the price of warmth? (Fargo: house, to buy, school)

[tnwannabe]

We are moving to fargo soon, at least before winter sets in and before school starts, I am from the south and just assumed that you heat with a fireplace for the whole house or to offset the cost of heating, am I wrong? If you have a house in fargo (surrounding area) that is approx 1200 sqft, what are we looking at for monthly heating? electric or gas-we are trying not to buy a house heated with oil. I sure could use the info since we are bringing 3 kids and are just ordinary "working people" no doctor or laywers paychecks here! help if you can

[jasperhobbs]

Originally Posted by tnwannabe

We are moving to fargo soon, at least before winter sets in and before school starts, I am from the south and just assumed that you heat with a fireplace for the whole house or to offset the cost of heating, am I wrong? If you have a house in fargo (surrounding area) that is approx 1200 sqft, what are we looking at for monthly heating? electric or gas-we are trying not to buy a house heated with oil. I sure could use the info since we are bringing 3 kids and are just ordinary "working people" no doctor or laywers paychecks here! help if you can

No way you can heat any house in the north with just a fireplace. Besides North Dakota does not have an abundance of wood. In Fargo you can heat with natural gas or heating oil if you live in an area where natural gas is not available.

Jasper

[mcorrales]

Whatever you do, if you just have to heat with oil, make sure that the house is extremely well insulated. Just moved from SoCal last year to PA and we have a combination furnace (wood, coal, oil) after breaking the bank and being cold most of the time, some of the posters here gave detailed advice on using the coal part, thank god for them, in four months we went through over $2k and like I say we were cold most of the time. Coal maybe dirtier but it sure is cheaper and warmer.

[johnnyreb]

Originally Posted by tnwannabe

We are moving to fargo soon, at least before winter sets in and before school starts, I am from the south and just assumed that you heat with a fireplace for the whole house or to offset the cost of heating, am I wrong? If you have a house in fargo (surrounding area) that is approx 1200 sqft, what are we looking at for monthly heating? electric or gas-we are trying not to buy a house heated with oil. I sure could use the info since we are bringing 3 kids and are just ordinary "working people" no doctor or laywers paychecks here! help if you can

We live in an older 1600 sq foot house in north Fargo. The worst month last winter was $300 for natural gas heat and electricity. The remainder of the winter months ranged from $200-$250.

[Cain]

We live in South Fargo and have base board heat, but the duct work is there we went to some sort of forced air heating (we use the ducts for airconditioning in the summer).

Anyway, I think the bill got to about $250 max a month, but in general was sub $200.

Nice thing with the baseboard was that for rooms that we dont' really use much, we would run the temp there lower than others. Our house is 1800 sqft split level, 4br.

One thing we did to help spread the heat around was use some ocillating fans as well, This really helped a lot to get the heat more around the house than in just certain places.