Pro-Pain Heating

[snousle]

Wow, I'm suffering total sticker shock over the price of propane heating. Bill had mentioned something about high propane usage, and the figure he gave was sort of ridiculous, so I thought he must be reading the meter wrong. But no - since the tank was hooked up about two months ago, we've gone through over two hundred gallons!

The builder had the furnace turned on at 72 degrees, 24 hours a day to dry out the house before putting in the floor. So it's understandable that he used a lot of LP doing it. But we left the thermostat at 65 on Saturday night, and used five gallons overnight! It's been cold, sure, but come ON, it can't use that much, can it? I figured something must be disconnected.

Well, I checked the Title 24 calculations, and our house comes in at 38 kBTU/sf-year. So that's about 100 million BTU/yr, which takes about a thousand gallons of propane. Say we use it 200 days a year, that's 5 gallons a day - and night before last was a good bit colder than average.

So, um, yeah. Five gallons! Dang, I could go on a pretty long motorcycle ride with that kind of energy. It's not that we can't afford it, it's that when you see the 500 gallon tank sitting there you realize just how profligate our energy use really is. Even before the recent price spiral, I've been a real energy bug, so this comes as something of a shock.

I think we can cut this down a lot by hunting down drafts and figuring out the airflow. It's definitely time for a wood stove. Maybe we can get some good spring-clearance deals. Who would have known we'd want one in April? I'd happily chop wood to save $20 on a night of heat.

The meter has a cubic-foot dial that is marked in tenths, and it just so happens that at current prices, each tick costs roughly a penny. I've been running various gas appliances to see just how much things cost. The hot water in the kitchen is about $3/hr, the furnace about $4/hr. Doesn't sound like much - it's hard to believe that the slowly creeping dial, measuring out pennies ever so gradually, can cost so much over time!

Comments

[furr-a-bruin.livejournal.com]

Hm... you're probably right about drafts. Also - if you don't have curtains or blinds in yet - and even if you've got double-glazed windows, window coverings can make a surprising difference in how much heat loss there is.

Also ... you probably already figured this out, but LP has only about 65% the energy content per gallon as residential heating oil, so the number of gallons used will be higher. (I don't know what kind of heating energy supply you're used to....)

All this makes me appreciate how long my catalytic tent heater will run on one of those little propane cylinders.... ;)

[furr-a-bruin.livejournal.com]

The thing is - he has LOTS of wood... to burn, even. ;)

What I'm wondering is how much it would cost - and how deep he'd have to go - to drill a geothermal tap. He's not all that far from the Geysers complex, one of the biggest geothermal power setups in the world.

[snousle.livejournal.com]

May I ask what the square footage on the church is?

At 8 kBTU per pound, and the heating energy specified in our Title 24 calcs of 40 kBTU/sft-year, we would require 6 tons a year to heat 2500 square feet.

However, that figure is based on some far-out adjustments that account for the varying cost of energy throughout the day, so I don't know quite what it really means.

Our heating "zones" are still not working, the commercial kitchen is being heated unnecessarily, and there are some unidentified drafts, so our heating isn't quite under control. But things still don't add up satisfactorily. I still have the feeling something is drastically wrong.

[snousle.livejournal.com]

What was it that led you to conclude that 3 tons of pellets will last you two years?

We, too, have a high ceiling in the main room, which slopes from 9 to 16 feet, which might add to the cost.
Even after tweaking things and heating only that room, we had another 5 gallon night. It's driving me nuts!

[snousle.livejournal.com]

Well we've got a motorcycle you can use if you want to come visit! Great riding out here ya know.

[darkphuque.livejournal.com]

I am surprised that you don't have fireplaces.... modern ones can heat quite efficiently....

[allanh.livejournal.com]

Can any of the energy load be diverted from propane to solar or wind power?

[snousle.livejournal.com]

Wood is the obvious alternative, we just haven't bought the stove yet.

[beastbriskett.livejournal.com]

Our 1600 sq.ft. house's forced air heater used between 180-200 gallons of propane per month in the winter. We'd replaced the old one with a new efficient unit, which helped bring usage down, but the cost rose at the same time, so we ended up paying about the same anyway. Five gallons a day isn't too bad. Do you heat water with propane, too?

[snousle.livejournal.com]

OK, now that's very interesting because that's the first usage I've seen that compare to ours. Where was this house located? Or do you mean your current SF house?

My dad's place in BC, which is also new and of comparable size, uses half of what we do, and that's the dead of winter in the Kootenays.

[backrubbear.livejournal.com]

Zone heating. Make sure you can take unused rooms and seal them off from the heating system.

[snousle.livejournal.com]

We already have three zones, of which we are attempting to use only one. But the system seems to have a mind of its own and turns things on and off at random. One zone is on when it's supposed to be off, the other is off when it says it is on. Also, we haven't got finish carpentry yet, so there are gaps around the interior doors that introduce copious amounts of cold air from the supposedly unheated zones.

Yeah, it's a freaking mess, we need to call the HVAC guy.

[barbarian-rat.livejournal.com]

Pellet stoves use electricity to move the pellets, with your abundance of wood a good efficient wood stove should do the trick.