oil or propane? long term usage cost
I have two homes that need new heating systems. One has baseboard hot water that I want to keep. The other has no central heating system,with only a woodstove. In the second house I would like to put radiant, if the budget will allow,if not,then baseboard hot water .Neither of the houses has natural gas available. So if I want gas it must be propane. I already have several estimates coming back on the cost to install a high efficiency oil or gas system. My question is wich system will give me the lowest bills on fuel? Oil or propane?
Replies
I don't think anyone can tell you the cost of energy in the future, but a good guess is that it will go up. They are both petrochemicals. Oil fired boilers are still the most common in the Northeast. Propane costs here are ridiculous, not that heating oil isn't going to hit new highs, soon. There are differences in furnace efficiency. If the furnace efficiency is equal, oil can give up to 139,000 BTU/gal, propane 91,600 BTU/gal.(guesstimate). It's then a matter of comparing price per gal. in your area. With either, tightening up and insulating will start paying you back.
Beat it to fit / Paint it to match
Thank you very much for the information. Do you know how I could figure not how many btu`s i will use.is there a formula based on square footage?
You need to know the heat loss of your building, and that requires a heat load calc. If you've gotten several bids and no one has produced heat load calculations, I would say there is a problem.Once you know your heat loss, loss per degree day can be estimated and calculated with the degree days for your area to estimate raw fuel usage; it's rough, but it gives the ballpark.If you compare a modulating/condensing propane boiler to an oil boiler, if you can run the baseboard cool (I would design for it, or do the load calc and find out how low you can go), I would go propane.If not, either way would be ok, but be aware that oil gets dirty and loses efficiency faster, so twice yearly cleanings (if it's doing DHW) would be a good idea.-------------------------------------
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