Someone emailed me selected numbers re their energy usage, and I’m trying to makes sense of it. I’ve been all-electric forever, so the units aren’t quite adding up.
As they describe it, their house has a gas furnace and a gas hot water heater as the only gas devices. Their usage is listed this way:
AUG SEP OCT NOV DEC JAN FEB MAR APR MAY JUN JUL AUG
Gas Billed CF: 9 7 8 13 48 95 122 160 61 54 12 9 8
I’m trying to find a rough kwh equivalent to compare to the electric usage in another house. Any guidance?
Thank you.
Replies
I'm looking at the gas bill and you need to know the ? gas content/area or the volume multiplier.
And I think the footage you show is ccf per # shown, which =s 1,000 cubic feet
Going to cubic feet to therms to BTUs to electric kwhs to $s
In SLC,Ut therms are up to $7.76
I would have to do some hunting on the cubic footage to therm?
I had it in my head a while back but with all the ventilation it fell out.
Ah here it is on the back of the bill Volume multiplier= a factor used to convert gas volume into deca therms.
And on to the front of the bill the multiplier is .091839 And the decatherm is heat equal to 1 million BTUs
Did some research while waiting for more gaseous people than me to weigh in. You're right that it should be ccf, but the first C is 100. Using an interactive energy calculator, it seems 100 ccf is equivalent to 2929 kwh. Can anyone confirm this as right or wrong? Is the house in question using 3000-4700 kwh equivalent a month in winter for heating and hot water? And then we could subtract out the ~9 ccf/month from summer usage as the assumed baseline for hot water to yield the pure space heating requirements.Yes? No?Edit: This chart seems to say the same thing if I'm reading it right: http://www.woodruffelectric.com/files/pdf/products/prod_heat.pdfFor a 2300 sf frame house (built 1998) in Ohio, does that usage seem typical or atypical, ordinary or extraordinary?
Edited 9/17/2007 1:23 pm ET by CloudHidden
If you use say 3000 kWh in the winter at my rate .072$=s about $216 so sounds close.
Or like I'm looking at my bill for August .9 DTH = $6.99 not including all the misc.
I think the first thing is to look at possible difference with the ccf you were given and the need to factor in the volume multiplier. With only the ccf you are missing a component in the calc.
It's funny , I have to shift into a different part of my brain to go to the energy zone.
I'm in the middle of a hands on rehab and this is like turning hat to different person.
It is a lot cleaner then all that dust eating.
As I was leaving and I looked at that chart. It looks like the heat pump will generate dollars for you at 260% efficient.
Comment on that for me if you would. Gotta go make some dust for awhile.
Edited 9/17/2007 1:49 pm by ClaysWorld
One CCF is 100 cubic feet.
If your view never changes you're following the wrong leader
an average CCF of natural gas is 92,000 BTUs. That can vary, but that's average. I think you are supposed to be able to get the BTU content of the fuel you are buying? I forget...
You then need to correct for the efficiency of the unit. If you only get 80% of those BTUs as useful heat into your home, then use that correction. Of course, you're probably guessing there....
a kWh of electricity is 3,412 BTUs. It is "100%" efficient (quotes because plenty is wasted on the way to your house, it's just already built into the price) so you shouldn't need a correction factor.
Hope that helps..
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I think the numbers on the bill are in CCF, not CF. "CCF" means "hundred cubic feet", the first C being hundred. (MCF is thousand cubic feet).
The heat content of 100 cubic feet of gas varies with what comes out of the well, but is close to 100,000 BTU per CCF. The U.S. Department of Energy website lists 103,000 BTU per CCF as typical. The numbers on the bill are rounded to the nearest whole CCF anyway, so we can use 100,000 BTU/CCF and be close enough.
3413 BTU of energy is 1 kWh of energy.
So the conversion becomes
X CCF (100,000 BTU/CCF)(1 kWh/3413 BTU) = Y kWh
So for your highest month of March at 160 CCF, the kWh is equal to 160(100,000/3413) = 4688 kWh. At, say, 10¢ per kWh that comes to $468.80