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

[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.