Should my heating bill be this high??? (lease, crawl space)

[Mrtwigg]

Originally Posted by chuyler1

3,200 sq ft house

I might have found the issue.

How big was the former house and how was it heated; oil, wood or gas ?

How high are the cielings ? Cubic footage costs more than square footage to heat.

Then again, a lot of folks buy too much house in the first place.

[thebig0]

Wow, I am shocked by these numbers. Our house is about 1800 sq ft and we burn on average 1.5 gals/day during heating season (november - march) and closer to 0.5 gals per day in the summer. We have the thermostat set for 62 degrees from 5:00 - 10:00 in the evening along with 6:00 - 8:00 in the morning. The remainder of the time it cycles down to 50.

[rmcewan]

Originally Posted by thebig0

Wow, I am shocked by these numbers. Our house is about 1800 sq ft and we burn on average 1.5 gals/day during heating season (november - march) and closer to 0.5 gals per day in the summer. We have the thermostat set for 62 degrees from 5:00 - 10:00 in the evening along with 6:00 - 8:00 in the morning. The remainder of the time it cycles down to 50.

62 is pretty chilly.

[buck naked]

I know a young woman that lives in a trailer park. She also heats with propane and her bill was over $600 her last fill. That will only last her 4-5 weeks. I was shocked...she is poor...

I looked at her bill and she was being charged $5.75 per unit - (gallons??) She switched to another company, cheaper, but still high at $4. per unit. plus $700 for installation and switch over.

[buck naked]

My home is fairly new - 6 years old, passive solar. I heated with only oil the first two years and couldn't keep up with the deliveries. Since that time, I put a pellet stove in and reduced the cost almost 50%. Now that pellets are available, the prices have dropped and heating the house is not so painful.

Saw a blurb on WMUR last week about a woman who could not afford to heat her home. She received $700 for fuel assistance, and that did not pay for even one fill. Some very generous people also saw the report and paid for another delivery for her.

[momto3nh]

Just to give you a comparison - We have a (roughly) 2800 sq. ft. house. This includes my son's bedroom which is in the finished walk up attic, so we are heating 3 floors. We have propane also, at $2.04/gallon. The gas company comes out about every 4-5 weeks in the winter and we pay about $400-600 depending. We keep our house at 70 pretty much 24/7. This is a new house built in 2010.

[buck naked]

just read that the 'average' house in the Northeast uses 822 gallons of fuel oil for heat and hot water annually.

source: Energy Information Agency

[GregW]

If I could afford to build a new house I would wrap a set of Structural Insulated Panels –SIPS - around a post and beam frame with lots of glass on the south and east sides and very little on the north and west. All the wiring on the outside walls would be through the baseboard or the room side of the walls. All the plumbing would be in inside walls. I would heat with oil fired single pipe steam with a small coal stove in the living/dining/library open space.

In the mean time we live in a small condo with electric heaters in both bathrooms and the laundry/plumbing room in the basement to keep the pipes from freezing. We use a small electric radiant heater aimed at us in the evening. The result is an almost comfortably heated house (my wife and cat on the other hand don’t agree) on about $350/mo in the winter and $100 per month for the rest of the year.

Even if I won the lottery I think I would keep the house fairly small. I would buy an old factory for the shop.

[chuyler1]

UPDATE!!!

So after following some tips mentioned by people on this forum and doing my own research, I have dropped an additional $100 off the cost of our bill for this month. Our first bill in the new home was $850, and we are now down to $650. Below are the changes I made (so you don't have to backtrack through the thread. There might be room for more improvements but for now I am satisifed.

Thanks again for your help.

Originally Posted by chuyler1

Thanks for all your responses. I have discovered a few items which should help.

1) There were wide-open vents in the partially-finished basement. We are not using that space so i closed them. The previous owner had a workshop down there. I assume it is OK to close these vents since the basement stays warm enough due to residual heat from the furnace.

2) The system has an auxilary fan which was set to auto. I changed it to medium which will continuously circulate warm air from the upper levels back down to the lower levels. This appears to be the recommended setting for newer homes with decent windows and insulation. So far, the house feels warmer even though i still have it set at 66 when we are home.

3) My wife had closed several vents on the main floor which was probably messing with the natural flow of air in the house. I opened everything on the main floor with the assumption the heat will rise. The only vents that are closed are the ones in the guest bedroom which we will open if we have a guest. I think this, in combination with closing the vents in the basement will help with our comfort levels when we are home.

4) When I work from home, I will close the office door and close the office vents. With the heat at 60 and the fan on constantly it feels drafty. By closing the office vents I can run a small electric space heater to keep the room comfortable without losing any of that heat to the rest of the house.

5) The foam contraption I used to seal the attic stairs may help, but I think I need to make one out of plywood. I put some weather stripping on the edges of the foam but the contraption isn't heavy enough to compress the stripping and create a seal. if I make something heavier I think it will work better.

I looked up information we received from the previous owners. They used about 750g of propane a year. We have used 450 so far (Dec + Jan). It's hard to speculate but we are probably on-track for using the same amount. I guess it just comes down to it being a big house.

I'll report back in a month and let you know how things worked out. I know you can't compare Jan to Feb as if they were apples-to-apples but I should have an idea of whether my changes are working.

[GotBackHome]

if you closed the vents in the guest room, make sure you also close the door to the guest room!