# Need Suggestions



## valentine92 (Sep 29, 2009)

We live in a ranch home with a full inground basement.  Last year we installed a pellet stove on the main floor and it heated it very well.  
Now the problem is we have oil hotwater baseboard heat as well as oil hotwater. Both the furnance and the oil tank are 45 years old.  Our friend is the tech and he told us to keep an eye on the oil tank it might need to be replaced soon.  

We are very happy with the pellet stove and didnt use the oil heat at all last year.  We did use the oil for hotwater though. A new tank is not cheap, and since we will eventually have to replace the furnace also we were thinking maybe we should get off oil totally.  We do not have natural gas here and we dont like propane.

Any suggestions?  We were thinking about converting to  electric hotwater  but do we need to have a central heating system in the house?  We are not planning on selling anytime soon but dont want to have any problems in the future if we do.  We also would like a back up source of heat just in case the pellet stove goes down.  Any suggestions or advise?


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## flyingcow (Sep 29, 2009)

I know there are various varieties of tankless heaters that should do what you want. But, are you looking to get away from the oil altogether? Or get away from fossil fuels? Do you want to swap over to wood heat completely?
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 My half azzed thought is your friend/tech is right. Tanks' on it's way out. Put in a tankless water heater (or heaters) to do your DHW and if needed will take care of your baseboard with a combination of said heaters?  Pellet boilers are becoming more available.
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I'm assuming others will chime in, I'm only here to really confuse things.


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## Shari (Sep 29, 2009)

Here's my attempt at muddying the waters:  In my location it is very difficult to sell a home without 'central heat' (oil, electric, gas or propane).  Wood burners and pellet stoves have not yet reached the 'desired' term of 'central heat'.  Depends what is 'normal' for your area.

Shari


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## kork (Sep 29, 2009)

What happens when the power goes out?  Do you have a back up generator?  Will the pellet stove operate without electricity?
Hank


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## valentine92 (Sep 29, 2009)

Well when the electricity goes out the oil heat wouldnt work either, so that is really not a concern.  We have a fireplace which we could use in emergencies and we could also get a backup generator.

To replace the tank we are looking at around 1200- 1400.  To get a regular electric hotwater heater will run me $200 labor plus the cost of the heater.  Tankless water heater sounds like a good option to look into.  

Maybe I should call up a realtor and ask them about a central heating system.  Or maybe we could install electric baseboards on top of the hotwater baseboard heaters, I wonder if that would be sufficient and be good enough as another heating option.  A lot of homes here are heated with electric baseboard heaters so that might be an option in the future, not sure how funny it would look adding electric baseboard heaters on top of the hotwater baseboards though.  Our electric rates are going up in January probably 30% but we wouldnt really be too concerned with that since we wont use it as a primary source of heat.

Is there a such thing as a electric furnance that we could hook up to the hotwater baseboards does anyone have any information on them?


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## flyingcow (Sep 29, 2009)

If the oil tank is 45 yrs old, it has to go. Electric BB over hot water BB, is reduntant at best. I've had very good luck with my oil boiler(80,000btu)+boiler mate for heating my 1800 sq/ft hse in northernmaine9(WITH 3 KIDS). For what info we gathered, replace the oil furnace(and tank) and use your baseboard system.


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## Dix (Sep 29, 2009)

I'd think about electric or solar for hot water, and worry about the burner & tank later. You're not planning on selling any time soon, so why push it?

If you have well water, It's my understanding they can be hard on those instant heaters.

Been researching this myself some, as I'm in the same boat with the hot water. No NG here, either.


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## burnham (Sep 29, 2009)

If your boiler and oil tank are 45 years old, they are both junk.  If you are not looking to sell anytime soon, and you can live with it, an electric water heater is the cheapest way out for you.   An on-demand water heater is out because you don't have the gas.  

 Don't put electric baseboard on top of the hot water baseboard, it will look like poo and it will still not help the re-sale down the road. If your pellet stove is keeping up by itself live with it that way.  Almost nobody wants electric heat.   The cost of wiring electric heat would be better spent on a boiler or furnace, at least it would be money you'd get back at some point.

 Can you do away with the forced hot water system all together?  I don't know if the whole system is 45 years old or not, but if it is there are probably more than a couple things ready to go wrong with it.  Consider a forced hot air system.  You would have to have duct work installed, but with that comes the option of air conditioning.  

 An electric boiler?  I have never seen one but I'm pretty sure they're out there.


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## dougstove (Sep 30, 2009)

Hi;
I faced similar decisions 3 years ago.

In stages:
One spring we completely removed an older oil fired hotwater baseboard system, that did not work well.
Over the summer we installed some wall-mount electric units as backup for a woodstove (now a Pacific Energy Super27 -we love it).

The woodstove is now the primary heat, the electric units just  keep the place from freezing if we are away.
Then we used the old oil fired hotwater heater to empty the remaining fuel in the oil tank over about a year, and then replaced it with an electric hot water tank, and finally removed the smelly oil tank.

More recently, we installed a solar hot water pre-heat (Thermo Dynamics), that feeds into the electric hotwater heater.  If we time laundry, dishwasher and some showers/baths, the solar covers about 70% of our hot water for the year, with about 6 year payback.

It works well.  The waste heat from the solar system keeps the basement warm and pleasant.
There is no oily smell any more, and no noisy oil furnace running.
It was a big relief to get the oil tank out of the house.


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## Heem (Sep 30, 2009)

My house was forced air oil, very poorly setup and the furnace was 35+ yrs old. I put in the wood stove and electric baseboard, and it's great. I spent a little extra money on digital programmable thermostats for the electirc baseboard that can actually "dim"  the voltage to the heaters when full heat is not needed : http://www.smarthome.com/300604/Programmable-Thermostat-TH106/p.aspx

That said the electric is VERY expensive to run. Where I live they USED to have a special rate for people that heat with electric.. AFTER I installed them I found out they canceled that plan. (greedy bastards). The electric baseboard units are very cheap to buy and install if you know what you are doing and are comfortable with that kind of thing. I had an electrician (ok, my brother..) install the breaker and make the final connections cuz I'm skeert of 220v.


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## JustWood (Sep 30, 2009)

Don't know what size tank you were pricing but NEW 275 gallon tanks here go for around $350-$450. Where in PA are you?


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## savageactor7 (Sep 30, 2009)

Val my neighbor saved a ton of LP by going with the tankless on demand water heater.

I've always heard that hot water heat was one of the best heats available...so I dunno if I'd be hasty to change a system that was working when maybe a little tweaking could be the better move.

I was away and my wife switched from oil backup furnace to LP to our mutual regret. LP is loud and we're always wondering ....where's the heat?

As far as having a 45 yo oil tank...hummm I'd put my faith in that before anything made today. When is the last time you've ever heard of a tank failure? Just ask your insurance man...I betcha it's extremely rare. Perhaps that tech wants to sell you something you don't really need? One final thing the older we get the more critical it becomes that we have a backup source of heat that we can fall back on. Suppose you want to go the FL for 6 weeks?


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## SolarAndWood (Sep 30, 2009)

This is the electric backup I am considering with the wood boiler:

http://www.burnham.com/pdf/carefree_lit.pdf

If/Before you go away from central heat, you should also make sure there aren't issues with your Certificate of Occupancy.


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## timfromohio (Sep 30, 2009)

I'd keep some form of backup heat that can operate when you are not there - so I'd not rely solely on the pellet stove.  Why don't you want an LP tank?  I'd switch to a gas hot water heat and furnace.  Having a nice big LP tank could also power a backup generator.  Regarding the tankless heaters - they are expensive and can be utterly destroyed by hard water.


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## Highbeam (Sep 30, 2009)

"Is there a such thing as a electric furnance that we could hook up to the hotwater baseboards does anyone have any information on them? "

Yes, you can buy electric boilers. If you don't want electric or oil then I would use propane. 

Your decision here will have huge impacts to the resale value of the home. I would propose that most new homeowners are not going to consider the pellet stove as a central heater and will then consider the central system as their heat source during the home purchase. Honestly, I would replace or repair the oil system as needed to keep it functional and so long as it is cost effective to maintain. Replacement would be with the lower efficiency (cheaper) unit since operating cost won't effect your budget and even the worst of today's boilers will be much better than your 45 YO boiler.


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## flyingcow (Sep 30, 2009)

if your tank is in your basement, tank failure will not be good. It's really bad when it happens.


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## Gooserider (Oct 1, 2009)

Before doing away w/ your oil setup, I would check w/ your homeowners ins., mortage bank, and local code people - from what I've heard, most will definitely insist on some kind of automatic control central backup type heating system - i.e. fossil fuel or electric...  Also it is good to have something like that as a backup in case you want to travel in the winter, or have some other reason you can't feed a stove.

Next the question is what to replace it with?

Electric is expensive to install for the wiring, although the units themselves are fairly cheap.  It will also have a VERY high operating cost.  Note that most building codes also call for higher insulation in an electric heat house, though I don't know if that would also apply to a retrofit.  Electric tank water heaters aren't to expensive, but the electric tankless units have been reported by several as needing very expensive extra heavy duty wiring, and not really offering all that much for savings.

I know you said you don't like LP, and I can't say I blame you, but it might be a decent low cost option.  However judging from the reported experience of some of our other users, I would advise you to get a long term contract IN WRITING from your LP supplier that specifies that you don't have to make minimum purchases in order to get decent prices, service, etc...  Some of our users have had some hassles because they didn't burn as much LP as they used to due to the wood burner.

Oil might also make sense - I would get a specific evaluation on the tank, it might or might not be a problem.  The boiler could be.

I would say you are lucky to have hydronics, I HATE our houses forced hot air system - noisy, drafty, blows dirt all over, and wastes huge amounts of energy just running the blowe to get the heat from the furnace to the rest of the house.  OTOH, if your hydronic piping works well now, it will probably continue to work well for the forseeable future with only minor upgrades (i.e. new lower energy cost circs and the like)

What do you presently use for cooking?

If I were picking, I'd keep the hydronics, and look at adding solar.  I would probably replace the boiler and maybe the tank, either sticking with oil, or going to LP.  If I did LP I'd use a tankless heater fed by a solar pre-heater for DHW, and also consider using it for cooking.

Gooserider


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## jebatty (Oct 1, 2009)

Two ideas:
1) An LP wall mounted heater. We heat our house with wood, do have electric baseboard backup, but also installed for a few hundred $$ an LP wall mounted heater, 35,000 btu, because we live in a rural area and a major power outage from a storm is a big risk factor. The heater operates on a millivolt thermostat and convection, so it needs no electricity to operate. With a 100 gal LP tank, in a pinch (no wood heat and no electricity) it will keep the house above freezing for about 2 weeks before the LP runs out. Peace of mind.
2) An electric hot water heater, with added insulation, heat traps, and insulated hw pipes as much as possible. See Elec Hot Water


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## valentine92 (Oct 1, 2009)

Thank you all for the suggestions.  Maybe we should reconsider LP.  Do they make boilers that can hook up to a hotwater baseboard system?  

Another thought we have. We currently have central air, all the registers are on the ceiling.  Would we be able to put a heat pump in our attic and use the current registers?  If so do you think it would heat the house sufficiently since the registers are on the ceilings and not on the floor?  Maybe we could use our ceiling fans to pull the heat down?

Which do you think would be more cost effective to install and for the long run LP boiler or a heatpump?


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## craigsward (Oct 1, 2009)

I am in a funaced forced air house now and it is not nearly as comfortable as the radiant heat you get from a hot water boiler setup, which i previously had.  I would replace your boiler and tank.  If you shop around it may prove to be the cheapest route if you need a complete system.  You already have the piping done.  Its not your primary heat so i wouldn't worry about buying a really high efficiency boiler.  Putting in forced air will be costly with the ductwork and furnace, and LP.  I doubt your AC registers that are ceiling mounted will be sufficient for heat.


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## Gooserider (Oct 1, 2009)

valentine92 said:
			
		

> Thank you all for the suggestions.  Maybe we should reconsider LP.  Do they make boilers that can hook up to a hotwater baseboard system?


 Yes, lots of different options in that area.  Essentially anything you can get in one fossil fuel you can get in the other two.  I have heard that some of the really high efficiency mod-con boilers do work a little better with NG or LP however...  



> Another thought we have. We currently have central air, all the registers are on the ceiling.  Would we be able to put a heat pump in our attic and use the current registers?  If so do you think it would heat the house sufficiently since the registers are on the ceilings and not on the floor?  Maybe we could use our ceiling fans to pull the heat down?


  Not an expert and this is definitely one that you would need to have your homes actual system evaluated by an HVAC guy, but what I've been told is that a system that was designed just for heating or cooling will not do a good job if you try to make it do the other job.  The compromises needed to do a combination heating / cooling setup also tend to give a system that is going to do worse than a dedicated system at one task, especially if one tries to do it all with just one set of registers.  (I've seen some that suggest putting a high and a low mounted outlet in each register location and switch the outlets when going from heating to cooling, but I forget the details)

Also, heat pumps tend to be a less efficient in cold weather - they really only work well in certain climates.  For instance we are told that in New England, they are reccomended in southern CT and RI, but not in MA and points north because our average winter temps are too cold.



> Which do you think would be more cost effective to install and for the long run LP boiler or a heatpump?


  I would suggest that this is the kind of question that might be best asked on some of the energy efficiency expert sites, or through your local utility companies...  The answer is variable depending on just what kind of climate you have, the type of equipment, etc...    My suspicion is that the LP setup would be less expensive and easier to get installed, but I don't have the data that would be needed to figure the operating cost numbers...  Also it depends on the heat pump - Air-air heat pumps are the least expensive to install, but have the worst efficiency.  Air-Ground or geothermal pumps can offer tremendous efficiency, but have such high install costs that it is questionable whether or not they would ever pay for themselves with savings...

Gooserider


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## raven (Oct 3, 2009)

ok ill throw out my thought. oil is not a bad backup,a new tank should only run 300 to 400. use your existing duct work. im not sold on instant water heaters over any length of time. although i do have a 1906 rudd instant thats interesting. still works ...lol thing is fed with a 1 inch gas line and uses a 1 inch copper coil over a open burner..lol.  as far as electric water heat i hate slow recovery time.


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