Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

mountainwocky t1_isupkut wrote

Oil prices are likely going to be much more volatile than wood so be sure to factor that in.

I did a similar exercise a few years ago. My townhouse is all electric baseboard heat so after the first winter I got a wood pellet stove and that was so much cheaper to run.

Eventually, I installed a mini split heat pump system; the focus was to provide air conditioning in the summer, but you can also run it as a heater. In fact, after calculating the total costs, it turned out that heating with the heat pump was less expensive than hearing with the wood pellet stove. It’s that efficient.

I did calculations to determine the cost per BTU of heat for my different heating methods. I took into account the efficiencies of the heating systems and factored in the efficiency drop in the heat pump as it got colder outside.

Even at the lowest suggested outside operating temp for the heat pump it still beat the cost of wood pellets, though by only a slight margin at those temps. So now we only get a ton of wood pellets for the winter and use them on just the coldest days of the year while using the heat pump on the other days.

I turned it into a spreadsheet so I could calculate the cost per BTU given a change in electricity costs and wood pellet costs. You can likely do something similar. Most wood stove manufacturers provide a rated efficiency for their stoves and I’m sure you can find published efficiency ratings for oil burner heating systems.

3

OnionCityChives t1_isxqze1 wrote

Hi there, I was building a similar spreadsheet to yours when I stumbled upon this "heat pump balance point" tool that Efficiency Vermont put together. It's much better than anything I could have come up with. Check it out.

"This Heat Pump Balance Point Tool was developed to help contractors find the proper balance point based on system capacity and economics. The balance point is the outdoor temperature at which the heat pump no longer has the capacity, or is no longer the most cost effective option to heat a building.
By entering data into the input cells on each tab of this simple spreadsheet users can find the outdoor temperature at which a dual fuel thermostat will change heating systems."

https://www.efficiencyvermont.com/trade-partners/heat-pump-balance-point-tool

3

mountainwocky t1_isxt6iz wrote

Nice, thanks. I'll definitely check that out and see if I can use it to improve my estimates.

3