What do you heat your home with?

[rubber duck]

What does evrybody use gas, oil, wood, corn, geo thermal?

Right now I have propane but looking into a corn stove.

So what do you do to keep warm?

[fishnutbob]

Oil for the main heat, and I put a pellet burner in my finished basement. Its great and heats 24 hrs on 40lbs of pellet's. It also has a timed blower. I use corn but it burns real hot I mix it with the pellets.

[Finns]

Electric is main with kerosene and then wood as backups.

[Valv]

I have 3 wives......and many daughters.....

Just kidding of course, I have propane, but I am curious to see what is a good alternative.

[MNice]

Natural gas, and I'm even in the country We happen to have a pipeline close by and were offered to hook us up. I live in a woods and thought about wood, but after you figure the extra cost of insurance and everything, I'll stick with my $80.00 per month budget. I only wish my gasoline budget would be that cheap

[Nova]

I also have natural gas and don't live in the city. I have a good fireplace that we run evry minute we are home. I get the wood when I am hunting for free except labor of course. The fire place with fan will keep the furnace from running even in the coldest days of winter. After about 3 hours of the fire not being stoked the furnace will take over. I sure think the wood saves me a lot of money, plus it's like having a camp fire in the living room.

[Dan Thiem]

Guys, eight years ago I went all out on alternative heating. We have an old five bedroom house in the country and I ended up going with an outdoor water boiler. It's the Aqua-Therm brand.

All kinds of units out there I just went with that brand for price and convienence.

Now after eight years of cutting, hauling, restacking, splitting, (by hand with malls and wedges), then restacking I'm calling it quits. We had no other heat source other than that stove. I had a lot of problems, all due to operator error, not the stoves fault.

I could never go on an ice fishing trip that would be overnight, let alone a week. Always had to feed the smoking dragon. Twice a day every day. Start in late September and end in late May.

The first few years weren't too bad. Kind of a neat novelty. The smell of the wood stove is nice. Ya right! Long after the shine wore off and it wasn't such a novelty I hated the smell. There was times when the smoke would drop right down off the stack and smother ya. Creosote (sp.?) makes a thick bellowing smoke that's not like any girlscout campfire.

After a few years of going to neighbors woods and cutting and hauling and stacking, I switched to having culled logs delivered. Very nice hardwood. Straight grained. Split (yep by hand)real easy, and all delivered to my house. But it was about $700.00 a year for buying wood.

I might as well spend twice that and just burn LP. So I did, I got a new gas furnace this year.

Free at last....Free at last! See ya you fire breathing dinasour.

[Mark Christianson]

Geo-Thermal heat pump.

I heat and cool the house off well water. Slick as snot!

(Yes, can you believe you can heat a house with well water that is 50-55 degrees????)

It does it. The temps at the vents are around 95 to 100 degrees if I remember right. Normal furnaces put out 100-105 degree heat at the vent. I think that was the numbers.

The water gets moved to my pond out by the road in the summer, and in the winter is goes out to a pseudo drainfield that is about 3 ft underground. In the winter it percolates up out of the ground back by the swamp behind the house, and the birds and deer have a nice little water hole in mid winter. Its just like a spring basically from the looks of it.

[CALVINIST]

Fireline?

(Sorry, couldn't help it!)

[marine_man]

Electric Heat, supplemented by Kerosene when it's really cold out...

marine_man

[gilby]

We heat our house with corn and use natural gas as a back up. We live in a rambler and heats the whole house 2100 square feet and better than when we just use gas. I work for a farmer in the spring and fall and buy my corn from him. He takes it out of my pay, so I like to think that I"m heating my house for free. Our gas bills were $40.00 a month last winter and that is just because of our gas stove and water heater.

[echotrail]

Natural gas on a $90 per month budget. Last week it was announced there would be a 20% increase in natural gas next year, so I figured another $18 per mo ($108). WRONG. Just got the notice our monthly budget will be $130. Someone at the gas co. needs a new calculator! They want to sit on the extra $ and suck up some interest, then next summer they will gladly refund your overpayment less the interest of course.

[upnorth]

Natural gas, and I heard that there will be a 30% increase. Ain't looking forward to that

Why is it that the only things that really go up dramatically in price are those that you can't do without? Heating fuel, gas for your vehicle, homeowners insurance, car insurance, health insrance etc. and the price of a dang TV that I can do without goes down. How the hell does that work?

[Kaz]

Drain it down and let it freeze up... I go to Florida. No heat needed down there... Oh, that's the lake place, I turn the heat to 55F at home and do it with natural gas, that's no sweat with the thermo's from the sun during the day... Kaz

[The Grebe]

Part of the heat for our home comes from friction, anomosity, grating nerves, fist fights and rasslin matches! We lie alot and tell tale stories, because the hot air helps also.

If it gets to cold, we each have a tread mill, danged good ones, that we have found at the ends of just about every other driveway in the neighborhood.

We keep it just warm enough to keep the pipes from freezing in the winter, we each eat a jalapeno pepper before turning in and wear snowmobile suits to bed!

Centerpoint, formerly Minnegasco....we, like millions of others, are at their mercy.

[backlash 1]

Electric storage furnace. Holds 4000 pounds of bricks, charges up at night. Up here we have off peak rates for this and water heating. Last winter, the very coldest month, our total electric bill was $200.00, this is heat and all other electric usage. If ANYONE can beat that without the manual labor of cutting wood, I would like to know.

[Valv]

Quote:

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Electric storage furnace. Holds 4000 pounds of bricks, charges up at night. Up here we have off peak rates for this and water heating. Last winter, the very coldest month, our total electric bill was $200.00, this is heat and all other electric usage. If ANYONE can beat that without the manual labor of cutting wood, I would like to know.

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Interesting. How does it work ? Any specific brand we can look at ? Web sites ?

And most imposratnt issue...PRICE ? I can live with a 30% increase in heating cost, if alternative is spending $8,000 in extra equipment, I'll never see the break even point.

[Aquaman01]

Right now it's natr gas - but when we build (someday, eh?) it'll be geo-thermal and passive solar.

[ChuckN]

Propane, and the way it's looking this year I may have to turn the heat down to 50 in the house and live in the garage with the woodstove.

[hawkeye43]

I have propane too, I thought about turning it down to 40 and live in the fishhouse on the lake, 8x17 is easier to heat than the home.

[Gadgetman]

Geo thermal heat pump on off peak with a propane back up for when they start to cycle the electricity. We use pressurized gas instead of ground water. Monthly bill for the heat pump is about $35 per month in Dec. Jan. and Feb. also used about 150 gallons of propane in '04. I also have a pellet stove in the finished basement and used one ton of pellets ($150). Total square footage of about 4500 sq ft. I am pretty pleased with these costs.In addition it air conditions very cheaply, less than $10 per month in the summer and you could hang meat in my house in the summer . Also belong to an electric co-op and our rates have been stable for at least 10 years. I am very pleased with the above systems. Would recomend the geo thermal to everybody, tho there are some obvious up front costs involved

[Slyster]

Unreal.. I didn't even know these options existed. We are tied into the standard natural gas and pay like $200 per month for gas all winter long. And then again $100 or more for electric A/C in the summmer. That's a lot of money. I just assumed that's what EVERYONE does.. every house in the winter that I see has the ol' steamy output on the roof like ours.

[Bobby Bass]

When I remodeled I reduced all glass on North-East of house and added 150sq ft of glass to the South also a 4x12 solar catch. Furnace only runs at night. to bad it's oil that and everyone has their own dog to sleep with!!

[Dave B]

methane

[mklem24]

Do the corn burning stoves cause havok with your insurance similar to wood burning stoves???? And how are they from a mess standpoint - are they a mess to have(like corn all over and is there ash??) or are they pretty clean unit?