Mild weather is killing demand for heating oil prepare for a big drop

[StuckInTheMuck]

This is a great resource to track oil and propane prices. http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_pri_wfr_dcus_nus_w.htm

Avg Oil price at the end of Nov for the northeast was $3.916... This is an all time high.

Back is 2008 it got to $3.696 and then plummeted back to $2.60 by winter of 2009.

I would not expect these prices to fall much if any.

However you are correct that the demand in the US is declining. Has been for years. Mainly a reduction in power generation..

Home heating oil is #2 fuel oil and as such is a distillate whereas a residual fuel is generally #5 or #6 fuel oil, is it not? If that is true, then would this not be a more appropriate chart?

When compared to gasoline over the same period of time you can see that the use of distillates has gone up a slightly greater amount over the period of the chart than has the use of gasoline. While the content of a barrel of crude hasn't changed, this is thought to explain why diesel is more expensive than gasoline.. higher demand.. Thoughts?

 

[StuckInTheMuck]

my thought
why not just put in an electris hot water heater
and not burn any oil
would it be that expensive for electric??
figuring how efficient they (heaters) are now
we are 100% electric here Ohio
pellets for heat
very economical

I have an Amtrol Boiler Mate that stores my hot water and acts as a zone off of the oil furnace. In the past 11 months I have used ~250 gallons of oil to keep the DHW hot. This work out to be $897.50/year at today's oil price of $3.59. Electricity from PSNH is going for ~$0.155kWh.

1 gallon of oil = 115,000 BTU's x 250 gallons = 28,750,000 BTU's
1 kWh of electricity = 3,413 BTU's

So.... 28,750,000/3,413 = 8,423.67kWh * $0.155 = $1,305.67

Looks like it is cheaper to keep my Boiler Mate. However, I'm hoping that someone will find some holes in my projections such that I could justify switching to an alternate fuel source for DHW :smirk:

I think it would be cheaper to keep the Boiler Mate (for possible future use), but plumb it out of the system. That of course depends on what your requirement is for hot water. Your furnace was likely sized to meet both your heating and DHW needs in the dead of winter. The Boiler Mate was added to ensure that on the coldest of days, you have plenty of hot water while heating the house. If you don't use the furnace to heat the house, it is likely that you have a ton of excess capacity that could meet your "on demand" DWH needs. Your calculations make sense for oil vs electric.. That of course assumes certain efficiencies in the system. Assuming that you have your DHW delivered at 120 degrees and it's coming in the house at 50 degrees, you have to heat it 70 degrees. So for each gallon of water heated, you'll need 8.4 x 70 = 588 BTUs. Say you're running 3 showers at 2gpm for an hour (which is of course a lot). You'll need 3 x 2 x 60mins x 588 = 211,000 BTUs to heat the water in that hour (and end up with the furnace at its starting temperature). While this may be more BTU's in an hour than your furnace is rated for, you have to take into account that water in the furnace is likely already 140+ degrees and it's not likely that you'll be using 300 gallons of 120 degree water in an hour. All of those are, of course, rough calculations. Either way, I think taking the Boiler Mate out of the system would save you on your annual bill without jeopardizing your hot water supply.

 

[SmokeyTheBear]

my thought
why not just put in an electris hot water heater
and not burn any oil
would it be that expensive for electric??
figuring how efficient they (heaters) are now
we are 100% electric here Ohio
pellets for heat
very economical

I have an Amtrol Boiler Mate that stores my hot water and acts as a zone off of the oil furnace. In the past 11 months I have used ~250 gallons of oil to keep the DHW hot. This work out to be $897.50/year at today's oil price of $3.59. Electricity from PSNH is going for ~$0.155kWh.

1 gallon of oil = 115,000 BTU's x 250 gallons = 28,750,000 BTU's
1 kWh of electricity = 3,413 BTU's

So.... 28,750,000/3,413 = 8,423.67kWh * $0.155 = $1,305.67

Looks like it is cheaper to keep my Boiler Mate. However, I'm hoping that someone will find some holes in my projections such that I could justify switching to an alternate fuel source for DHW :smirk:

I think it would be cheaper to keep the Boiler Mate (for possible future use), but plumb it out of the system. That of course depends on what your requirement is for hot water. Your furnace was likely sized to meet both your heating and DHW needs in the dead of winter. The Boiler Mate was added to ensure that on the coldest of days, you have plenty of hot water while heating the house. If you don't use the furnace to heat the house, it is likely that you have a ton of excess capacity that could meet your "on demand" DWH needs. Your calculations make sense for oil vs electric.. That of course assumes certain efficiencies in the system. Assuming that you have your DHW delivered at 120 degrees and it's coming in the house at 50 degrees, you have to heat it 70 degrees. So for each gallon of water heated, you'll need 8.4 x 70 = 588 BTUs. Say you're running 3 showers at 2gpm for an hour (which is of course a lot). You'll need 3 x 2 x 60mins x 588 = 211,000 BTUs to heat the water in that hour (and end up with the furnace at its starting temperature). While this may be more BTU's in an hour than your furnace is rated for, you have to take into account that water in the furnace is likely already 140+ degrees and it's not likely that you'll be using 300 gallons of 120 degree water in an hour. All of those are, of course, rough calculations. Either way, I think taking the Boiler Mate out of the system would save you on your annual bill without jeopardizing your hot water supply.

That boiler also has jacket heat loss and is likely less than 85% efficient based solely on a combustion efficiency bases which doesn't take any of the jacket loss into account so your calculation above isn't the whole story.

I'm currently debating going over to an on demand hot water setup.

 

[GrahamInVa]

Home heating oil is #2 fuel oil and as such is a distillate whereas a residual fuel is generally #5 or #6 fuel oil, is it not? If that is true, then would this not be a more appropriate chart?

When compared to gasoline over the same period of time you can see that the use of distillates has gone up a slightly greater amount over the period of the chart than has the use of gasoline. While the content of a barrel of crude hasn't changed, this is thought to explain why diesel is more expensive than gasoline.. higher demand.. Thoughts?

Yea your right, that would only make sense.. i wasn't paying attention.

 

[StuckInTheMuck]

That boiler also has jacket heat loss and is likely less than 85% efficient based solely on a combustion efficiency bases which doesn't take any of the jacket loss into account so your calculation above isn't the whole story.

I'm currently debating going over to an on demand hot water setup.

I agree on the jacket heat loss. I guess my point was that if Brad is heating his house with pellets, he only needs the furnace for hot water when he's home and only for heat if he goes away for a long period of time. If that assumption is true, the extra storage tank is, in my opinion, overkill. One upside is that he would continue to have hot water in the event of a power loss for a longer period of time than he would if he was just working off the furnace assuming that he didn't have a generator backup. Wow, a lot of assuming.. I know what that will do to ME!!.

 

[StuckInTheMuck]

Yea your right, that would only make sense.. i wasn't paying attention.

No worries.. I'm just glad that I finally found a forum where people talk about this stuff...

 

[cuznvin]

Even if the price of oil goes down, I still dont want to give them my money. They continue to rip us off, so screw them.

 

[BradH70]

That boiler also has jacket heat loss and is likely less than 85% efficient based solely on a combustion efficiency bases which doesn't take any of the jacket loss into account so your calculation above isn't the whole story.

I'm currently debating going over to an on demand hot water setup.

I agree on the jacket heat loss. I guess my point was that if Brad is heating his house with pellets, he only needs the furnace for hot water when he's home and only for heat if he goes away for a long period of time. If that assumption is true, the extra storage tank is, in my opinion, overkill. One upside is that he would continue to have hot water in the event of a power loss for a longer period of time than he would if he was just working off the furnace assuming that he didn't have a generator backup. Wow, a lot of assuming.. I know what that will do to ME!!.

I'm not sure that an "On Demand" setup would burn less oil though. My wife is home most of the day with my 2 1/2 year old son, so I'm sure that the hot water is being used more then if the house was empty all day. And with that, an average of about 0.8 gallons is used each day to keep the water hot. The Boiler Mate is one of the most efficient units on the market for an off boiler system. I'm looking for an alternative that will guaranty a cost savings over oil.

 

[Salty]

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/storie...ME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2011-12-23-15-04-00

screw the wx you need to worry about this baloney. ugh.

 

[StuckInTheMuck]

I'm not sure that an "On Demand" setup would burn less oil though. My wife is home most of the day with my 2 1/2 year old son, so I'm sure that the hot water is being used more then if the house was empty all day. And with that, an average of about 0.8 gallons is used each day to keep the water hot. The Boiler Mate is one of the most efficient units on the market for an off boiler system. I'm looking for an alternative that will guaranty a cost savings over oil.

I just have a furnace in my house for heat and hot water. We rent. We moved in on July 1 and are only staying for a year. Early in July, I got sick of listening to the furnace kick on all the time to heat water, so I asked my wife if it was okay if we just leave it off and turn it on when we need hot water. She's a sport, so she was game. I have two kids, 4 years and 2 years old. When they need a bath, we flip on the switch to heat the water and when it is up to temp, we turn it off. With that hot water (in just the furnace) the kids get a bath and the wife and I get a shower (or two). It takes 3-4 minutes to get the furnace up to temperature and because the switch is off it doesn't turn on again. My furnace is rated at about 140k BTU and it's about 80% efficient. I'm not sure if that means that it burns 140k BTU of oil per hour or if it burns 175k BTU of oil to get 140k BTU of heat. Either way, I figure that we burn less than 1/10th of a gallon of oil every time we turn it on (which is either every or every other day in the summer). We lost a bunch of oil by leaving the furnace running for the first two weeks of July, but made up for that the rest of the summer. By the end of Sept, we had burned less than 30 gallons of oil for hot water. It was refreshing to see all of the neighbors get oil deliveries and know that still had 7/8 of a 275 gallon tank. Landlord even contacted us as she was concerned that the tank was perilously low and in danger of flaming out the furnace. That's a different story, but I assured her that we were fine. When doing dishes, we actually heat the water for washing dishes in the microwave. A small tub of soapy water cuts through the grease and then we rinse with cold water. That way we avoid running the water for 2 minutes just to get hot water to the tap. Overkill? Sure, but it's saving us money and more importantly keeping the money out of Big Oil's filthy pockets.

Now that I'm heating with my furnace (because the fireplace was determined to be no good in the beginning of Dec) I flip the switch on at 6am to heat the portion of the house that we use.. It's a total of about 1800 sqft and we have 3 zones. We run the heat in the loop that covers the dining room, kitchen and living room in an early 70's poorly insulated raised ranch in southern RI. We leave the bedrooms and the finished basement off. The ancient thermostat is set at 64 which makes it 68 in the heated part of the house. In the evening, depending on outside temperature, we'll shut off the furnace sometime between 3 hours and 30 minutes before its time for the kids to go to bed which means that the furnace is off for around 12 hours. We use an electric heater to keep one bedroom at about 70 degrees and let the rest of the house go. It got down to 14 degrees a couple of days ago and the house (minus the bedroom) was 43 degrees. I thought about turning on a fan to get some kind of wind chill factor going. I ran around the house with a IR Laser Temp Gun to make sure that I wasn't endangering any of the pipes by doing this and the coldest place I could find by the front door was 2.5 degrees C. In the morning at 6am, I flipped on the switch for the furnace which labored to bring the temp back up to 68 by 8am where it sat for the rest of the day. I checked the change in my electrical usage in Dec vs Nov and we have gone up 10kW per day,(a 50% increase to 30kW per day) so at .13 per kWh we pay an extra $1.30 per day in electric charges to keep our 1320 W electric heater going.

Do I need to save the money? Not really. Its become kind of a game with the landlord. We're supposed to use this one oil company and she's convinced we have been buying oil from someone else. She just doesn't get it and has even threatened to evict us. With all of that labor, we have been on this tank of oil for 6 months and it still reads 3/4... The house is a comfortable 68 degrees when we are home during the day and we have hot water when we need it..

So to get to your initial question, I think it's two questions. 1. How can I save money now with my current system? You can do what we are doing. You're in a slightly colder climate, but I'm sure your home's insulation is much better than mine. 2. What will save me money in the future for my DHW? That's the burning question. I heard someone talking about doubling or tripling electric rates with all the coal fired power plants they are shutting down this year due to EPA issues. Will crude go to $200/bbl or will the economy slow down and send it back down to $50? Can you get access to a supply of wood? If so, maybe you can heat your house with an add on wood boiler and use the pellet stove for aesthetics and use the wood boiler for your DHW. Maybe you can defray some of your costs for electric with solar panels or for oil with a solar hot water system. Other than that, the only thing I can think of is to capture some of the heat from your home to warm the water in your cold water supply line to your boiler add on prior to entering the system. Perhaps a few loops of copper tubing will warm the water a few degrees.

I'm by no means a professional in this industry.. far from it. I've just had one too many trips to the middle east and as such do everything I can to minimize my use of oil, even if I do have to use it for now. And I still have the full support of my wife, or at least I haven't seen the divorce papers yet.. haha.

Merry Christmas to you and yours.

 

[RidgeRunner56]

Looks like oil is on the rise again

Oil Prices rising

 

[jbfrost912]

I just paid $3.449 for oil. Have used about 300 gallons this year, mostly for hot water.

Anybody thought about installing a wood pellet furnace/boiler?

 

[imacman]

Latest reason for rise in price: Iran threatening to close Strait of Hormuz.

 

[pollywog]

I don't see no price drop. Just paid 3.69 a gallon. Thankfully it was only for 49 gallons. Still totaled $166. Thankfully I put in the pellet stove this year.

 

[slangtruth]

I just paid $3.449 for oil. Have used about 300 gallons this year, mostly for hot water.

Anybody thought about installing a wood pellet furnace/boiler?

Several of us have done so, a furnace in my case but there are boiler owners here, too. There's a learning curve and you can leave thoughts of "a bag a day" way behind in the dust (I average 2.5 - 3 bags a day and have gone as high as 4, and I don't try to fully heat all of my large, badly insulated building). But I've gotten through this uncommonly warm fall/early winter without burning any oil at all as of yet, and compared to last year (at today's oil prices) have saved about a grand.

 

[jmcp]

3.5 to 4 bags a day seems like a lot again I have a stove not a furnance how good are these pellet stove boilers do they need the same cleaning every day or two as a stove.I got flooded in the last storm and thought about putting a pellet boiler in but I went with a new oil burner instead $6000. later I still do not turn on the boiler.TO me the oil is emergency or backup heat when the stove cannot keep up

 

[RKS130]

I was listening to an analysis of home heating oil prices and their relationship to the price of a barrel of oil. The bottom line was that heating oil prices do not go up and down with the price of crude because of the worldwide surge in demand for diesel, which is basically the same stuff. The US is exporting diesel in larger and larger quantities because it is worth even more overseas than it is here as heating oil. End result is that oil prices will continue to rise no matter what.

I am still working on how to eliminate oil as the fuel for my domestic hot water, which we still draw off the coil in the oil fired boiler. Since we have natural gas in the house, perhaps an on demand gas fired hot water supply? Anyone have any thoughts on the cost factor there?

 

[mrbill]

You should never put any type of heater in a bedroom,it is very dangerous and against code.#2 fuel oil is 140,000 btu's per gallon,not 115,000.In my neck of the woods on demand water heaters do not work worth a damn,heat pumps are also only marginal.It is usually too cold for them to keep up.

 

[Chain]

Latest reason for rise in price: Iran threatening to close Strait of Hormuz.

They do that every other day. It's the usual BS story used by the oil conglomerates to spin their price gouging...

 

[SmokeyTheBear]

Latest reason for rise in price: Iran threatening to close Strait of Hormuz.

They do that every other day. It's the usual BS story used by the oil conglomerates to spin their price gouging...

More likely it is the commodity traders that use it to spin the fear and doubt machine known as the market.

 

[Chain]

Latest reason for rise in price: Iran threatening to close Strait of Hormuz.

They do that every other day. It's the usual BS story used by the oil conglomerates to spin their price gouging...

More likely it is the commodity traders that use it to spin the fear and doubt machine known as the market.

I suspect they're both to blame and always have been....

 

[jtakeman]

Latest reason for rise in price: Iran threatening to close Strait of Hormuz.

They do that every other day. It's the usual BS story used by the oil conglomerates to spin their price gouging...

More likely it is the commodity traders that use it to spin the fear and doubt machine known as the market.

I suspect they're both to blame and always have been....

Futures anyone?

 

[SmokeyTheBear]

Latest reason for rise in price: Iran threatening to close Strait of Hormuz.

They do that every other day. It's the usual BS story used by the oil conglomerates to spin their price gouging...

More likely it is the commodity traders that use it to spin the fear and doubt machine known as the market.

I suspect they're both to blame and always have been....

Futures anyone?

Already in my garage. Fully hedged for the next 3 calender years. I'll replenish when the price isn't at heating season rates.

 

[jtakeman]

Latest reason for rise in price: Iran threatening to close Strait of Hormuz.

They do that every other day. It's the usual BS story used by the oil conglomerates to spin their price gouging...

More likely it is the commodity traders that use it to spin the fear and doubt machine known as the market.

I suspect they're both to blame and always have been....

Futures anyone?

Already in my garage. Fully hedged for the next 3 calender years. I'll replenish when the price isn't at heating season rates.

No wonder pellets just jumped $30 bucks a ton! ;-)