I have a Vermont Castings dvrt natural gas fireplace in my basement rec room. The house is well insulated and this room has two 8 foot water baseboards that the plumber looped in with the main floor themostat.
This room is about 300 square feet. It is plently warm so I rarely fire up the fireplace which has its own thermostat across the room.
Any idea how much $ I am wasting in gas keeping the pilot on this fireplace burning from October to May?
I’m thinking of just shutting it down and lighting it up the once every two weeks I want it.
Have a good day
Cliffy
Replies
This article might have some insight for you:
http://homeenergy.org/archive/hem.dis.anl.gov/eehem/97/970103.html
Specifically:
"The average gas fireplace pilot uses about 21 ft3 (0.6 m3) of gas per day."
So at the recent price of about 12.50 per thousand cuft (http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/ng/hist/n3010us3m.htm), then that's:
21 cuft/day * 365 days/year * 0.0125 $/cuft = $95 a year
I'd call that significant.
Wow, quick reply with a Canadian study as reference. I lived in Ottawa for a couple of years aof University and their climate is similar to mine. So I'll check my gas bill to see what I'm paying.
Havae a good dayCLiffy
I just dug out my gas bill file. It looks like by the time I pay for gas , price adjustment, transportation,storage and delivery, I'm paying close to .50 a cubic metre. Based on the Ottawa study of the avg fireplace using about 0.6 cubic metres, I'm using 30 cents for the fireplace pilot per day, that is 9 bucks per month.
Maybe I'll just light the fireplace when I wannt to use it.
Cliffy
Edited 3/2/2009 4:07 pm ET by cliffy
Edited 3/2/2009 4:09 pm ET by cliffy
Probably not much. Since you're heating the space anyway, the pilot will simply add a tiny amount of heat, which, if it were not, the baseboard heaters would make up for anyway. You will pay to heat the room no matter what source the heat comes from. And every BTU helps. The pilot will add about 15,000 to 40,000 BTU's/day to the house. Natural gas is priced by the "therm" (100,000 BTU's = 1 therm), so if you pay $1.00/therm, you'll pay about 15 to 40 cents per day. But you'll pay it anyway.
The same can be said for electric lights being left on in a space that is heated by electric baseboads: since most of the energy that a light uses goes for heat, you really don't save much by turning them off during the heating season.