Home heating oil

[goddessfarmer]

On 10/02/01 the tank was filled.
on 11/10/03 the tank was topped off with 102.9 Gal
on 10/17/06 (today) we purchased 134.5 gal to fill the tank.
Firewood may be hard work, but I'm happy with it.

Comments

[perspicuity.livejournal.com]

firewood rocks :)

and then sometimes the world opens up, and magically, there's all this free wood. we used to have all the pallets we could cart home. for free. hard stuff, burned well. also a butt load of maple and oak. then neighbors needed fallen trees downed or removed. yay more free wood.

also, yay axes :>

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[quietann.livejournal.com]

It's good for you, but...

Retrofitting everyone for woodstoves? I can't see it happening. How many woodstoves would we need, for example? Our little stove can be used to heat the downstairs from rat room to stairway, and the bedroom and computer room directly above it. Not the bedroom above the kitchen, really. So maybe half the house.

We could chop down all the trees on our property and burn them; it might take a few years to use them all. But then what? And we actually have the property with the trees.

Not that I'm saying that there's an infinite supply of oil -- there isn't -- but I do sometimes get a cynical streak when contemplating your situation, as you *have the money* to go green but most people do not.

[quietann.livejournal.com]

(also we'd have no hot water if we didn't use the boiler...)

Prophet without honor...

[chocorua.livejournal.com]

If you'd put in a solar hot water system with gas tankless backup in 2001, it would already have paid back half the investment on a straight avoided cost basis, without considering where the oil profits go, or what the CO2 does. I've been preaching and practicing this for 14 years, but I'm clearly not out of the wilderness.

Details and other free advice available on request...

Re: Prophet without honor...

[quietann.livejournal.com]

Well, things move slowly with Ben, you know :)

Actually, how would the south-facing roof of the *house* do for solar panels? I think you're right about the barn -- too much shadowing, especially with the beech tree (which I don't want to give up).

Also, gas is right out. No gas pipes here, and Ben absolutely will not have a tank installed. Things that go boom ain't fun. Would it be possible to keep the oil tank and boiler as backup for the solar? And any chance of there being a way to connect the solar part to the forced-hot-water heating system?

Re: Prophet without honor...

[chocorua.livejournal.com]

The south roof of your house looked like an excellent solar hot water location to me, but you'd have a better idea how it lies relative to the sun, being there all the time.

Most of the benefit of gas tankless is that it only heats as needed, rather than keep a big thermal mass hot 24/7/365 like a tank heater or your oil furnace. You can get tankless electric, but the economics are not so good. I am not aware of any tankless oil units. We use solar as pre-heat for our gas tankless, so it doesn't run much in the summer, and not as much as it would otherwise in the winter.

You can always locate the propane tank well away from the house, or underground. Yes, a gas leak in the house may blow it up, but a serious oil tank leak generally leaves you with a demolished house and your own personal brownfields site.

[goddessfarmer.livejournal.com]

I wasn't trying to imply that everyone should or even could heat with wood. We use it because we can, as you say. One of the biggest problems is overpopulation and our population distribution. Our wood heat would be much more efficient (per capita) if we had as many people living here as the house could fit - say 2 more comfortably, or 3-5 more in a severe housing crises or farm labor necessity. While we americians each insist on having our own bedroom and multiple grand common spaces in each household we will continue to use up all of our resources much faster than mother nature can replenish them. Other contributers are mass-transit fobia, desire for suburbia, desire for non-local foods, and so forth. I don't claim to be perfect, far from it in fact, but these are things I do think about.

[perspicuity.livejournal.com]

if you have the property, and you rely on wood for "stuff", you replant the trees. i have some basic data in my woodlore books, but suffice to say that one can fairly readily compute usage to acreage and replanting schedules, adjustments may have to be made, but a definite cycle can be accomplished.

one adjustment of course is downsizing the living areas if required, or adjusting what you feel is a comfortable level of heat, wear more clothes, insulate more; large old houses don't tend to be cheap to heat regardless of the methods - ditching a given building isn't out of line either - one day it may come to that. also the method of heating.

i have friends that live up north, they use an external (ie outside) water jacketed furnace. it's VERY efficient. the furnace provides all kinds of hot water for all kinds of uses, the least of which is heating. stoke it every few days. nice stuff. also clean, as there is no burning inside the dwelling.

gas/oil requires no effort but money really. wood and other methods are more labor intensive, but keep your warmer in other ways too :)

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[sarahshevett.livejournal.com]

1. I didn't get any vibe from this that she was suggesting anything of the sort...

2. Trees grow back! You cut some down ,and you plant some!

3. I wouldn't consider trees green, I mean we use a chainsaw to cut ours up. And the smoke is not particularly clean. But, like I said they do grow back, so it is renewable, and they breath carbon dioxide while they grow, so there's that.

4. Money! We could never afford to heat our house with oil or whatever, which is one of the main reasons we do it.
The poorest of the poor heat their houses with wood ( o k maybe manure..)

[chocorua.livejournal.com]

Tree cutting can be fairly green - I have an electric chainsaw and a portable solar power system. We cut cordwood with a PTO-driven saw on our tractor, so while it uses diesel, it does so fairly efficiently and without a lot of smoke. I could build an electric cordwood saw too, and power it off our home solar electric system.

[chocorua.livejournal.com]

From 2001 through 2008 or so, we will be using wood from two projects to re-clear grown up fields, and two project to cut the trees along the edge of a field back to the stone wall (probably 25 years growth). We could get by on 5-8 intensively-managed acres but because of the land we've protected, we have another four miles of stone wall to expose; wood for my lifetime anyway.

Keep in mind that most urban and suburban areas waste enormous amounts of wood, mostly as chips made by the DPW and tree guys. The first person in one of these areas to install a chip-burning furnace will feel like the early bio-diesel people did with fryer oil - you get it for nothing because otherwise they'd have to pay to dump it. The other strategy is to find open conservation land that needs the same "clear the field back to its original size" done to preserve the habitat, view or whatever.