Jerseydaze
Senior Member
i have a customer renovating a small home and wants to know if electric baseboard with separate thermostats in each room would be cheeper to run then a new oil burning furnace with 1 zone ? Small 2 bedroom ranch
Unless you know the cost of oil, the cost of electricity, and the conversion efficiency of the oil burner, it's at best a WAG.
Here's my WAG
From http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/energy-content-d_868.html:
1 gallon heating oil @ 139000BTU/gal = 40.7 KWH @ 3412 BTU/kwh
Electric baseboard heaters are 100% efficient
For discussion, call an oil heat system 80% efficient, so to get the same amount of heat as electric, 40KW = 1.25 gallons of oil.
Oil is around $4/gal (http://www.eia.gov/petroleum/heatingoilpropane/), which works out to about $0.13/KWH. If electricity is cheaper than that, it'll cost less to operate. Likewise, since you probably have separate thermostats for different rooms, you can play with the settings and potentially save more.
Wow!! We are at 4.369 for the power and another five cents for the distribution charges.Nice back-of-the-envelope calculation! Based on that, it's going to be better to go with oil, since $0.13/kWh is just the product charge for most of NJ, not including the delivery portion.
Wow!! We are at 4.369 for the power and another five cents for the distribution charges.
Next exercise:... that may tip the balance.
Demonstration of the preceding is left to the student as an exercise.
No furnace, nothing forced air.
Electric baseboard (backup) with a high quality pellet stove would be my first guess. Electric heat pump for DHW. If the customer wants to spend 10 grand more and take the next step up, I would be looking at a Froling P4 pellet boiler for heat and DHW (that's if my only choices were oil, propane, and electric).
You may be able to cut your heat loss from 30 btus/sf to 15 btus/sf with a hardcore exterior renovation. Wrap the building with 2" rigid foam board exterior with new siding, new Andersen 400 windows, new roof, new flashing, inside attic, basement insulation. Pretty much every house I would look at needs that.
Next exercise:
Consider that baseboard will not require forced air and will also help prevent draft effects by running directly under windows and cold spots if you put them on exterior walls. But they also limit furniture placement is a way that forced air does not.
If you are considering fluid-based oil heating, the complexity takes a large jump upward.
If you're an efficiency junkie you might implement everything in your last paragraph in NJ for about $20,000. Based on my last house, built in ~1929 in NJ and the current price of fuel oil, that's 20 years of home heating. As an engineer, I appreciate the allure of doing the most with the least, but a 20-year payback is a little too steep to indulge that inclination. New construction, maybe a different story.