I also have one of those running 24/7 in my basement all summer since we arent heating the house aside from thermal loading.
Great thread. My house has enough capacity for 1000 gallons of oil. I have about 400 gallons in them total. I used 0.0 gallons last year. My trick is big wood, dry wood, high btu wood. The oil is simply there as a backup in case I travel.. I spent $20 on some stabilizer
