can someone explain coverting CCF's to wood consumption?

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88rxn/a

Member
Hearth Supporter
Feb 12, 2008
145
northeast PA
between last year of october to march i used around 1,000 CCF's of natural gas (national fuel)
looking at a conversion chart i google'd it said this:

cubic feet to gallons (USA) x 7.481

then,
i thought i read that 1 cord of dry hardwood = 150 gallons of oil?

so according to my calculations ill use almost 60 cords huh???
yeah, i need to go back to school....

heres a link to my conversion chart i found.
http://www.iol.ie/~discover/measure.htm

i know alot of factors come into play but id like to get a jump on wood in the spring and would like to know what im up against as far as wood consumption.
 
88rxn/a said:
between last year of october to march i used around 1,000 CCF's of natural gas (national fuel)
looking at a conversion chart i google'd it said this:

cubic feet to gallons (USA) x 7.481

then,
i thought i read that 1 cord of dry hardwood = 150 gallons of oil?

so according to my calculations ill use almost 60 cords huh???
yeah, i need to go back to school....

heres a link to my conversion chart i found.
http://www.iol.ie/~discover/measure.htm

i know alot of factors come into play but id like to get a jump on wood in the spring and would like to know what im up against as far as wood consumption.

Good news: you have to look at BTU content, not volume. A CCF is about 100,000 BTU and a gallon of oil is about 140,000 BTU. You used about 100,000,000 BTU, or about 700 gallons of fuel oil equivalent. Figure 5 cords of wood......
 
OIC, they dont tell me how many BTU's just CCF.

so thats the good news...
whats the bad?? im a noob at this? lol
 
CCF is a wierd way to sell natural gas as the heat content varies from source to source and throughout the year. A more accurate way is by therm, or 100,000 BTU. A cubic foot of nat gas has about 1000 BTUs, but usually a little more. Our utility measures and tracks the heat content continuously and throws a conversion factor in the bill. I guess it allows them to charge a little more as the HC varies from about 1040 to over 1100 in the winter. The 7.48 number is a pure volume conversion that doesn't take into account the fact that oil has a much higher energy density than NG.

I think nofo has your answer.

Chris
 
i have a feeling it will be more than 5 cords.
heating my DHW, and the house will be ALOT warmer.
we kept the T-stat kind of cold last winter.
im going to be safe and have 8 ready i think. i have many pine trees that need cut early spring i will hopefully have dried for next winter to mix in with good hardwood.
thanks for helping!
 
You could also throw in the efficiencies of the appliances and expected btu's of your local wood to refine that number a bit:

ie - 80% efficient gas heater:
100,000,000 btu gas x .80 efficiency = 80,000,000 btu delivered to the heated space


Getting 80 million btu from a 72% efficient wood boiler with oak wood @ 24 million btu/cord
80,000,000 btu / .72 efficiency / 24,000,000 btu per cord = 4.6 cords

In this case, the numbers are pretty close, you'd probably want 5 or more cords anyway, but if the efficiency of the appliances varies a lot or your local wood species has much higher or lower btu's that could swing the numbers higher or lower.
 
interesting...
if i only go through 4.6 cords id be a very happy camper!
im still in the process of insulating the house better.
 
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