On 11/4/2012 2:49 PM, Han wrote:
Frank wrote in
:

You're lucky. We could not get gas when our house was built. Oil
furnace with blower takes a lot of juice. So does well. I've got
5,500 watt generator but hot water, stove and AC are all off line when
power fails. Well, furnace, freezer and refrigerator were main
reasons I got a generator and no way could these be handled off an
inverter.

Given a choice, I don't understand why anyone would buy a home that
didn't have natural gas. I do understand that sometimes there is no
choice. We had an oil furnace in our previous home, but it was
expensive to run, stinky and not very reliable. There was gas for the
stove. OK, the furnace was an old system. I would definitely ditch it
for a gas furnace if I'd had to replace it. With gusto if I had known
in advance that gas would drop in price by as much as it has.
Luckily, where I have lived there has always been municipal water, gas
of some sort, and electricity. Except for a few years, there has always
been a sewer system as well.


There are a lot of older homes in my area that I describe as having an
"octopus" furnace in the basement. The furnaces were originally coal
fired and you can still see the coal bins and coal chute in many of the
old homes. The supply ducts slope diagonally up to the main floor like
limbs of a tree or octopus tentacles and the air flow is via convection
with no blower and the ducts are fairly large in diameter. All of them
I've ever seen were converted to natural gas in the middle of the last
century but as inefficient as the beasts may be, they will keep a home
warm in the winter during a power outage. ^_^

TDD