Oil to Natural Gas Conversion Costs
On Sat, 05 Aug 2006 22:16:34 GMT, "Pete C."
wrote: John wrote: "Pete C." wrote: trimmed The owner was also directed to have the boiler serviced as soon as possible. That is / was *not* an explosion, not even close. I don't think a blowback on a residential boiler has ever injured anyone, much less killed them. Certainly it will scare the **** out of them and perhaps teach them not to keep messing with the thing if they don't know what they are doing. Oil burners do *not* have blowbacks on their own, they have had the safety devices to prevent that for decades. Blowbacks occur when someone keeps pressing the reset button ignoring the warning not to press it more than once. Oil burner controls from the last couple decades have incorporated a "three strikes and you're out" lockout to prevent this. Ok, that's not the case. You can reset ANY oil flame safeguard relay control as many times as you like. The nucleus of gas vs. oil residential heating safety lies in the control methodology of the times. Oil burners are direct fired. The full fuel output is ignited by a strong arc. There is no pilot light. If it does not ignite, there is approximately 10 seconds worth of atomized oil spray inside of the combustion chamber. Flame detection is performed by a Cad Cell. Until recently, most all gas furnaces used a small pilot light to achieve combustion, which in turn ignites the main burners. More of today's furnaces are direct light off such as the oil burner, however modern flame safeguards strategies are applied to bring an acceptable level of safety to the gas burner. There are better controls available for domestic oil burners however they have not found their way into the residential product lines. Proportionally, there are many more instances of delayed ignition in oil, then fuel gas. So oil heat is not "safe" under your definition. http://www.newburyfd.org/responding_...er_emergen.htm That is an interesting link however you probably didn't read it thoroughly: This other bit: "Fuel oil comes in several grades, number 1 to 5 grade oil, and has the following general fire hazard properties: a flashpoint of 1007F to 1507F, a flammable (explosive) range of 0.7 to 5 percent when mixed with air, and an ignition temperature of 4947F." should give a bit of a reminder on just how difficult it is to get oil to burn and the near impossibility of igniting oil spilled from a tank leak. Oh it won't burn pretty, but it WILL burn under far less stringent conditions as these. -zero |
Oil to Natural Gas Conversion Costs
"Pete C." wrote: John wrote: "Pete C." wrote: trimmed Completely false. This argument against nat. gas is based on facts about it's safety, reliability, cleanliness and the service life of the equipment. Yeah. Decades of living with natural gas and never one service interuption. Real unreliable. Houses are just blowing up all over the place that have natural gas too. I guess everyone is keeping that a big secret from the home insurance companies. Service life? My furnace has a lifetime warranty on the heat exchanger. How many oil furnaces have that? The blower of course will die sooner, but I believe oil furnaces have a blower too. A lifetime warrantee on one component is not necessarily a good thing if you keep replacing the components around it. Well the warranty gives some sort of an indication of how long things are expected to last. And if one thing is going to last a damned long time, I'd want it to be my heat exchanger, which is what separates my house air from my combustion exhaust. That mid range Weil-McLain WTGO4 boiler I just had installed in my mother's place has a comparable warrantee: "Limited Lifetime Warranty Covers cast iron sections. " And what is the efficiency of that unit again? I have ignored price per BTU since that is constantly in flux. You mean your argument. A FUD one at that. Price is the only argument made in favor of nat. gas that has even short term validity. All other arguments in favor of nat. gas have been based on either myths, or comparisons of brand new gas equipment to 50yr old oil equipment. That's nonsense. Where do you come up with this crap, now you are claiming "50 yr old oil equipment" comparisons. Compare an average highest efficiency gas furnace with an average highest effiency oil furnace. Which is more efficient and wastes the least amount of energy so that it can heat your house instead? Efficiency isn't everything. If the 8% more efficient gas furnace saves me $200 in fuel during a heavy heating season, but subjects me to a gas outage that I have no way to provide backup for which cause $1,000 in damage due to frozen pipes (neglecting the fact that I know to drain the pipes, most people don't). There you go with the claims of all those gas outages again. With so many outages, it makes me wonder how all of those explosions can any gas to blow up. is subject to outages and is far more dangerous than oil. With oil you have multiple suppliers in competition that you can choose from, Who all have to buy from the same source yielding little difference in price. you have an on-site fuel supply that is not subject to outages No outage here in 35 years. I've asked several times where Pete lives that he thinks nat gas interruption is a big concern. And I've mentioned several times that I'm referring to the northeast. It's CT in particular where I lived for 36 years before moving a couple years ago. How many gas interruptions did your neighorhood have in Connecticut? My immediate neighborhood did not have gas service, guess the gas company didn't want to spend months of blasting to install lines. The neighborhoods within 10 miles of me that did have gas service had at least a couple outages per year that I heard of and since I was not there to personally count them probably several more per year that got little press. Multiply that times 36 years and compare to the same 36 years of flawless oil service. Well if that was true, I wouldn't want gas service in that neighborhood either, and I wonder how long it took them to switch. To anything. It obviously isn't for 95% of us who use it. I've had nat gas service for 25+ years, that has never gone out once. I live in central NJ, 50 miles from NYC. But I've sure had electricity go out. Indeed I did as well and when it did I simply started my generator and went back about my normal business without more that a few minutes interruption. Good for you. Yep. Better to be prepared than screwed. Almost like a boy scout, except I was never a scout. And it;s the nature of the two systems that's key. An underground piped system is immune from much of what can halt electric service. A thrunderstorm, snow storm, car hitting a pole, all are common electric system weak points, that gas generally is immune from. You are ignoring the fact that it is possible and economical to provide backup for the electricity, something that is not possible with the gas. Are you nuts? You have never heard of automatic standby generators connected to a gas line? If your electric service is crappy enough to warrant it, that's the way to go. No fuel to have to worry about storing and engines last a long time with nat. gas, maintenance is very low too. You misread that statement. I said it is possible and practical to provide backup for electric service. It is not possible or practical to provide backup for gas service. True. Fortunately that is not really necessary. Providing backup for gas service in a residential setting would require a redundant backup furnace or boiler fired by an alternate fuel like oil or electricity. Wood fired boilers are becoming popular in the northeast, but as primary sources, not backup for the most part. Some commercial sized burners are available in dual fuel (oil / gas) though and can switch between fuels at any time. I would hazard to guess that the "popular" percentage is still quite a bit lower than 17%, which is the percentage that you said is "not significant" for oil generation in USA (1973). Additionally time to repair a damaged electric line is significantly less than time to repair a damaged gas line in most cases. You also don't have to spend additional time purging a repaired electric line before returning it to service as you do with a repaired gas line. Purging a gas line takes seconds or minutes. For lines inside a home, not for the distribution lines in a neighborhood. Wouldn't know. Never needed to be purged since it was up and running. Maybe we'll find out some day if maintenance is needed on the pipeline, like water pipes. Again, when you put this in perspective, the gas outtage thing is another red herring. Tell that to the folks who lived within 10 miles of me that had to spend several days in a shelter due to a gas outage. When was that? Where was that? What was the cause? Somewhere between 5 and 10 years ago. In CT, I believe in the Avon / Simsbury area. I think it was a gas line rupture, not a dig up or anything. Should be somewhere in the Hartford Courant archives if you want to look. Well if that ever happens to me, I'll expect I'll heat my house with electric heat for a few days. Or maybe just keep the wood stove working overtime. But it's good to know that they could just move right back into their house, no long lived $$$ environmental clean up required. |
Oil to Natural Gas Conversion Costs
John wrote:
"Pete C." wrote: John wrote: "Pete C." wrote: trimmed They *should* have the minimal skills necessary to change an oil burner nozzle by following instructions. Recall this requires only the skill to operate two wrenches and is little different from the skill to change a faucet aerator, couple a garden hose or connect a propane tank to a grill. Changing a nozzle does not require any knowledge of burner controls, combustion adjustments or anything else technical. So since this is so easy, safe, and common, which oil equipment manufacturers recommend this service as a customer done item, like changing light bulbs? (and lighting pilot lights in the old days) None that I know of since as I indicated the population as a whole has lost a lot of skills and common sense over the years. trimmed Noise levels for modern gas or oil furnaces of comparable capacity are comparable as well. Older units of both types were noisier. I've never heard an oil furnace, even brand new top of the line, that was even close to silent. Even thirty years ago natural gas was nearly silent (except the ho hum blower motor and maybe the click of a relay and gas valve opening). Perhaps the comparison is better between gas and oil boilers which I have more experience with. Even so, with current oil furnaces the difference isn't that significant. Old units were certainly louder. trimmed Yes and average oil furnaces are cast iron with similar warrantees. Many low end gas furnaces are not stainless steel and have much shorter life expectancies. Only a very few bottom of the barrel oil furnaces use plain steel heat exchangers. Cast iron would rust in a high efficiency (condensing) furnace. Yes, it would. Oil furnaces don't do the condensing thing (yet) due to cost factors mostly. If a fair increase in upfront cost would be tolerated by the market they could bump the efficiency up further that way with more expensive materials. And what is causing the aforementioned "cost factors???" (dirty exhaust, sulfer, soot, acids....) Acids primarily. trimmed In the town I was in and the adjacent towns during the past couple decades I recall hearing of a gas outage of some duration at least every few months. This is also an area with relatively sparse gas service, probably less than 50% coverage of residences in the area. I recall several times there were multi day outages during the winter where people had to go to shelters. What town was that in? If natural gas service was really that unreliable, I'd be looking at propane. Look to the northwest corner of CT. trimmed Where should I look there? Most anywhere. You'll find some small cities with gas service surrounded by many miles of moderately dense semi-rural area with no minimal gas service. Check the CT DPUC site or the sites of the gas utilities covering the area and you should find reports of service interruptions. I know the CL&P / Northeast utilities site has such reports for electric outages, I expect the gas utilities have the same. The costs of nat. gas also go up with the cost of other energy commodities and also with the growth of nat. gas fueled electric generation "peaking" power plants. Nat. gas is not some fixed cheap energy source unaffected by the rest of the energy market. And gee, why is so much electric production being shifted away from oil and to natural gas? Because it hasn't? Nope. Very little electric production was ever oil. Oh really? Really. "At the time of the 1973 oil embargo, about 17 percent of U.S. electricity was generated by burning oil, and about five percent from nuclear energy. But, twenty-five years later, oil represents only about three percent of U.S. electricity production, while nuclear energy supplies almost twenty percent." http://www.house.gov/science/ee_charter_072500.htm 17% = Very little. It's gone to nat. gas from coal and of course nuclear because of both political and economic reasons. Nat. gas used to be a lot cheaper before those peaking plants were built, which is one reason they were built to begin with. The siting and permitting for the relatively small nat. gas peaking plants was also easier which also led to the increase. By the way, a number of larger power plants have been outfitted to burn either oil OR gas. Yet they are burning gas predominantly nowadays. Why? Cost. And gas turbines are pretty multi-fuel to begin with. And why would permitting and siting be so much easier for those natural gas plants? Seems that it would be lot more harder. You know, they must be blowing up and exploding on a regular basis. Hardly. Industrial settings are the one place that gas is fairly safe as they generally get serviced and maintained properly, particularly power plants. trimmed Excuse me? I have solid reasons to have a generator as backup for the electric companies outages. Outside of that the electric company can provide me power at a lower effective rate than I can generate it myself for since they can keep their generators fully loaded and therefore at optimum efficiency. A generator loaded to 25% of it's rated capacity as it would by much of the time supplying a single home will still consume far more than 25% of it's full load fuel consumption. If you could maintain a steady load from the house so that you could match the generator size perfectly then you could generate at close to utility rates. So it is most economical to use an electric utility because of the lower cost and the fact that it is practical and economical to have backup for that utility. Electricity (like oil) also does not present the hazards of gas. If the insulation on an electric line fails it does not fill your home with explosive gas. If an electric line is shorted a circuit breaker or fuse interrupts the power. Gas services generally do not have comparable protective devices other than very recent seismic valves in earthquake areas and those provide no protection from any other faults. You said you are dislike gas because it is a regulated monopoly utility. You said you dislike gas because it has nominal fees for minimum usage per month. Electric service has both of these qualities. Therefore, your arguments are also in opposition to electric service. I *also* said nat. gas is less safe and less reliable than oil. All those factors combine to give more than adequate reason to avoid nat. gas. And I *also* said that I disagree with your hypothesis. You can disagree all you want. I still won't use gas any time soon. If I were currently using oil, if the pricing was to get too high I'd install a geothermal heat pump long before I'd consider nat. gas. You are also incorrect with your electric service analogy. Too bad you snipped it out, because you missed the point. You were all hot and bothered about gas because a gas bill contains a minimum billing charge. I pointed out that electricity utilities have the same deal, and also the savings from gas makes up for that nominal fee in spades. I'm afraid I don't make long term decisions like heating fuel choice based solely on price. I have more than a dozen electric suppliers I can choose from, only the distribution is a monopoly. Umm, that's no different than gas supplier choice. You were all upset about the gas utility "monopoly" so I pointed out that electricity is a monopoly too. Both for the distribution portions. You appear to be located in Texas with a incumbent distributor of TXU and "choice" options range from about 13.4 cents to 16 cents per kW/hr. So some "choice" but a very minor spread between the highest and lowest, with most options very close together in between, all with varying terms. The effective spread is a bit larger than those numbers appear since it's multiplied by a couple thousand KWH / month as opposed to a couple hundred gallons / month. Electric also is practical to provide backup for during outages where nat. gas is not. Absolutely false. Natural gas generators are a wonderful thing, and do not require tanks, fuel storage, deliveries, etc. They also burn much cleaner than say, a diesel fuel. Extremely practical. You clearly don't read very well. It is practical to provide backup for electric service outages with a generator (gasoline, diesel, propane, nat. gas.) It is not practical to provide backup for nat. gas service outages. There is no practical way to provide on-site storage for a useable quantity of nat. gas, gas appliances other than generators are particular to the gas type (different burner orifices) so you can't switch on the fly to a "hot dog" propane tank in the back yard either. The only way to provide backup for nat. gas service is with redundant appliances for an alternate fuel. Pete C. |
Oil to Natural Gas Conversion Costs
John wrote:
"Pete C." wrote: John wrote: "Pete C." wrote: trimmed Exactly where is this spotty gas service that you speak of? Anywhere outside urban and close suburban areas. There are vast areas without nat. gas service and many of those areas are also in colder climates where backup is more critical. There wasn't gas service where I was in CT and there isn't gas service where I am now either. Well obviously if there is no nat gas service and propane isn't feasible, oil would be a way to go in climates too cold for heat pumps to work well. Oil. Cleaner than Coal. Propane is even more dangerous than nat. gas. Because it is heavier than air it is even less likely to dissipate from a leak in a house. Because it is not a pipeline service you have to store a large quantity on-site in a tank that you can't smoke/grill/whatever around and that has to be outside where it is exposed to the weather and more likely to rust than an oil tank in a basement. Wow! You can't grill near a natural gas tank! I think you just ruined a lot Labor day parties. Nice going. :) You have a nat. gas tank? You have your own refrigeration and liquification facilities too? The reference is to the large "hot dog" propane tanks of several hundred gallon LP capacity. They can and do vent some gas while roasting in the hot sun so you aren't supposed to smoke/grill/whatever near them. In those areas they are typically in basements to they are not consuming heated air. The basement air is sealed from the air upstairs? To a large extent yes. Warm air also rises so you aren't going to get warm air from upstairs going downstairs. Indeed waste heat from the furnace is rejected into the surrounding area and that warmer basement air will rise and warm the floors above slightly. Wow! I've never seen a house where the basement air was sealed from the house air. It's nice to know that the air "consumed" into the oil burner wouldn't need to be made up from air leaking into the house via window gaps, exhaust fans, cracks etc. Air typically leaks into basements just fine through garage doors which are damn near impossible to seal, utility penetrations, dryer vents and other basement openings. You won't generally see a draft sucking under the gap at the bottom of the one basement door. Well my garage IS quite sealed from my basement, with a tight fireproof door with lots of weather stripping. Of course it's a moot point for the furnace discussion,since the natural gas furnace uses outside temperature air (colder air contains more oxygen too :) which it brings directly inside for its use. And your point is? Oil furnaces can and do use sealed combustion as well. Neither gas nor oil furnaces used sealed combustion until fairly recently and both are able to use it currently. No real difference. Pete C. |
Oil to Natural Gas Conversion Costs
John wrote:
"Pete C." wrote: Robert Gammon wrote: John wrote: "Pete C." wrote: When I was in CT I watched the town blast for three days just in the few hundred foot stretch in front of my house to install storm drains. I also watched weeks of blasting when widening the main road down the street. I've watched major construction in my new location in TX as well and there was no blasting required. I'm sorry, I thought we were discussing natural gas lines, not huge storm drains, which often have to be buried much deeper for gravity flow reasons anyway. So if I could find an area in Texas where blasting WAS required, and some other area in Connecticut where blasting was NOT required, that would pretty much "proove" the opposite, wouldn't it? :) Blasting IS required in the Hill Country of texas where rock is frequently only a few feet below the top soil. Right. Is that where the big housing boom is? The DFW area sure is growing fast. I thought it was where all of those natural gas heated houses going up in flames were. No, they do that all over the country. Pete C. |
Oil to Natural Gas Conversion Costs
Raw natural gas hasnt been refined seperating butane propane and other
gasses. Raw natural gas s indeed used directly in peoples homes, know a fellow with a abandoned oil well on his property, ewhen they quit pumping it he paid some $ to leave the casing and heats his home and water with gas from this well, its at 5 PSI reportedly high for butler PA area. since raw natural gas contains other gasses it has slightly more BTUs than refined gas. |
Oil to Natural Gas Conversion Costs
"Robert Gammon" wrote in message m... Martik wrote: "Robert Gammon" wrote in message ... Martik wrote: "Robert Gammon" wrote in message m... Todd H. wrote: "Martik" writes: Are you referring to the chimney for the furnace? Why would anyone put something in there. Sounds like a good way to murder someone! Luckily we have 2 CO detectors. Birds have a nasty habbit of not informing homeowners of their nesting plans. If only the birds would follow the permit process, by god, lives would be saved. Given that the top of the stack is a protected entrance, it will be DIFFICULT, but not impossible for small birds to get in there. The gap to my fireplace is a bit larger than my furnace flue, and small birds do find their way to the fireplace from time to time. In 28 years, never such an incident in either gas water heater or gas furnace. A maintenance worker sticking a rag down the flue and forgetting to take it out seems to be a more likely scenario. such an action is more likely to occur at the bottom of the stack, at the furnace, rather than on top of the roof. Is there a sensor to detect lack of free flow thru the chimney that would shut off the gas? Not that I am aware of. It would require putting an electrically operated damper in place, closing it, then venting a quantity of vapor and attempt to detect back pressure. If only atmospheric pressure in 5 seconds after release, then open damper and allow furnace to run. Need a largish supply of compressed air or an air compressor and a bottle to store the gas. This system would add at least $500 to the cost of the furnace. I have a condensing furnace with both intake and exhaust horizontally vented thru PVC and a draft inducer fan. Would this furnace have a safety shutoff. Nope, it RELIES on the fact the the exhaust vent AND the supply vent are UNOBSTRUCTED. Both vents MUST be inspected on a REGULAR basis to ensure that gas is free flowing thru BOTH of them. I put my hand over the intake vent (outside) and the furnace shutdown within 2 secs. |
Oil to Natural Gas Conversion Costs
John wrote:
"Pete C." wrote: John wrote: "Pete C." wrote: trimmed Try looking at the EPA and DOE sites. Ok. What pages on these sites should we look at? I don't have specifics handy, but I'm sure you can find them with a search. Oh, I thought you knew what you are talking about. Now you want me to go on an egghunt for your claims. Spend some time there, you might learn something. WHERE is this "THERE" you speak of? www.epa.gov? www.doe.gov? trimmed What is the number of deaths from natural gas versus oil? Can you show us the numbers or is this just a FUD campaign? They are out there on one of the government sites. Oh you know the numbers are out there. Since you know, which sites did you find them on? I'm not sure at the moment, I have too many bookmarks to find it easily. Suppose that rather defeats the purpose of bookmarks. Yes, how convenient. Not really. Certainly the ratio of hundreds of gas explosions to zero oil explosions should be pretty obvious. Someone was killed in a gas explosion at a motel just a month ago, and no, I don't count the deliberate gas explosion suicide in NYC. Zero oil burner explosions? Here's a recent one in New Jersey (nobody was killed in this case, thank goodness!) On March 21, 2005 at 8:44 p.m., the Teaneck Fire Department (TFD) responded to a report of a loud explosion and smoke in the house at 501 Rutland Avenue. Upon arrival, responding firefighters were guided into the basement to investigate a problem with the boiler; however they could not find an odor or smoke. The firefighters, who combined have more than 100 years of experience, began investigating the area. They found that the emergency switch of the boiler had been shut off and later learned that the mother living in the home had turned it off. The basement of the home was sectioned off to provide for various uses of the area. There was a large portion that was used for a recreation/family room, an area that contained two beds that were usually used by the house keeper and one of the children, and two small rooms; one containing the oil fired boiler, the other utilized as a laundry room. After investigating the basement area, the responding firefighters determined that a “blowback” of the oil burner had caused the reported explosion and smoke. “Blowback” occurs when an accumulation of vaporized fuel oil in the combustion chamber suddenly ignites due to a delayed ignition. This causes too much pressure, which results in a loud bang and the release of smoke. The firefighters found multiple problems with the boiler, including closed water valves, a low water level, a non-functional low-water cut-off and a dirty flue pipe. Fire personnel made the necessary adjustments to restore the boiler to a safe and operable condition and advised the owner of the problems that were found. The owner was also directed to have the boiler serviced as soon as possible. That is / was *not* an explosion, not even close. I don't think a blowback on a residential boiler has ever injured anyone, much less killed them. Certainly it will scare the **** out of them and perhaps teach them not to keep messing with the thing if they don't know what they are doing. Oil burners do *not* have blowbacks on their own, they have had the safety devices to prevent that for decades. Blowbacks occur when someone keeps pressing the reset button ignoring the warning not to press it more than once. Oil burner controls from the last couple decades have incorporated a "three strikes and you're out" lockout to prevent this. Yet it didn't work in this one case. What didn't work? The lockout? There is no mention of the boiler being new enough to have the lockout controls. Indeed from the long list of problems mentioned it appears likely it was a pretty old unit. Nat gas continues to increase in market share, while oil heat is now down to 4% of new homes. If it's so unsafe and unreliable, why is that? 1) Consumer ignorance - Believing nat. gas somehow avoids buying foreign energy. They apparently are not aware of the LNG super tankers delivering foreign LNG just like oil tankers delivering foreign oil. Both nat. gas and oil are produced in the US and both are also imported from foreign sources. The amount and proportion of natural gas that is imported to the USA is tiny compared to oil. Much of the imported natural gas comes from right here in North America, not hostile areas of the world like the Middle East. How does it compare to the 50% or so of oil that we import? The best numbers I have are the US produced 539 cubic meters in 2003, (exported 24.19 cubic meters) and imported 114.1 billion cubic meters of natural gas. Compare those ratios. I'm assuming you forgot a billion on the US numbers. So importing something like 18% nat. gas vs. 50% oil. Not that drastic a difference and given the current trends the gap is likely to close further. Yes all numbers are in billions sq meters. It's a huge difference in terms of energy, as total gas imports was estimated at 114.1 billion cubic meters total for the year. Oil imports were 13.15 million barrels per DAY average or 4.790 billion barrels . To compare, 1 cubic meter of natural gas contains about 36 409.2241 BTUs, 1 barrel of oil contains about 5 800 000 BTUs. (calculations by the Department of Energy website http://www.eia.doe.gov/kids/energyfa...alculator.html) 4154293 billion BTUs natural gas imports 27782000 billion BTUs oil imports Or to put it in another way, natural gas was about 1/7 of oil imports. Not really a valid comparison. Compare US oil production to oil imports and US gas production to gas imports. In both cases we are importing sizable amounts because we do not produce enough domestically. The general public seems to think we get 99% of our oil from the middle east which certainly isn't true. No it's not, nevertheless middle east oil production has a huge impact on our foreign policy and national spending. Our perpetually inept middle east foreign policy has less to do with oil than the anti war folks claim. There are serious issues there that we need to deal with that have nothing to do with oil. Those issues did come largely as a result of oil, but not directly from US actions. Please. I'm not an "anti war folk" but get real. The United States will spare no expense to keep the Straits of Hormuz open and flowing. I don't know about that. It's a different world and different US from the 70s oil embargo days. I'd be rather interested to see what effect another embargo would have. I also seriously doubt that any of the OPEC folks would consider an embargo and indeed would fight one since they have learned that it would not be in their interest and could do them long term damage if people once again get serious about alternatives. Why do you thing the 70s embargo ended? Couldn't have had anything to do with people starting to look seriously at alternatives could it? The sudden appearance of the oil wealth in the middle east contributed to the downfall of their other economic sectors and the rise of their corrupt / oppressive governments and the resulting collapse of most of their civilization. Which civilization was "collapsed" by oil? Saudi Arabia (formerly wandering nomads?) The whole islamic world which used to be a seat of learning and knowledge but has now degenerated into a cesspool of violence and hatred. If we had not been in the market for oil when it was discovered there, if there culture had advanced more and stabilized before oil was discovered there, or if the Brits hadn't been meddling over there the problems would likely have been avoided. Uh huh. Yea, that hindsight thing. A bit late now to undo the mistakes of many decades ago. 2) Marketing - Some deceptive as in the case of the short lived "safe" in one gas suppliers advertising. Which supplier are you talking about? What is the definition of "safe?" It was Connecticut Natural Gas as I recall. I don't know the details exactly, but their "Clean, Safe, Dependable Natural Gas" campaign only lasted like six months before mysteriously becoming the "Clean, Dependable Natural Gas" campaign. On their web page, I noticed that it is "What can Natural Gas offer over my existing fuel? Dependability. Versatility. Affordability. Convenience. Efficiency. Plus, it is also environmentally friendly! " That campaign was a while back. Notice that safety is not included in their current campaign either. Their claim that it is environmentally friendly is more or less true, the implication that other options are not is however untrue. Natural gas burns much cleaner than oil. Don't take my word for it, super efficient condensing furnaces are common with natural gas but oil doesn't even burn clean enough for a condensing application, all the soot and sulfur and crap makes it a show-stopper. New electric plants are favored to be gas because it burns cleaner and has lower emissions, which is now important. Transit agencies are even starting to buy clean "natural gas" buses for the simple reason that they have so much less emissions than #2 oil (aka Diesel fuel) Not really, there are a number of available technologies that make oil / diesel burn cleaner however they are being largely overlooked due to the political / emotional stigma of the word "oil" due to the middle east issues. My definition of safe would be free from threat of catastrophic and potentially fatal failures i.e. explosions. So oil heat is not "safe" under your definition. http://www.newburyfd.org/responding_...er_emergen.htm That is an interesting link however you probably didn't read it thoroughly: "There are many possible causes of oil burner emergencies and fires. Fortunately, despite human error and poor maintenance practices, the millions of oil burners in use today function without a mishap year after year. When they do malfunction, the fire department is called and usually remedies the situation with little effort. But never forget that these seemingly harmless emergencies can and sometimes do turn deadly, whether it be from fire, explosion, or carbon monoxide poisoning, and you must be ever on guard against such instances." Additionally most of the failure modes they indicate are all but impossible with burners and controls manufactured in the last couple decades. Most are very unlikely with burners or controls even older. Due to the longevity of oil equipment there are however some really old units out there. This other bit: "Fuel oil comes in several grades, number 1 to 5 grade oil, and has the following general fire hazard properties: a flashpoint of 1007F to 1507F, a flammable (explosive) range of 0.7 to 5 percent when mixed with air, and an ignition temperature of 4947F." should give a bit of a reminder on just how difficult it is to get oil to burn and the near impossibility of igniting oil spilled from a tank leak. No oil will generally not go boom, unless it is atomized, but that doesn't mean that an oil burner malfunction can't fill your house with soot or burn it down. In Eastern Massachusetts last winter, a home had to be abandoned due to an oil leak causing heavy fumes and making the home uninhabitable. The family wasn't going home anytime soon, and the last I heard about it they were talking of demolishing the structure. What they do in the People's Republic of Taxachusets is hardly a model for the rest of the world. Look at their big dig disaster. Deceptive price comparisons that do not account for service charges during periods of no use. Deceptive claims of reliability of oil fired equipment. Deceptive claims about the cleanliness of oil burners. Deceptive comparisons of "upgrade" costs to low end gas equipment with service lives in single digit years. Service charges? Like the $4/month minimum billing fee that I pay for my natural gas service? My electric company charges more than that so your argument is opposing electric service too. Even including that fee (which includes service for my hot water heater, gas grill, stove, and dryer) I'm still way ahead with gas, and I have a very efficient furnace too. Electric service is rarely without some usage. With gas service it is not uncommon to have periods of zero use. Certainly this is not true in every case, but again, this is only one of many reasons to not use nat. gas, not the sole reason. Well yeah the reason not to use natural gas is to save a few bucks in non usage charges (similar to what you get with electric service) to save far more in higher efficiency. Besides even in those "zero use" periods, I'm still making hot water, and if I'm home there is a good chance I'm eating (using the grill, stove) or doing laundry (dryer.) A 10% efficiency difference Efficiency difference? Read again, I was referring to your complaints about "service charges" during non-use periods (summer). during a period when you were only heating hot water (to keep the comparison fair) would amount to about $5 with today's high prices. Yeah, except the main consumption of natural gas and reason for using it is heating the HOUSE. I don't know about you, but during the summer months I am not heating my house, I am only heating water. I'll also note that that market share is rather slanted to southern states whe 1) There are minimal heating requirements which means consumers can get low end gas systems to last longer. How so? When the low end gas furnace is only required to operate from November - February it will clearly have a longer service life than the same unit required to operate from September to April. Oh I see. Good thing that same furnace wouldn't be needed for a/c in those climates. A/C operation only affects the blower. There is no stress on the burner or heat exchanger. Unless of course the POS unit leaks condensate into the heat exchanger and it's rusted out by the time heating season rolls around. Yeah it only affects that "cheap" blower, remember??? The main problem with those low end gas furnaces is not the blower, it's the thin, non SS heat exchangers. Rather like the couple very low end oil furnaces out there with steel heat exchangers, not cast iron. 2) Gas companies cover larger service areas in large part due to lower installation costs vs. the northern states with more rock to cut and blast through. Huh? What is your source of this claim? Check with any gas company for the cost of extending gas service to your street in say CT vs. OK for comparable distances. You made the claim. Which gas company(ies) did you check with? I didn't because I don't use gas. But you're making claims about gas, which is what we're discussing. I base that on construction knowledge. What construction knowledge? And using that construction knowledge of yours, please show the numbers. When I was in CT I watched the town blast for three days just in the few hundred foot stretch in front of my house to install storm drains. I also watched weeks of blasting when widening the main road down the street. I've watched major construction in my new location in TX as well and there was no blasting required. I'm sorry, I thought we were discussing natural gas lines, not huge storm drains, which often have to be buried much deeper for gravity flow reasons anyway. This was a small storm drain on a road with a significant grade. No issues with gravity flow, no excessively deep installation. Uh huh. So what does that have to do with natural gas? A lot. whether you are installing storm drains of gas mains you have to get through the horrendous amount of rock and ledge in the northeast. So if I could find an area in Texas where blasting WAS required, and some other area in Connecticut where blasting was NOT required, that would pretty much "proove" the opposite, wouldn't it? :) No, not really. An individual town may be an anomaly, but the regions in general have notably different underground utility construction costs. This is changing a bit with some scary new trenchers able to cut through granite without blasting and leave nice cuttings to back fill with. Good thing natural gas is the only underground utility, right? And natural gas is so expensive that nobody can afford to install it, right? Good thing sending huge heavy trucks with people driving them around to everyone's house is so cheap and efficient. In those areas nat. gas, city water and city sewers are very sparse due to the huge installation costs. Oil heat, wells and septic systems are the norm. I've also dug a 650' trench in CT for conduit and an 80' trench in TX for conduit and I can assure you the TX trench went far faster and easier per foot and required much smaller equipment than the CT trench. Well there you go. Irrefutable proof that installing gas lines is always more expensive in Connecticut than Texas. Find me any part of CT away from the shore where you don't have significant boulders and ledge to deal with. If you're talking about new construction on an apples to apples comparison, it is possible you might need to do some blasting to install some utilities. However that also includes sewer pipe (which is generally a lot more deep than nat gas), water, maybe electric, telephone in newer subdivisions, etc. Big deal. Generally it is a big deal. In new subdivisions the developers are required to do all that work and that is one of the reasons that new housing is more expensive in the northeast. If the developer has to shell out the money to install all those utilities they add it to the sales prices. In all the existing neighborhoods where it is individual houses filling in, not large developments, those utilities are not installed by the builder and generally remain unavailable for a long time. 3) Gas companies market more since they generate more profits from service charges during the long hot months where they have to supply minimal gas. You said they are a monopoly. Why would they need to market? I hear a lot of advertising by oil dealers, or the collective oil dealers, operating as one. They market to get you locked into their nat. gas monopoly. They market to those that use other energy sources. So why does that no-colluding oil heat lobby advertise about "today's oil heat" and how hot it is, blah blah blah. Keep in mind this is not one dealer advertising against other oil dealers, but an obligarchy of many/all oil dealers. A cooperative advertising arrangement is not in any was a monopoly and indeed it's the only way many of the small oil dealers could get advertising outside local newspapers and direct mail. They little local oil dealers don't have the deep pockets of the big state wide nat. gas monopolies. So to rectify that they collude together. Big deal. Cooperative advertising is not collusion by any stretch of the imagination. I guess you think the various commercials from the egg board, dairy council, etc. all represent collusion between all those little dairies and egg producers eh? 4) The southern states have been having a huge housing boom as a whole due to lower construction costs and most tract housing gets gas systems not because they are better in any way, but simply because the cheapest low service life units available are in gas which means more profits for the developers and replacement costs for the consumer a short time down the road. What are your numbers for your cost comparison? No handy online reference, but a low end gas furnace installation is at least a thousand dollars less than a low end oil furnace installation. The low end gas unit will also have a service life expectancy about half of the oil unit. Both will be blow the service life of the average units in each class, but the oil still last longer there as well though the ratio is not as extreme. If you say so. I do. But you don't provide any reference for you claim, so it is just rambling. Find some online prices for furnaces. They aren't out there online (rather anticompetative) so it's not really possible to provide references. Pete C. |
Oil to Natural Gas Conversion Costs
zero wrote:
On Sat, 05 Aug 2006 22:16:34 GMT, "Pete C." wrote: John wrote: "Pete C." wrote: trimmed The owner was also directed to have the boiler serviced as soon as possible. That is / was *not* an explosion, not even close. I don't think a blowback on a residential boiler has ever injured anyone, much less killed them. Certainly it will scare the **** out of them and perhaps teach them not to keep messing with the thing if they don't know what they are doing. Oil burners do *not* have blowbacks on their own, they have had the safety devices to prevent that for decades. Blowbacks occur when someone keeps pressing the reset button ignoring the warning not to press it more than once. Oil burner controls from the last couple decades have incorporated a "three strikes and you're out" lockout to prevent this. Ok, that's not the case. You can reset ANY oil flame safeguard relay control as many times as you like. One of many examples: http://www.carlincombustion.com/products/50200.htm "Serviceman Reset Protection ( Latch-up after three consecutive lockouts)" The nucleus of gas vs. oil residential heating safety lies in the control methodology of the times. Oil burners are direct fired. The full fuel output is ignited by a strong arc. There is no pilot light. If it does not ignite, there is approximately 10 seconds worth of atomized oil spray inside of the combustion chamber. Flame detection is performed by a Cad Cell. Right, but what does that have to do with the three strike lockout? Until recently, most all gas furnaces used a small pilot light to achieve combustion, which in turn ignites the main burners. More of today's furnaces are direct light off such as the oil burner, however modern flame safeguards strategies are applied to bring an acceptable level of safety to the gas burner. If you're indicating that gas burners until very recently have had very minimal controls with limited safeties you are correct. Many had no electronics at all and relied on a thermocouple heated by the pilot as the only safety for pilot loss. Most had no detection if the main burner actually lit off properly. Most had no easily accessible emergency off switch, you had to find the gas valve, etc. There are better controls available for domestic oil burners however they have not found their way into the residential product lines. Huh? Those features are on nearly every residential oil burner manufactured in the last decade. They are certainly on the oil burner I had installed this spring. Proportionally, there are many more instances of delayed ignition in oil, then fuel gas. For pilot units probably. And for delayed ignition on an oil burner rarely anything of consequence without human intervention overriding the safety. So oil heat is not "safe" under your definition. http://www.newburyfd.org/responding_...er_emergen.htm That is an interesting link however you probably didn't read it thoroughly: This other bit: "Fuel oil comes in several grades, number 1 to 5 grade oil, and has the following general fire hazard properties: a flashpoint of 1007F to 1507F, a flammable (explosive) range of 0.7 to 5 percent when mixed with air, and an ignition temperature of 4947F." should give a bit of a reminder on just how difficult it is to get oil to burn and the near impossibility of igniting oil spilled from a tank leak. Oh it won't burn pretty, but it WILL burn under far less stringent conditions as these. Yea if you get it on a wick and apply direct flame to it to get it started ala oil lamp. An inch of oil across the basement floor has little chance of ignition even if there were a burning pilot light nearby. In the very unlikely event the oil level to make it to the pilot light there is near 100% probability it would simply extinguish the pilot. Nat. gas (or propane) if they leak and build until they are in proximity of a pilot have a near 100% probability of exploding. Pete C. |
Oil to Natural Gas Conversion Costs
John wrote:
"Pete C." wrote: zero wrote: On Fri, 04 Aug 2006 21:10:29 GMT, "Pete C." wrote: CO deaths are a result of poor combustion adjustment combined with flue leakage, both of which have a higher probability with a gas furnace due to: 1) People believing that a gas furnace does not require annual inspections / service. This creates a greater probability of the furnace falling into disrepair and the poor adjustment and leakage forming. And the average Oil burner in a home that is not serviced properly is JUST as dangerous. That has been my point when people keep claiming that gas burners don't need service. The fact is that any combustion appliance is dangerous if it's not serviced properly. Who was claiming that gas burners don't need service, let alone "keeps claiming" that? Someone in this thread. No disrespect intended, Pete. This whole thread seams to be diminishing the attention due to oil burning equipment. A delayed ignition that has not left the confines of the combustion chamber may not be an explosion according to some, however it is an unplanned event. It also rarely occurs without human intervention not heeding the warnings on the unit. New units take the human factor into account as well with lockout modes. What you learn in a classroom is fine. It prepares you to go into the field. Once you've been in the field for 3-4 years, you realize just how little you knew that first year. Many things go wrong with oil burners. YOU may know to stop resetting your protectorelay after the third time, however most DO look at it like an elevator button. Right, but that is not the fault of the oil burner and newer oil burners prevent that as well. Most are filthy. Just have a fly on the wall look-see at most HVAC shops and watch the service techs try to casually avoid the oil service calls. Because most do not get their annual service. No annual service for a few years and nozzles begin to clog causing the combustion to go out of adjustment, soot to form and efficiency to plummet until finally someone calls for service. If they were serviced even every other year they would be nice and clean. Same with a natural gas furnace. Of course I'd rather have a nat gas furnace that hasn't been serviced in years than an oil furnace. Oddly enough I'd rather have a furnace that has received proper servicing. Oh, by the way, standing in front of a 750 HP boiler (30,131,000 btu's per hour./ 215 gal. per hour) while it huffs itself out for .5 seconds, and then back into high fire with out shutting off the main fuel valve will forever makeup ones mind on weather or not an oil burner can or cannot explode. Yea, large commercial / industrial boilers of either gas or oil can do interesting things. Recall one story of a fairly small nat. gas commercial boiler on about the 20th floor of a building that had it's own little blowback and blew the boiler door off barely missing the service guys before it went through the wall and fell the 20 stories to the street below. Blowback? Who puts a boiler on the 20th floor? (I could understand a furnace). Blowback, delayed ignition, whatever you want to call it. A gas buildup in the combustion chamber prior to ignition. Boilers are commonly located on upper floors in tall buildings. Furnaces tend not to be used in large (tall) commercial buildings in favor of larger boilers serving multiple heat exchanger air handlers. Pete C. |
Oil to Natural Gas Conversion Costs
John wrote:
"Pete C." wrote: John wrote: "Pete C." wrote: John wrote: "Pete C." wrote: " wrote: Gas being lighter than air normally dissapates if it leaks. That only works to a limited extent and less and less as homes get "tighter". If windows and doors are closed well nat. gas will just accumulate from the ceiling down. LP gas is heavier and will accumulate from the floor up. In either case unless the home is quite drafty / leaky it will continue to accumulate until it finds an ignition source. There shouldn't be any gas at all outside the furnace or plumbing. There shouldn't, if pipes, regulators, valves and controls were all 100% reliable. As can plainly be seen from all the gas explosions that occur, that is not the case. How many explosions is "all the gas explosions?" Or people that awake to find their home and its contents are destroyed by oil or that their basement is now an oil spill site? Relative to the total number of units? Very few. Relative to each other there is a significant difference. In numbers, what is the "significant difference" that you claim? I don't feel like digging up numbers at the moment. Oil pools and settles , causing a possible safety clean up issue with guys in moon suits hauling away contaminated soil:( This is *not* a safety issue, it is an over hyped environmental issue. When your house is not inhabitable due to heavy oil contamination and fumes, it *is* a safety issue. "Over hyped" environmental issue? Yeah right, unless you consider oil contaminated earth and pollution as part of your environment. First off, uninhabitable meaning you have to leave during cleanup, and uninhabitable because it collapsed after the gas explosion are vastly different things. If you are home when the oil leaks you simply leave, safe and sound. If you are home when the gas leaks you can easily end up dead. As for the environmental part, yes, it is over hyped. Cleanup of even 300 gal of fuel oil that leaks in a concrete basement is pretty minor if it's done reasonably soon. Cite? I know it is a lot more than that because a house near me had exactly that happen to it, and the house was condemned during the cleanup last year. Yes, well it can be overblown if you let yourself be taken in by the hype. Even then it still pales in comparison to rebuilding from the crater the gas explosion left, or paying for the funeral. Yeah an oil spill into the ground causing environmental damage to the ground, not to mention the damage to the house and its contents and/or making the house uninhabitable is just "hype." I don't think there is a difference in funeral costs from people dying in burning houses caused by oil, gas, or whatever. If oil is so much safer, which insurance companies give the oil heat discount or gas heat surcharge? The idea that an oil spill on the ground automatically is some environmental disaster is exactly the hype I'm talking about. Unless that oil is getting into ground water or heading for a stream there is no environmental damage. Oil getting into ground water takes a good amount of time, after all the ground water isn't 3" under your house or your house would be floating. Have a spill and clean it up promptly and the oil has not had an opportunity to go anywhere and there is no damage despite what some dropout eco-nut might claim. Killing some soil bacteria 3" below my basement slab is not environmental damage. Cleanup of oil leaked from an underground tank is a different matter since until the advent of the double wall tanks with monitoring you aren't likely to detect the leak for months or years. That is why we replace 50 yr old underground tanks with indoor tanks or new double wall underground tanks. I'm suspicious of underground tanks for residential use. And who is doing all of the required monitoring? If the inner tank breaks, why can't the outer tank break too? If the outer tank is already corroded when the inner tank breaks, what good is it (or the monitoring system?) The outer tanks are poly or fiberglass and they have leak detectors between the inner and outer walls that will trigger an alarm mounted in the house. Basically just a smaller version of the tanks they now use at gas stations. Great. So this residential detector needs to be working properly in a decade or two or three when the tank starts leaking. How common is this? More like five or six or more decades. I don't know how common it is, probably fairly common with some XL houses in the northeast where a couple 300 gal indoor tanks won't really do. Not particularly cheap, but if you need the capacity and don't have the room for several conventional 300 gal indoor tanks they are a good option. Gas station tanks have caused enough horrors (at least 7 spill sites from leaking tanks in my town alone), and they supposedly are tightly regulated and inspected regularly. Recall that the MTBE fiasco is caused primarily from gasoline leaking from underground tanks! Old tanks certainly caused problems, new tanks generally do not. The MTBE fiasco was caused primarily by eco-nuts pressing for something to be done without adequate research. The problem was not just from leaking tanks and those tanks were likely old tanks, not new. What are they putting in your Texas water? The problem with MTBE is that it gets into the water and travels. It travels much farther than the leaking gasoline/petroleum mess in service station leaking tanks disasters. Nothing in my water, I've got rather good water here. Nice and soft too, I don't miss the hard water in the northeast at all. What do the characteristics of the MTBE problem have to do with why we have the MTBE problem? The fact is that loud moth eco-nuts badgered the government into requiring MTBE without adequate research and the MTBE problems are the result of that knee jerk reaction. The problem that the MTBE lowered mileage enough to cause more gas to be consumed to offset any pollution reduction was an even bigger problem resulting from the knee jerk nonsense. So not only was no pollution reduced from the tailpipe, That's false. MTBE actually did help meet clean air goals, which is the reason it was used. The oil companies weren't buying it for nothing. In the cylinder, this ether is an oxygenate. Oil companies bought it because it was required by the feds, not because it did anything productive. MTBE looked like it helped meet clean air goals based on the emissions from combustion of a gal of gas with MTBE vs. without MTBE. The reality that was discovered later was that the MTBE reduced the mileage of vehicles using the gas with it so they used more gas with the MTBE in order to travel the necessary distances thereby producing pretty much the same emissions as they did burning less gas without MTBE. There are other technologies available to get extra oxygen into the engine without resorting to chemical additives in the gas by the way. These of course require changes to the engine so if they were introduced in new cars they it would take some time to achieve any significant vehicle turnover. additional pollution from the additive was generated, all of which could have been avoided with a year of research and testing. Yeah, it's all the "eco-nuts" fault. Like President Bush, who just eliminated federal protections for oil companies for MTBE lawsuits. Funny how all of the oil companies phased out their MBTE faster than they could lift up a price changing pole. The fed government didn't ban MTBE by the way; several states have. Why should the oil companies by liable for problems from an additive that the federal government required them to put in their product? Want to blame someone for the MTBE problem blame those who pushed for it and those that pushed it on the refiners. Fuel oil has a strong smell and is very likely to be noticed before much leaks. Even when a lot leaks, most undamaged concrete floors contain it pretty well if it's discovered and cleaned in a day or two. I guess if your concrete floors are watertight and sealed (so the oil doesn't soak into them) and you don't have any drains or perimeter drains. Oh and if you don't mind everything saturated in #2 oil. Concrete floors are fairly water tight if they are in good condition. Oil will eventually soak through, but at a pretty slow rate. Not that many basements actually have drains either. Well just about every house around me has a perimeter drain. Prevents any concerns of water in the basement. I didn't realize that basement floors and walls were supposed to be petroleum spill containment systems. Actually, per building codes, they are. There is supposed to be a concrete or block containment wall around tanks of sufficient height to contain the contents of the largest single tank in the space. I don't have the codes handy, but I think it should have a sealer applied to the wall and floor as well. Fairly recent code. I have never seen that, even in brand spanking new houses finished two months ago. Which building code are you talking about? Last reference to it was in CT, but I believe it is in the IRC codes. I was researching when looking at building a house in CT and the oil tank room required a short concrete containment wall around it. There was also a limit of I believe 600 gal in a single fire rated space. As for saturated in #2, I'd vastly prefer that over a smoldering crater where my house used to be. The oil can be readily pumped and vacuumed up from the surface and the concrete if it's saturated can be removed and replaced with far less expense than rebuilding the whole house after the gas explosion (if I survived the explosion). Gas just doesn't blow up a house unless something goes really wrong, like a backhoe out front hitting a pipe. Even then the smell of the gas is pretty obvious before it reaches an explosive ratio with oxygen. In that case it doesn't matter if your particular house has gas service if the gas follows a water or sewer or electrical conduit into your basment instead of following the outside of a gas line. Well, I keep hearing of people killed in gas explosions in their houses. Many are elderly which may be a result of reduced ability to smell the leaking gas, not remembering warnings to not turn on lights and get out if they smell gas, forgetfulness in having the equipment serviced regularly, very old equipment, or a combination of all of those. Yeah, it's so common now, the news doesn't even bother covering it anymore. There was someone killed in a gas explosion at a motel somewhere within the past month. Collapsed the whole corner of the two story building. It was on the news and I think CNN. Certainly a search on CNN.com for "gas explosion" produces quite a few valid results including some doosies like one that ripped up a mall parking lot. Thats why homeownerts insurance is requiring oil tank replacement based on age of tank. And that is why new underground oil tanks are double wall construction, just like new tanks at gas stations. Some new indoor tanks are double wall as well though most are still single wall since there is minimal risk. Just because a 50 year old single wall underground tank is no longer viable in no way means that oil heat is no longer viable. Technology changes and advances and the current high velocity flame retention burners and controls with pre and post purge cycles are a far cry from the old burners as well. Yeah, technology changes, like inducer motors that shut everything down if there is an exhaust blockage in gas furnaces (very very rare). Current oil furnaces have the same feature available. But as you pointed out, CO for oil furnaces isn't a concern for you since you can just smell the dirtier oil furnace fumes. When they are out of adjustment and producing a lot of CO, yes. When they are operating properly they produce little CO and little fumes. You keep changing your topics. My comment was directed at your complaints that natural gas burns too cleanly for someone to smell the fumes if somehow they come into the house, unlike oil, thus CO would be more likely to kill. Even if that was true, it's moot with CO detectors, which everyone should have anyway. You're the one who keeps claiming that nat. gas burns cleanly and oil is dirty which is false. Both are pretty clean with proper combustion adjustments. Improperly adjusted, oil is more detectable than improperly adjusted gas. It's not a function of cleanliness, its a function of different detection thresholds for different chemicals. So, what oil company do you work for? Typical new high efficency gas furnaces get about 94-96% efficiency (AFUE) My neighbor has the exact same house as I do and he has oil heat. I keep my house a little warmer and last winter's bill was less than 2/3 of his. After comparing numbers, he's very interested in switching too. What is the AFUE of your oil furnace? I work for a bank. How old are each of your furnaces? Where in the model range is each one? Both make a big difference. New vs. 30yr old isn't a fair comparison and neither is new high end vs. new low end. About five years old. Fine, let's compare it with a four or even a brand new oil furnace. What AFUE rating Also since both nat. gas costs and oil costs fluctuate it's difficult to make a really valid comparison based on cost, particularly when someone buying their oil off season can get lower prices than someone buying just month to month. Rate lock-ins are also more frequently available for oil service. The last furnace I just had installed at my mothers house this spring (Weil-McLain WTGO4 with a Becket burner) is 85% AFUE, but it is not a high end unit. If I was going for high end it would be a Buderus boiler with a Riello burner. The house needs a lot more insulation so the burner efficiency is a small factor at present. What oil furnaces can do 92%-96% AFUE? Ones that presently cost too much for residential use. And which ones are those ? With that huge residential oil market, why would it cost so much to make a high efficient furnace from a such a superior product like oil, when they've been around for years with natural gas? Maybe the natural gas market is just so much larger due to the need to keep replacing the furnaces when the house keeps blowing up. I've already noted why the nat. gas market is larger. A few gas explosions: http://archives.cnn.com/2002/US/08/1...ion/index.html http://cbs4boston.com/local/local_story_313162110.html http://cbs4denver.com/local/local_story_089161935.html http://wcbstv.com/topstories/topstor...347103431.html http://www.boston.com/news/local/art...gas_explosion/ http://wboy.com/story.cfm?func=viewstory&storyid=10207 http://news.minnesota.publicradio.or.../04/27_ap_gas/ http://ksdk.com/news/news_article.aspx?storyid=89827 http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/a...WS05/603070325 http://www.11alive.com/news/usnews_a...?storyid=74159 http://cbs2chicago.com/topstories/lo...087114934.html http://www.wutc.wa.gov/webimage.nsf/...7!OpenDocument http://cbs4.com/topstories/local_story_105231940.html http://www.texnews.com/1998/2003/tex...ural_g220.html Just a sample, plenty more to be found. Some doosies too. Pete C. |
Oil to Natural Gas Conversion Costs
John wrote:
"Pete C." wrote: John wrote: "Pete C." wrote: trimmed Completely false. This argument against nat. gas is based on facts about it's safety, reliability, cleanliness and the service life of the equipment. Yeah. Decades of living with natural gas and never one service interuption. Real unreliable. Houses are just blowing up all over the place that have natural gas too. I guess everyone is keeping that a big secret from the home insurance companies. Service life? My furnace has a lifetime warranty on the heat exchanger. How many oil furnaces have that? The blower of course will die sooner, but I believe oil furnaces have a blower too. A lifetime warrantee on one component is not necessarily a good thing if you keep replacing the components around it. Well the warranty gives some sort of an indication of how long things are expected to last. And if one thing is going to last a damned long time, I'd want it to be my heat exchanger, which is what separates my house air from my combustion exhaust. That mid range Weil-McLain WTGO4 boiler I just had installed in my mother's place has a comparable warrantee: "Limited Lifetime Warranty Covers cast iron sections. " And what is the efficiency of that unit again? 85% according to the web site But keep in mind, this thing heats water that get circulated to radiators in each room, and or to radiant flooring. This is a boiler, not the same as a gas fired forced air heater. Wall thickness in the heat exchanger is much higher as a result of immersion in water, and this also lowers efficiency. But 85% is nothing to sneeze at, pretty darn good. Someone with radiant heat will always stick with radiant heat. Switching to forced air is very expensive. The installation disrupts the house enormously while the vents are installed and radiators removed. In 90+% of cases, a faulty boiler will be replaced with a similar product. |
Oil to Natural Gas Conversion Costs
Pete C. wrote:
John wrote: "Pete C." wrote: John wrote: "Pete C." wrote: trimmed Completely false. This argument against nat. gas is based on facts about it's safety, reliability, cleanliness and the service life of the equipment. Yeah. Decades of living with natural gas and never one service interuption. Real unreliable. Houses are just blowing up all over the place that have natural gas too. I guess everyone is keeping that a big secret from the home insurance companies. Service life? My furnace has a lifetime warranty on the heat exchanger. How many oil furnaces have that? The blower of course will die sooner, but I believe oil furnaces have a blower too. A lifetime warrantee on one component is not necessarily a good thing if you keep replacing the components around it. Well the warranty gives some sort of an indication of how long things are expected to last. And if one thing is going to last a damned long time, I'd want it to be my heat exchanger, which is what separates my house air from my combustion exhaust. That mid range Weil-McLain WTGO4 boiler I just had installed in my mother's place has a comparable warrantee: "Limited Lifetime Warranty Covers cast iron sections. " And what is the efficiency of that unit again? What does efficiency have to do with the lifetime heat exchanger warranty you were crowing about? I have ignored price per BTU since that is constantly in flux. You mean your argument. A FUD one at that. Price is the only argument made in favor of nat. gas that has even short term validity. All other arguments in favor of nat. gas have been based on either myths, or comparisons of brand new gas equipment to 50yr old oil equipment. That's nonsense. Where do you come up with this crap, now you are claiming "50 yr old oil equipment" comparisons. Compare an average highest efficiency gas furnace with an average highest effiency oil furnace. Which is more efficient and wastes the least amount of energy so that it can heat your house instead? Efficiency isn't everything. If the 8% more efficient gas furnace saves me $200 in fuel during a heavy heating season, but subjects me to a gas outage that I have no way to provide backup for which cause $1,000 in damage due to frozen pipes (neglecting the fact that I know to drain the pipes, most people don't). There you go with the claims of all those gas outages again. With so many outages, it makes me wonder how all of those explosions can any gas to blow up. http://www.dailynorthwestern.com/med...rthwestern.com http://www.wric.com/Global/story.asp?S=4218169&nav=0Rcx http://fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2...102003/1163272 http://girardpress.com/stories/12210...51221038.shtml http://www.wowktv.com/story.cfm?func...y&storyid=1683 http://www.ktre.com/global/story.asp...Type=Printable http://www.findarticles.com/p/articl...12/ai_96369163 Etc. No shortage of gas outage reports. Do a search for rail car derailments that spill petroleum products including fuel oil and you find a big collection too, spanning the last 5 years as these stories do. Dp a search for oil pipeline breaks/leaks and you can find several of those too. This is LIFE, SH?T happens from time to time, and there are NO guarantees for ANYTHING. Heating water with oil is not problem free. Equipment must be maintained and inspected. Leaks must be dealt with, leaks that can contaminate the land to the point that the property may not ever be sold, except to the town, and at a BIG loss. Spot shortages can develop due to several factors, and yes, diesel fuel is a backup. is subject to outages and is far more dangerous than oil. With oil you have multiple suppliers in competition that you can choose from, Who all have to buy from the same source yielding little difference in price. you have an on-site fuel supply that is not subject to outages No outage here in 35 years. I've asked several times where Pete lives that he thinks nat gas interruption is a big concern. And I've mentioned several times that I'm referring to the northeast. It's CT in particular where I lived for 36 years before moving a couple years ago. How many gas interruptions did your neighorhood have in Connecticut? My immediate neighborhood did not have gas service, guess the gas company didn't want to spend months of blasting to install lines. The neighborhoods within 10 miles of me that did have gas service had at least a couple outages per year that I heard of and since I was not there to personally count them probably several more per year that got little press. Multiply that times 36 years and compare to the same 36 years of flawless oil service. Well if that was true, I wouldn't want gas service in that neighborhood either, and I wonder how long it took them to switch. To anything. That's my point. If you are in a pretty urban area gas is probably fairly reliable. Out in suburban pushing rural areas and particularly long established area vs. new developments gas service can be fairly unreliable. Unreliable gas service, in my opinion is MUCH more likely to exist in OLD neighborhoods where the piping has been underground for a long time, access to the piping is difficult and expensive due to roads and buildings built over the distribution lines after the piping was installed. In a new development, by definition, everything is new. Only ongoing construction in the area is a risk, but even then the construction crews KNOW where the gas lines are buried. Spotty or unreliable gas service is unlikely. I suggest that the majority of gas service interruptions are caused by work crews who dig where they are not supposed to, and water lines that are too close to the frost line. |
Oil to Natural Gas Conversion Costs
Pete C. wrote:
John wrote: "Pete C." wrote: John wrote: "Pete C." wrote: trimmed They *should* have the minimal skills necessary to change an oil burner nozzle by following instructions. Recall this requires only the skill to operate two wrenches and is little different from the skill to change a faucet aerator, couple a garden hose or connect a propane tank to a grill. Changing a nozzle does not require any knowledge of burner controls, combustion adjustments or anything else technical. So since this is so easy, safe, and common, which oil equipment manufacturers recommend this service as a customer done item, like changing light bulbs? (and lighting pilot lights in the old days) None that I know of since as I indicated the population as a whole has lost a lot of skills and common sense over the years. trimmed Noise levels for modern gas or oil furnaces of comparable capacity are comparable as well. Older units of both types were noisier. I've never heard an oil furnace, even brand new top of the line, that was even close to silent. Even thirty years ago natural gas was nearly silent (except the ho hum blower motor and maybe the click of a relay and gas valve opening). Perhaps the comparison is better between gas and oil boilers which I have more experience with. Even so, with current oil furnaces the difference isn't that significant. Old units were certainly louder. trimmed Yes and average oil furnaces are cast iron with similar warrantees. Many low end gas furnaces are not stainless steel and have much shorter life expectancies. Only a very few bottom of the barrel oil furnaces use plain steel heat exchangers. Cast iron would rust in a high efficiency (condensing) furnace. Yes, it would. Oil furnaces don't do the condensing thing (yet) due to cost factors mostly. If a fair increase in upfront cost would be tolerated by the market they could bump the efficiency up further that way with more expensive materials. And what is causing the aforementioned "cost factors???" (dirty exhaust, sulfer, soot, acids....) Acids primarily. trimmed In the town I was in and the adjacent towns during the past couple decades I recall hearing of a gas outage of some duration at least every few months. This is also an area with relatively sparse gas service, probably less than 50% coverage of residences in the area. I recall several times there were multi day outages during the winter where people had to go to shelters. What town was that in? If natural gas service was really that unreliable, I'd be looking at propane. Look to the northwest corner of CT. trimmed Where should I look there? Most anywhere. You'll find some small cities with gas service surrounded by many miles of moderately dense semi-rural area with no minimal gas service. Check the CT DPUC site or the sites of the gas utilities covering the area and you should find reports of service interruptions. I know the CL&P / Northeast utilities site has such reports for electric outages, I expect the gas utilities have the same. The costs of nat. gas also go up with the cost of other energy commodities and also with the growth of nat. gas fueled electric generation "peaking" power plants. Nat. gas is not some fixed cheap energy source unaffected by the rest of the energy market. And gee, why is so much electric production being shifted away from oil and to natural gas? Because it hasn't? Nope. Very little electric production was ever oil. Oh really? Really. "At the time of the 1973 oil embargo, about 17 percent of U.S. electricity was generated by burning oil, and about five percent from nuclear energy. But, twenty-five years later, oil represents only about three percent of U.S. electricity production, while nuclear energy supplies almost twenty percent." http://www.house.gov/science/ee_charter_072500.htm 17% = Very little. It's gone to nat. gas from coal and of course nuclear because of both political and economic reasons. Nat. gas used to be a lot cheaper before those peaking plants were built, which is one reason they were built to begin with. The siting and permitting for the relatively small nat. gas peaking plants was also easier which also led to the increase. By the way, a number of larger power plants have been outfitted to burn either oil OR gas. Yet they are burning gas predominantly nowadays. Why? Cost. And gas turbines are pretty multi-fuel to begin with. And why would permitting and siting be so much easier for those natural gas plants? Seems that it would be lot more harder. You know, they must be blowing up and exploding on a regular basis. Hardly. Industrial settings are the one place that gas is fairly safe as they generally get serviced and maintained properly, particularly power plants. trimmed Excuse me? I have solid reasons to have a generator as backup for the electric companies outages. Outside of that the electric company can provide me power at a lower effective rate than I can generate it myself for since they can keep their generators fully loaded and therefore at optimum efficiency. A generator loaded to 25% of it's rated capacity as it would by much of the time supplying a single home will still consume far more than 25% of it's full load fuel consumption. If you could maintain a steady load from the house so that you could match the generator size perfectly then you could generate at close to utility rates. So it is most economical to use an electric utility because of the lower cost and the fact that it is practical and economical to have backup for that utility. Electricity (like oil) also does not present the hazards of gas. If the insulation on an electric line fails it does not fill your home with explosive gas. If an electric line is shorted a circuit breaker or fuse interrupts the power. Gas services generally do not have comparable protective devices other than very recent seismic valves in earthquake areas and those provide no protection from any other faults. You said you are dislike gas because it is a regulated monopoly utility. You said you dislike gas because it has nominal fees for minimum usage per month. Electric service has both of these qualities. Therefore, your arguments are also in opposition to electric service. I *also* said nat. gas is less safe and less reliable than oil. All those factors combine to give more than adequate reason to avoid nat. gas. And I *also* said that I disagree with your hypothesis. You can disagree all you want. I still won't use gas any time soon. If I were currently using oil, if the pricing was to get too high I'd install a geothermal heat pump long before I'd consider nat. gas. And the question for you is, would you opt for a water to water geothermal heat pump for radiant heat, or would you go with forced air? What drives your decision in this case? I am not going to try to convince you that nat gas is safe and reliable in residential use as you are clearly so frightened by the risks that you will go to almost any lengths to avoid using natural gas. As it stands presently in Texas with the electricity and natural gas prices we have now, geothermal heat pumps make enormous financial sense as they are 4-5X more efficient than electric resistance heat, and in dual speed compressor models, run at EERs above 20 in low speed and at EERs of 15-17 in high speed. A properly sized geothermal heat pump would rarely run at high speed in the winter in south texas, and would run in high speed mode only when outdoor temps exceed 90-95F in a properly insulated and sealed home. OK, they are NOT cheap to install as the wells or ground loops are very expensive to install. You are also incorrect with your electric service analogy. Too bad you snipped it out, because you missed the point. You were all hot and bothered about gas because a gas bill contains a minimum billing charge. I pointed out that electricity utilities have the same deal, and also the savings from gas makes up for that nominal fee in spades. I'm afraid I don't make long term decisions like heating fuel choice based solely on price. I have more than a dozen electric suppliers I can choose from, only the distribution is a monopoly. Umm, that's no different than gas supplier choice. You were all upset about the gas utility "monopoly" so I pointed out that electricity is a monopoly too. Both for the distribution portions. You appear to be located in Texas with a incumbent distributor of TXU and "choice" options range from about 13.4 cents to 16 cents per kW/hr. So some "choice" but a very minor spread between the highest and lowest, with most options very close together in between, all with varying terms. The effective spread is a bit larger than those numbers appear since it's multiplied by a couple thousand KWH / month as opposed to a couple hundred gallons / month. Electric also is practical to provide backup for during outages where nat. gas is not. Absolutely false. Natural gas generators are a wonderful thing, and do not require tanks, fuel storage, deliveries, etc. They also burn much cleaner than say, a diesel fuel. Extremely practical. You clearly don't read very well. It is practical to provide backup for electric service outages with a generator (gasoline, diesel, propane, nat. gas.) It is not practical to provide backup for nat. gas service outages. There is no practical way to provide on-site storage for a useable quantity of nat. gas, gas appliances other than generators are particular to the gas type (different burner orifices) so you can't switch on the fly to a "hot dog" propane tank in the back yard either. The only way to provide backup for nat. gas service is with redundant appliances for an alternate fuel. Pete C. And MOST of us with gas service have NEVER had a gas service interruption in many many decades of service. We just don't worry about it, we don't worry about the need for a backup. |
Oil to Natural Gas Conversion Costs
Pete C. wrote:
John wrote: "Pete C." wrote: John wrote: "Pete C." wrote: John wrote: "Pete C." wrote: " wrote: Gas being lighter than air normally dissapates if it leaks. That only works to a limited extent and less and less as homes get "tighter". If windows and doors are closed well nat. gas will just accumulate from the ceiling down. LP gas is heavier and will accumulate from the floor up. In either case unless the home is quite drafty / leaky it will continue to accumulate until it finds an ignition source. There shouldn't be any gas at all outside the furnace or plumbing. There shouldn't, if pipes, regulators, valves and controls were all 100% reliable. As can plainly be seen from all the gas explosions that occur, that is not the case. How many explosions is "all the gas explosions?" Or people that awake to find their home and its contents are destroyed by oil or that their basement is now an oil spill site? Relative to the total number of units? Very few. Relative to each other there is a significant difference. In numbers, what is the "significant difference" that you claim? I don't feel like digging up numbers at the moment. Oil pools and settles , causing a possible safety clean up issue with guys in moon suits hauling away contaminated soil:( This is *not* a safety issue, it is an over hyped environmental issue. When your house is not inhabitable due to heavy oil contamination and fumes, it *is* a safety issue. "Over hyped" environmental issue? Yeah right, unless you consider oil contaminated earth and pollution as part of your environment. First off, uninhabitable meaning you have to leave during cleanup, and uninhabitable because it collapsed after the gas explosion are vastly different things. If you are home when the oil leaks you simply leave, safe and sound. If you are home when the gas leaks you can easily end up dead. As for the environmental part, yes, it is over hyped. Cleanup of even 300 gal of fuel oil that leaks in a concrete basement is pretty minor if it's done reasonably soon. Cite? I know it is a lot more than that because a house near me had exactly that happen to it, and the house was condemned during the cleanup last year. Yes, well it can be overblown if you let yourself be taken in by the hype. Even then it still pales in comparison to rebuilding from the crater the gas explosion left, or paying for the funeral. Yeah an oil spill into the ground causing environmental damage to the ground, not to mention the damage to the house and its contents and/or making the house uninhabitable is just "hype." I don't think there is a difference in funeral costs from people dying in burning houses caused by oil, gas, or whatever. If oil is so much safer, which insurance companies give the oil heat discount or gas heat surcharge? The idea that an oil spill on the ground automatically is some environmental disaster is exactly the hype I'm talking about. Unless that oil is getting into ground water or heading for a stream there is no environmental damage. Oil getting into ground water takes a good amount of time, after all the ground water isn't 3" under your house or your house would be floating. Have a spill and clean it up promptly and the oil has not had an opportunity to go anywhere and there is no damage despite what some dropout eco-nut might claim. Killing some soil bacteria 3" below my basement slab is not environmental damage. Well there is the environmental cleanup issue with the soil that is contaminated. Any such leak to the soil ANYWHERE on your property, if detected by others MAY make the property UNSALEABLE!!! |
Oil to Natural Gas Conversion Costs
Pete C. wrote:
John wrote: "Pete C." wrote: John wrote: "Pete C." wrote: trimmed If you're leaving for vacation and don't review the house status and things like turning off the water and looking at the level on the oil tank then you're an idiot. If I'm getting ready for vacation and the oil tank is low I just call my supplier and ask them to deliver the next day (before I leave). Doesn't cost me any extra and is no more effort than turning off the water or unplugging some appliances. Oh I always turn off the water too. After all any furnace (including oil with that big red RESET button) could sense a fault and shut down or the power could fail, or everything could work perfectly and a pipe breaks etc etc. Someone posted a neat picture (link in this newsgroup I mean) of a house that had been vacant in the winter and the oil company had not filled the tanks with the expected amount of oil and the pipes froze in zero degree F weather. Cool glacier coming down the garage doors. That picture was attributed to not turning off the water before going on vacation when it got very cold and a pipe froze and burst in the ceiling over the unheated garage. I've never seen any reference to the type of heating system in the house or a fault with it. No kidding, except it wasn't a "vacation" and if you did you see you'd know it wasn't just the garage. If you read what I wrote above, you would also know that I was discussing generally why it was a good idea to shut off your water when you're away in the winter because I wrote, "furnace could sense a fault and shut down or the power could fail, or everything could work perfectly and a pipe breaks etc." Right and that situation can occur with both gas and oil and even electric for that matter. Oh by the way, if we do have a power failure, we can still take lots of hot showers and cook on our stove indefinitely. Same here. With my diesel generator and oil heat I can go for weeks. A natural gas generator could keep you going too, offer auto start (and auto charging the batteries weekly, monthly, whenever you prefer) and burn much cleaner than a diesel engine. :) Diesel generators offer auto start, exercise cycles etc. as well. As for burning cleaner that depends on the particular engine. Larger and more expensive units will be cleaner than small inexpensive ones. Run it on biodiesel or WVO and you have yet another comparison. I'm glad you have room for a diesel generator. No way it can burn as cleanly as a natural gas engine can, and that doesn't require stored fuel either. Room? A diesel generator doesn't require any more room than any other type of generator. Oil is a great choice if you have no natural gas service available and your climate is too cold for heat pumps. Oil is indeed a great choice under those conditions and it is also a very good choice under many more conditions, particularly if you are in a cold area even if gas is available. By the way, no climate is too cold for geothermal heat pumps, you just have to get the coils below the frost line where you have a nice constant temperature. That would be nice but unfortunately there is more to geo heat pumps than just putting coils below the frost line. Such as? A properly sized and installed geothermal heat pump will operate just fine in most any environment. Yes, but that "properly sized" part can be a show stopper if you don't have a bunch of land, or a pond nearby, or can use wells. Not really. Vertical loop is workable most everywhere, "wells" typically refers to the old style open loop geothermal which is rarely done these days. The newer trenched vertical coil also doesn't require a lot of area. Pete C. One contractor here in Houston TX recently completed a project for a RESIDENCE that used SIXTY FIVE wells, 300 feet deep. The contractor sizes the project at one well per ton of installed capacity so this was 65 tons of HVAC. Considering that most of us can get by with a ground source heat pump in the 3 ton to 6 ton range, one wonders just how big this house is. The contractor has a 3000sq ft house deep inside the city limits and uses geothermal himself. Lot sizes are small so clearance to neighbor's property line is only a few feet in many cases. One of the wells for his house is under the slab!! He keeps the house at 65F year round and has cooling bills of under $175 Heat in Houston is just not a big concern as there are so few days a year that the temps fall below 40F and almost never get below 25F. What we worry about is keeping cool. |
Oil to Natural Gas Conversion Costs
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Oil to Natural Gas Conversion Costs
Paul M. Eldridge wrote: Well, if the theft of heating oil could expose me to this kind of liability it would certainly be of concern to me. My friends are now estranged from their neighbours (it didn't do much for their own marriage either), their property and that of their neighbours has been torn-up to remove the contaminated soil, they're out of pocket a considerable amount of money, they can no longer get homeowner's insurance and they can't sell this property because the Department of Environment won't sign off on the clean-up (apparently they're still detecting traces of oil). It's just one big mess. Be it related to theft as in this case, a leaking tank or falling ice damaging the supply line, the consequences of a fuel oil spill are pretty grim no matter how you look at it. Generally speaking, an inside tank is your best choice. That said, thirty years ago, my mother's oil tank, which was in located inside a finished basement, began leaking while she was away on holidays. The stench when she returned was unbelievable and all the carpets on the lower level had to be replaced. They brought in big fans to try to clear the smell but it lingered on for months; when you walked through the door, you just wanted to gag. My home is Toronto is all gas (heat, hot water, cooktop, wall ovens, fireplaces, dryer, patio heater and BBQ) and, quiet honestly, if natural gas were available here in Halifax, I would be pushing my way to the front of the line. Cheers, Paul On Sat, 05 Aug 2006 22:56:45 GMT, "Pete C." wrote: I'm not sure you can conclude much of anything from an incident that resulted from criminal activity. Pete C. Funny isn't it how any incidents involving oil just get dismissed, while anything bad that happens with nat gas gets carefully logged as a matter of great significance? In addition to the story of outside tanks leaking and causing big problems, every so often I see news reports of the old wrong delivery address incident. This happened again last winter on Long Island, NY. The oil company delivered oil to the wrong address. Turns out where they delivered it the home once had oil heat, removed the basement tank, but did not remove the fill tube. So, they pumped a couple hundred gallons of oil into the wrong home's basement. On TV they showed the huge cleanup underway, the family was forced to leave the home for an indefinite period until the house was declared safe again, etc. Now, this can be traced to stupidity. I wouldn't say it makes oil unsafe, or a bad choice, depending on the other options available, etc. But the difference is, I see this and put it in perspective. While Pete sees anything go wrong with nat gas, and it's suddenly a big issue, blown out of proportion, while oil gets a free pass. |
Oil to Natural Gas Conversion Costs
"Pete C." wrote: John wrote: "Pete C." wrote: John wrote: "Pete C." wrote: trimmed Exactly where is this spotty gas service that you speak of? Anywhere outside urban and close suburban areas. There are vast areas without nat. gas service and many of those areas are also in colder climates where backup is more critical. There wasn't gas service where I was in CT and there isn't gas service where I am now either. Well obviously if there is no nat gas service and propane isn't feasible, oil would be a way to go in climates too cold for heat pumps to work well. Oil. Cleaner than Coal. Propane is even more dangerous than nat. gas. Because it is heavier than air it is even less likely to dissipate from a leak in a house. Because it is not a pipeline service you have to store a large quantity on-site in a tank that you can't smoke/grill/whatever around and that has to be outside where it is exposed to the weather and more likely to rust than an oil tank in a basement. Wow! You can't grill near a natural gas tank! I think you just ruined a lot Labor day parties. Nice going. :) You have a nat. gas tank? You have your own refrigeration and liquification facilities too? Sorry, should have said a *propane* tank. I'm sorry that I confused you, although I'm not sure why you think refrigeration and liquification facilities would be needed for a natural gas tank. ??? The reference is to the large "hot dog" propane tanks of several hundred gallon LP capacity. They can and do vent some gas while roasting in the hot sun so you aren't supposed to smoke/grill/whatever near them. In those areas they are typically in basements to they are not consuming heated air. The basement air is sealed from the air upstairs? To a large extent yes. Warm air also rises so you aren't going to get warm air from upstairs going downstairs. Indeed waste heat from the furnace is rejected into the surrounding area and that warmer basement air will rise and warm the floors above slightly. Wow! I've never seen a house where the basement air was sealed from the house air. It's nice to know that the air "consumed" into the oil burner wouldn't need to be made up from air leaking into the house via window gaps, exhaust fans, cracks etc. Air typically leaks into basements just fine through garage doors which are damn near impossible to seal, utility penetrations, dryer vents and other basement openings. You won't generally see a draft sucking under the gap at the bottom of the one basement door. Well my garage IS quite sealed from my basement, with a tight fireproof door with lots of weather stripping. Of course it's a moot point for the furnace discussion,since the natural gas furnace uses outside temperature air (colder air contains more oxygen too :) which it brings directly inside for its use. And your point is? Basements are not sealed from houses. Oil furnaces can and do use sealed combustion as well. Neither gas nor oil furnaces used sealed combustion until fairly recently and both are able to use it currently. No real difference. The difference is that all oil furnaces dump a lot of heat up the chimney. Condensing furnaces do not, and they just don't exist for oil since it is a much dirtier burning fuel. |
Oil to Natural Gas Conversion Costs
Robert Gammon wrote: Martik wrote: "Robert Gammon" wrote in message ... Martik wrote: "Robert Gammon" wrote in message m... Todd H. wrote: "Martik" writes: Are you referring to the chimney for the furnace? Why would anyone put something in there. Sounds like a good way to murder someone! Luckily we have 2 CO detectors. Birds have a nasty habbit of not informing homeowners of their nesting plans. If only the birds would follow the permit process, by god, lives would be saved. Given that the top of the stack is a protected entrance, it will be DIFFICULT, but not impossible for small birds to get in there. The gap to my fireplace is a bit larger than my furnace flue, and small birds do find their way to the fireplace from time to time. In 28 years, never such an incident in either gas water heater or gas furnace. A maintenance worker sticking a rag down the flue and forgetting to take it out seems to be a more likely scenario. such an action is more likely to occur at the bottom of the stack, at the furnace, rather than on top of the roof. Is there a sensor to detect lack of free flow thru the chimney that would shut off the gas? Not that I am aware of. It would require putting an electrically operated damper in place, closing it, then venting a quantity of vapor and attempt to detect back pressure. If only atmospheric pressure in 5 seconds after release, then open damper and allow furnace to run. Need a largish supply of compressed air or an air compressor and a bottle to store the gas. This system would add at least $500 to the cost of the furnace. I have a condensing furnace with both intake and exhaust horizontally vented thru PVC and a draft inducer fan. Would this furnace have a safety shutoff. Nope, it RELIES on the fact the the exhaust vent AND the supply vent are UNOBSTRUCTED. Both vents MUST be inspected on a REGULAR basis to ensure that gas is free flowing thru BOTH of them. Your condensing furnace doesn't have an automatic shut down if if the exhaust is blocked? If that's not working properly, you need service. |
Oil to Natural Gas Conversion Costs
"Pete C." wrote: John wrote: "Pete C." wrote: John wrote: "Pete C." wrote: trimmed Completely false. This argument against nat. gas is based on facts about it's safety, reliability, cleanliness and the service life of the equipment. Yeah. Decades of living with natural gas and never one service interuption. Real unreliable. Houses are just blowing up all over the place that have natural gas too. I guess everyone is keeping that a big secret from the home insurance companies. Service life? My furnace has a lifetime warranty on the heat exchanger. How many oil furnaces have that? The blower of course will die sooner, but I believe oil furnaces have a blower too. A lifetime warrantee on one component is not necessarily a good thing if you keep replacing the components around it. Well the warranty gives some sort of an indication of how long things are expected to last. And if one thing is going to last a damned long time, I'd want it to be my heat exchanger, which is what separates my house air from my combustion exhaust. That mid range Weil-McLain WTGO4 boiler I just had installed in my mother's place has a comparable warrantee: "Limited Lifetime Warranty Covers cast iron sections. " And what is the efficiency of that unit again? What does efficiency have to do with the lifetime heat exchanger warranty you were crowing about? I have ignored price per BTU since that is constantly in flux. You mean your argument. A FUD one at that. Price is the only argument made in favor of nat. gas that has even short term validity. All other arguments in favor of nat. gas have been based on either myths, or comparisons of brand new gas equipment to 50yr old oil equipment. That's nonsense. Where do you come up with this crap, now you are claiming "50 yr old oil equipment" comparisons. Compare an average highest efficiency gas furnace with an average highest effiency oil furnace. Which is more efficient and wastes the least amount of energy so that it can heat your house instead? Efficiency isn't everything. If the 8% more efficient gas furnace saves me $200 in fuel during a heavy heating season, but subjects me to a gas outage that I have no way to provide backup for which cause $1,000 in damage due to frozen pipes (neglecting the fact that I know to drain the pipes, most people don't). There you go with the claims of all those gas outages again. With so many outages, it makes me wonder how all of those explosions can any gas to blow up. http://www.dailynorthwestern.com/med...rthwestern.com http://www.wric.com/Global/story.asp?S=4218169&nav=0Rcx http://fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2...102003/1163272 http://girardpress.com/stories/12210...51221038.shtml http://www.wowktv.com/story.cfm?func...y&storyid=1683 http://www.ktre.com/global/story.asp...Type=Printable http://www.findarticles.com/p/articl...12/ai_96369163 Etc. No shortage of gas outage reports. Yeah, it's just happening all over. Gosh why haven't the insurance companies figured out that natural gas heated houses burn down so much more? Why aren't they as enlightened as you? is subject to outages and is far more dangerous than oil. With oil you have multiple suppliers in competition that you can choose from, Who all have to buy from the same source yielding little difference in price. you have an on-site fuel supply that is not subject to outages No outage here in 35 years. I've asked several times where Pete lives that he thinks nat gas interruption is a big concern. And I've mentioned several times that I'm referring to the northeast. It's CT in particular where I lived for 36 years before moving a couple years ago. How many gas interruptions did your neighorhood have in Connecticut? My immediate neighborhood did not have gas service, guess the gas company didn't want to spend months of blasting to install lines. The neighborhoods within 10 miles of me that did have gas service had at least a couple outages per year that I heard of and since I was not there to personally count them probably several more per year that got little press. Multiply that times 36 years and compare to the same 36 years of flawless oil service. Well if that was true, I wouldn't want gas service in that neighborhood either, and I wonder how long it took them to switch. To anything. That's my point. If you are in a pretty urban area gas is probably fairly reliable. Out in suburban pushing rural areas and particularly long established area vs. new developments gas service can be fairly unreliable. I live in a suburban/rural area and I have gas. "Not reliable" to you is never having an outage in *DECADES* to me. It obviously isn't for 95% of us who use it. I've had nat gas service for 25+ years, that has never gone out once. I live in central NJ, 50 miles from NYC. But I've sure had electricity go out. Indeed I did as well and when it did I simply started my generator and went back about my normal business without more that a few minutes interruption. Good for you. Yep. Better to be prepared than screwed. Almost like a boy scout, except I was never a scout. And it;s the nature of the two systems that's key. An underground piped system is immune from much of what can halt electric service. A thrunderstorm, snow storm, car hitting a pole, all are common electric system weak points, that gas generally is immune from. You are ignoring the fact that it is possible and economical to provide backup for the electricity, something that is not possible with the gas. Are you nuts? You have never heard of automatic standby generators connected to a gas line? If your electric service is crappy enough to warrant it, that's the way to go. No fuel to have to worry about storing and engines last a long time with nat. gas, maintenance is very low too. You misread that statement. I said it is possible and practical to provide backup for electric service. It is not possible or practical to provide backup for gas service. True. Fortunately that is not really necessary. I suppose not really necessary if you enjoy spending a few nights in a shelter with a hundred other people and don't mind repairing frozen pipes. Huh? Shelter with a hundred other people? Sorry dude, never happened. No outages either. Providing backup for gas service in a residential setting would require a redundant backup furnace or boiler fired by an alternate fuel like oil or electricity. Wood fired boilers are becoming popular in the northeast, but as primary sources, not backup for the most part. Some commercial sized burners are available in dual fuel (oil / gas) though and can switch between fuels at any time. I would hazard to guess that the "popular" percentage is still quite a bit lower than 17%, which is the percentage that you said is "not significant" for oil generation in USA (1973). Correct, wood boilers are probably in the low single digits at this point. Due in large part to their applicability to large heavily wooded lots where you can log your own fuel. Uh huh. So your point? Additionally time to repair a damaged electric line is significantly less than time to repair a damaged gas line in most cases. You also don't have to spend additional time purging a repaired electric line before returning it to service as you do with a repaired gas line. Purging a gas line takes seconds or minutes. For lines inside a home, not for the distribution lines in a neighborhood. Wouldn't know. Never needed to be purged since it was up and running. Maybe we'll find out some day if maintenance is needed on the pipeline, like water pipes. Right. Some of the articles noted above give an idea of how long it takes to get the lines purged and get everyone's pilots lit again. Yeah, since pipes need replacing like every year I guess, and they always do that maintenance in the middle of the winter, that's a real concern! Again, when you put this in perspective, the gas outtage thing is another red herring. Tell that to the folks who lived within 10 miles of me that had to spend several days in a shelter due to a gas outage. When was that? Where was that? What was the cause? Somewhere between 5 and 10 years ago. In CT, I believe in the Avon / Simsbury area. I think it was a gas line rupture, not a dig up or anything. Should be somewhere in the Hartford Courant archives if you want to look. Well if that ever happens to me, I'll expect I'll heat my house with electric heat for a few days. Or maybe just keep the wood stove working overtime. But it's good to know that they could just move right back into their house, no long lived $$$ environmental clean up required. Why would you have a long cleanup if you ran out of oil, the equivalent of a gas outage? The closest equivalent to an oil leak that would require cleanup would be a gas explosion. No an explosion or fire of any type would be a disaster. |
Oil to Natural Gas Conversion Costs
"Pete C." wrote: John wrote: "Pete C." wrote: John wrote: "Pete C." wrote: trimmed What is the efficiency rating (AFUE) for these "modern efficient oil furnaces?" My natural gas furnace is about 96% efficient (AFUE), meaning that about 96% of the energy in the gas becomes actual heat in my house. How does your "efficient oil furnace" compare? Well, no, it means that the furnace sends 96% of the energy in the gas to it's output as heat, whether that actually becomes heat in your home is dependent on other factors. A good oil fired boiler I looked at was 86.8%, I don't have numbers handy for oil furnaces at the moment. Again, there are multiple reasons to choose oil over nat. gas. Not true. Heat that goes up the chimney or out the exhaust is not included in AFUE. It would make AFUE pretty pointless if the heat being measured in its rating wasn't used to go into the distribution system. (I am assuming that all heat in the duct system goes to the house and that you aren't running ducts outside, through an ice cellar, or through a cold attic). I was referring to the losses after the furnaces heat output, not the stack. So what? You keep claiming that oil is so efficient. I say again, my average condensing furnace is about 96 AFUE. Which oil furnaces come close to that again? The bulk of them are in the single digit difference range, 85%+. Uh huh. Bad assumptions as well since a large percentage of furnaces and related duct work travel through unconditioned space. Horizontal configuration gas furnaces in particular often end up in cold attics. "The Annual Fuel Utilization Efficiency (AFUE) measures the amount of fuel converted to space heat in proportion to the amount of fuel entering the furnace. This is commonly expressed as a percentage. Energy Star labeled furnaces must meet or exceed 90% AFUE energy-efficiency ratings." http://www.waptac.org/sp.asp?id=6841 Yes? And? As I said there are a lot of losses after the furnace output and gas furnaces often end up in icy attics where oil furnaces almost never do. So if you need to put a furnace unit in an attic, you are out of luck with oil again. Oh yeah, insulate those ducts. No, you are not out of luck, it is just rather uncommon. And why would that be? |
Oil to Natural Gas Conversion Costs
"Pete C." wrote: John wrote: "Pete C." wrote: John wrote: "Pete C." wrote: trimmed Try looking at the EPA and DOE sites. Ok. What pages on these sites should we look at? I don't have specifics handy, but I'm sure you can find them with a search. Oh, I thought you knew what you are talking about. Now you want me to go on an egghunt for your claims. Spend some time there, you might learn something. WHERE is this "THERE" you speak of? www.epa.gov? www.doe.gov? Those are home pages. There is nothing on those home pages that support your claims. So you don't even read the pages you say proves your claim. trimmed What is the number of deaths from natural gas versus oil? Can you show us the numbers or is this just a FUD campaign? They are out there on one of the government sites. Oh you know the numbers are out there. Since you know, which sites did you find them on? I'm not sure at the moment, I have too many bookmarks to find it easily. Suppose that rather defeats the purpose of bookmarks. Yes, how convenient. Not really. Oh, I'm sure you have all of those sites on natural gas deaths versus oil deaths all bookmarked. I really am. Certainly the ratio of hundreds of gas explosions to zero oil explosions should be pretty obvious. Someone was killed in a gas explosion at a motel just a month ago, and no, I don't count the deliberate gas explosion suicide in NYC. Zero oil burner explosions? Here's a recent one in New Jersey (nobody was killed in this case, thank goodness!) On March 21, 2005 at 8:44 p.m., the Teaneck Fire Department (TFD) responded to a report of a loud explosion and smoke in the house at 501 Rutland Avenue. Upon arrival, responding firefighters were guided into the basement to investigate a problem with the boiler; however they could not find an odor or smoke. The firefighters, who combined have more than 100 years of experience, began investigating the area. They found that the emergency switch of the boiler had been shut off and later learned that the mother living in the home had turned it off. The basement of the home was sectioned off to provide for various uses of the area. There was a large portion that was used for a recreation/family room, an area that contained two beds that were usually used by the house keeper and one of the children, and two small rooms; one containing the oil fired boiler, the other utilized as a laundry room. After investigating the basement area, the responding firefighters determined that a “blowback” of the oil burner had caused the reported explosion and smoke. “Blowback” occurs when an accumulation of vaporized fuel oil in the combustion chamber suddenly ignites due to a delayed ignition. This causes too much pressure, which results in a loud bang and the release of smoke. The firefighters found multiple problems with the boiler, including closed water valves, a low water level, a non-functional low-water cut-off and a dirty flue pipe. Fire personnel made the necessary adjustments to restore the boiler to a safe and operable condition and advised the owner of the problems that were found. The owner was also directed to have the boiler serviced as soon as possible. That is / was *not* an explosion, not even close. I don't think a blowback on a residential boiler has ever injured anyone, much less killed them. Certainly it will scare the **** out of them and perhaps teach them not to keep messing with the thing if they don't know what they are doing. Oil burners do *not* have blowbacks on their own, they have had the safety devices to prevent that for decades. Blowbacks occur when someone keeps pressing the reset button ignoring the warning not to press it more than once. Oil burner controls from the last couple decades have incorporated a "three strikes and you're out" lockout to prevent this. Yet it didn't work in this one case. What didn't work? The lockout? There is no mention of the boiler being new enough to have the lockout controls. Indeed from the long list of problems mentioned it appears likely it was a pretty old unit. Ok. Nat gas continues to increase in market share, while oil heat is now down to 4% of new homes. If it's so unsafe and unreliable, why is that? 1) Consumer ignorance - Believing nat. gas somehow avoids buying foreign energy. They apparently are not aware of the LNG super tankers delivering foreign LNG just like oil tankers delivering foreign oil. Both nat. gas and oil are produced in the US and both are also imported from foreign sources. The amount and proportion of natural gas that is imported to the USA is tiny compared to oil. Much of the imported natural gas comes from right here in North America, not hostile areas of the world like the Middle East. How does it compare to the 50% or so of oil that we import? The best numbers I have are the US produced 539 cubic meters in 2003, (exported 24.19 cubic meters) and imported 114.1 billion cubic meters of natural gas. Compare those ratios. I'm assuming you forgot a billion on the US numbers. So importing something like 18% nat. gas vs. 50% oil. Not that drastic a difference and given the current trends the gap is likely to close further. Yes all numbers are in billions sq meters. It's a huge difference in terms of energy, as total gas imports was estimated at 114.1 billion cubic meters total for the year. Oil imports were 13.15 million barrels per DAY average or 4.790 billion barrels . To compare, 1 cubic meter of natural gas contains about 36 409.2241 BTUs, 1 barrel of oil contains about 5 800 000 BTUs. (calculations by the Department of Energy website http://www.eia.doe.gov/kids/energyfa...alculator.html) 4154293 billion BTUs natural gas imports 27782000 billion BTUs oil imports Or to put it in another way, natural gas was about 1/7 of oil imports. Not really a valid comparison. Compare US oil production to oil imports and US gas production to gas imports. In both cases we are importing sizable amounts because we do not produce enough domestically. Are you serious? Earlier you just made the claim to wit, "So importing something like 18% nat. gas vs. 50% oil." I give you the ACTUAL figures and now you say, oh that's "not really a valid comparison." You'd make a helluva football official. Keep moving those goal markers around until your guys could a ball in the endzone. Or just keep changing your mind about what you are asking. US Oil production 2.77 Billion barrels per year US Net Oil imports 4.412 Billion barrels per yeyar US Nat Gas production 539 billion cubic meters per year US Nat Gas net imports 89.91 billion cubic meters per year The general public seems to think we get 99% of our oil from the middle east which certainly isn't true. No it's not, nevertheless middle east oil production has a huge impact on our foreign policy and national spending. Our perpetually inept middle east foreign policy has less to do with oil than the anti war folks claim. There are serious issues there that we need to deal with that have nothing to do with oil. Those issues did come largely as a result of oil, but not directly from US actions. Please. I'm not an "anti war folk" but get real. The United States will spare no expense to keep the Straits of Hormuz open and flowing. I don't know about that. It's a different world and different US from the 70s oil embargo days. I'd be rather interested to see what effect another embargo would have. I also seriously doubt that any of the OPEC folks would consider an embargo and indeed would fight one since they have learned that it would not be in their interest and could do them long term damage if people once again get serious about alternatives. Why do you thing the 70s embargo ended? Couldn't have had anything to do with people starting to look seriously at alternatives could it? Embargo? If the USA was so dependent on middle east oil, it could get the hell out of the Persian golf. Instead we make pals with our "friends" the Saudis, sail nuclear carriers up and down the persian golf, and spend much of our foreign policy trying to "stabilize" that minefield as much as possible. The sudden appearance of the oil wealth in the middle east contributed to the downfall of their other economic sectors and the rise of their corrupt / oppressive governments and the resulting collapse of most of their civilization. Which civilization was "collapsed" by oil? Saudi Arabia (formerly wandering nomads?) The whole islamic world which used to be a seat of learning and knowledge but has now degenerated into a cesspool of violence and hatred. Oh ok.. The "whole islamic world," right? If we had not been in the market for oil when it was discovered there, if there culture had advanced more and stabilized before oil was discovered there, or if the Brits hadn't been meddling over there the problems would likely have been avoided. Uh huh. Yea, that hindsight thing. A bit late now to undo the mistakes of many decades ago. Yeah just blame it on the Brits running around almost a hundred years ago. US oil dependence TODAY has nothing to do with our foreign policy expenditures in the region. No siree bob. 2) Marketing - Some deceptive as in the case of the short lived "safe" in one gas suppliers advertising. Which supplier are you talking about? What is the definition of "safe?" It was Connecticut Natural Gas as I recall. I don't know the details exactly, but their "Clean, Safe, Dependable Natural Gas" campaign only lasted like six months before mysteriously becoming the "Clean, Dependable Natural Gas" campaign. On their web page, I noticed that it is "What can Natural Gas offer over my existing fuel? Dependability. Versatility. Affordability. Convenience. Efficiency. Plus, it is also environmentally friendly! " That campaign was a while back. Notice that safety is not included in their current campaign either. Their claim that it is environmentally friendly is more or less true, the implication that other options are not is however untrue. Natural gas burns much cleaner than oil. Don't take my word for it, super efficient condensing furnaces are common with natural gas but oil doesn't even burn clean enough for a condensing application, all the soot and sulfur and crap makes it a show-stopper. New electric plants are favored to be gas because it burns cleaner and has lower emissions, which is now important. Transit agencies are even starting to buy clean "natural gas" buses for the simple reason that they have so much less emissions than #2 oil (aka Diesel fuel) Not really, there are a number of available technologies that make oil / diesel burn cleaner however they are being largely overlooked due to the political / emotional stigma of the word "oil" due to the middle east issues. The cleanest oil or sweet light crude comes from the Middle East. My definition of safe would be free from threat of catastrophic and potentially fatal failures i.e. explosions. So oil heat is not "safe" under your definition. http://www.newburyfd.org/responding_...er_emergen.htm That is an interesting link however you probably didn't read it thoroughly: "There are many possible causes of oil burner emergencies and fires. Fortunately, despite human error and poor maintenance practices, the millions of oil burners in use today function without a mishap year after year. When they do malfunction, the fire department is called and usually remedies the situation with little effort. But never forget that these seemingly harmless emergencies can and sometimes do turn deadly, whether it be from fire, explosion, or carbon monoxide poisoning, and you must be ever on guard against such instances." Additionally most of the failure modes they indicate are all but impossible with burners and controls manufactured in the last couple decades. Most are very unlikely with burners or controls even older. Due to the longevity of oil equipment there are however some really old units out there. This other bit: "Fuel oil comes in several grades, number 1 to 5 grade oil, and has the following general fire hazard properties: a flashpoint of 1007F to 1507F, a flammable (explosive) range of 0.7 to 5 percent when mixed with air, and an ignition temperature of 4947F." should give a bit of a reminder on just how difficult it is to get oil to burn and the near impossibility of igniting oil spilled from a tank leak. No oil will generally not go boom, unless it is atomized, but that doesn't mean that an oil burner malfunction can't fill your house with soot or burn it down. In Eastern Massachusetts last winter, a home had to be abandoned due to an oil leak causing heavy fumes and making the home uninhabitable. The family wasn't going home anytime soon, and the last I heard about it they were talking of demolishing the structure. What they do in the People's Republic of Taxachusets And what is the Sales Tax in Texas again? is hardly a model for the rest of the world. Look at their big dig disaster. What does the big dig have to do with an abandoned house due to an oil heating system? Please explain your fancy comparison. Deceptive price comparisons that do not account for service charges during periods of no use. Deceptive claims of reliability of oil fired equipment. Deceptive claims about the cleanliness of oil burners. Deceptive comparisons of "upgrade" costs to low end gas equipment with service lives in single digit years. Service charges? Like the $4/month minimum billing fee that I pay for my natural gas service? My electric company charges more than that so your argument is opposing electric service too. Even including that fee (which includes service for my hot water heater, gas grill, stove, and dryer) I'm still way ahead with gas, and I have a very efficient furnace too. Electric service is rarely without some usage. With gas service it is not uncommon to have periods of zero use. Certainly this is not true in every case, but again, this is only one of many reasons to not use nat. gas, not the sole reason. Well yeah the reason not to use natural gas is to save a few bucks in non usage charges (similar to what you get with electric service) to save far more in higher efficiency. Besides even in those "zero use" periods, I'm still making hot water, and if I'm home there is a good chance I'm eating (using the grill, stove) or doing laundry (dryer.) A 10% efficiency difference Efficiency difference? Read again, I was referring to your complaints about "service charges" during non-use periods (summer). during a period when you were only heating hot water (to keep the comparison fair) would amount to about $5 with today's high prices. Yeah, except the main consumption of natural gas and reason for using it is heating the HOUSE. I don't know about you, but during the summer months I am not heating my house, I am only heating water. Irrelevant to the comments about "service charges" which is what I was directly responding to. Another non-sequitur. I'll also note that that market share is rather slanted to southern states whe 1) There are minimal heating requirements which means consumers can get low end gas systems to last longer. How so? When the low end gas furnace is only required to operate from November - February it will clearly have a longer service life than the same unit required to operate from September to April. Oh I see. Good thing that same furnace wouldn't be needed for a/c in those climates. A/C operation only affects the blower. There is no stress on the burner or heat exchanger. Unless of course the POS unit leaks condensate into the heat exchanger and it's rusted out by the time heating season rolls around. Yeah it only affects that "cheap" blower, remember??? The main problem with those low end gas furnaces is not the blower, it's the thin, non SS heat exchangers. Rather like the couple very low end oil furnaces out there with steel heat exchangers, not cast iron. Uh huh. 2) Gas companies cover larger service areas in large part due to lower installation costs vs. the northern states with more rock to cut and blast through. Huh? What is your source of this claim? Check with any gas company for the cost of extending gas service to your street in say CT vs. OK for comparable distances. You made the claim. Which gas company(ies) did you check with? I didn't because I don't use gas. But you're making claims about gas, which is what we're discussing. I base that on construction knowledge. What construction knowledge? And using that construction knowledge of yours, please show the numbers. Well? Can you show any information at all or do you just make your stuff up?? When I was in CT I watched the town blast for three days just in the few hundred foot stretch in front of my house to install storm drains. I also watched weeks of blasting when widening the main road down the street. I've watched major construction in my new location in TX as well and there was no blasting required. I'm sorry, I thought we were discussing natural gas lines, not huge storm drains, which often have to be buried much deeper for gravity flow reasons anyway. This was a small storm drain on a road with a significant grade. No issues with gravity flow, no excessively deep installation. Uh huh. So what does that have to do with natural gas? A lot. whether you are installing storm drains of gas mains you have to get through the horrendous amount of rock and ledge in the northeast. Yeah that just explains why there isn't any gas service in "the northeast." Sure. I'll bet that ledge you complain of only affects gas lines too. Good thing there is no sewers, water service, underground utilities, etc. "in the northeast." So if I could find an area in Texas where blasting WAS required, and some other area in Connecticut where blasting was NOT required, that would pretty much "proove" the opposite, wouldn't it? :) No, not really. An individual town may be an anomaly, but the regions in general have notably different underground utility construction costs. This is changing a bit with some scary new trenchers able to cut through granite without blasting and leave nice cuttings to back fill with. Good thing natural gas is the only underground utility, right? And natural gas is so expensive that nobody can afford to install it, right? Good thing sending huge heavy trucks with people driving them around to everyone's house is so cheap and efficient. In those areas nat. gas, city water and city sewers are very sparse due to the huge installation costs. Oil heat, wells and septic systems are the norm. Oh who can afford to blast through all that ledge to build their leach field "in the northeast?" I've also dug a 650' trench in CT for conduit and an 80' trench in TX for conduit and I can assure you the TX trench went far faster and easier per foot and required much smaller equipment than the CT trench. Well there you go. Irrefutable proof that installing gas lines is always more expensive in Connecticut than Texas. Find me any part of CT away from the shore where you don't have significant boulders and ledge to deal with. If you're talking about new construction on an apples to apples comparison, it is possible you might need to do some blasting to install some utilities. However that also includes sewer pipe (which is generally a lot more deep than nat gas), water, maybe electric, telephone in newer subdivisions, etc. Big deal. Generally it is a big deal. In new subdivisions the developers are required to do all that work and that is one of the reasons that new housing is more expensive in the northeast. If the developer has to shell out the money to install all those utilities they add it to the sales prices. In all the existing neighborhoods where it is individual houses filling in, not large developments, those utilities are not installed by the builder and generally remain unavailable for a long time. So what? Doesn't make oil a better fuel than gas, which is what your only thesis is. \ 3) Gas companies market more since they generate more profits from service charges during the long hot months where they have to supply minimal gas. You said they are a monopoly. Why would they need to market? I hear a lot of advertising by oil dealers, or the collective oil dealers, operating as one. They market to get you locked into their nat. gas monopoly. They market to those that use other energy sources. So why does that no-colluding oil heat lobby advertise about "today's oil heat" and how hot it is, blah blah blah. Keep in mind this is not one dealer advertising against other oil dealers, but an obligarchy of many/all oil dealers. A cooperative advertising arrangement is not in any was a monopoly and indeed it's the only way many of the small oil dealers could get advertising outside local newspapers and direct mail. They little local oil dealers don't have the deep pockets of the big state wide nat. gas monopolies. So to rectify that they collude together. Big deal. Cooperative advertising is not collusion by any stretch of the imagination. I guess you think the various commercials from the egg board, dairy council, etc. all represent collusion between all those little dairies and egg producers eh? You mean like the interstate Dairly Compact, a sort of OPEC for milk? No, no collusion at all, sir. No gambling in this casino either. 4) The southern states have been having a huge housing boom as a whole due to lower construction costs and most tract housing gets gas systems not because they are better in any way, but simply because the cheapest low service life units available are in gas which means more profits for the developers and replacement costs for the consumer a short time down the road. What are your numbers for your cost comparison? No handy online reference, but a low end gas furnace installation is at least a thousand dollars less than a low end oil furnace installation. The low end gas unit will also have a service life expectancy about half of the oil unit. Both will be blow the service life of the average units in each class, but the oil still last longer there as well though the ratio is not as extreme. If you say so. I do. But you don't provide any reference for you claim, so it is just rambling. Find some online prices for furnaces. They aren't out there online (rather anticompetative) so it's not really possible to provide references. How convenient for your claims. |
Oil to Natural Gas Conversion Costs
"Pete C." wrote: John wrote: "Pete C." wrote: Robert Gammon wrote: John wrote: "Pete C." wrote: When I was in CT I watched the town blast for three days just in the few hundred foot stretch in front of my house to install storm drains. I also watched weeks of blasting when widening the main road down the street. I've watched major construction in my new location in TX as well and there was no blasting required. I'm sorry, I thought we were discussing natural gas lines, not huge storm drains, which often have to be buried much deeper for gravity flow reasons anyway. So if I could find an area in Texas where blasting WAS required, and some other area in Connecticut where blasting was NOT required, that would pretty much "proove" the opposite, wouldn't it? :) Blasting IS required in the Hill Country of texas where rock is frequently only a few feet below the top soil. Right. Is that where the big housing boom is? The DFW area sure is growing fast. I thought it was where all of those natural gas heated houses going up in flames were. No, they do that all over the country. Well, don't tell that to the insurance companies that write fire policies. They'd hate to know your "facts!" Ha, ha. |
Oil to Natural Gas Conversion Costs
"Pete C." wrote: John wrote: "Pete C." wrote: zero wrote: On Fri, 04 Aug 2006 21:10:29 GMT, "Pete C." wrote: CO deaths are a result of poor combustion adjustment combined with flue leakage, both of which have a higher probability with a gas furnace due to: 1) People believing that a gas furnace does not require annual inspections / service. This creates a greater probability of the furnace falling into disrepair and the poor adjustment and leakage forming. And the average Oil burner in a home that is not serviced properly is JUST as dangerous. That has been my point when people keep claiming that gas burners don't need service. The fact is that any combustion appliance is dangerous if it's not serviced properly. Who was claiming that gas burners don't need service, let alone "keeps claiming" that? Someone in this thread. Who? No disrespect intended, Pete. This whole thread seams to be diminishing the attention due to oil burning equipment. A delayed ignition that has not left the confines of the combustion chamber may not be an explosion according to some, however it is an unplanned event. It also rarely occurs without human intervention not heeding the warnings on the unit. New units take the human factor into account as well with lockout modes. What you learn in a classroom is fine. It prepares you to go into the field. Once you've been in the field for 3-4 years, you realize just how little you knew that first year. Many things go wrong with oil burners. YOU may know to stop resetting your protectorelay after the third time, however most DO look at it like an elevator button. Right, but that is not the fault of the oil burner and newer oil burners prevent that as well. Most are filthy. Just have a fly on the wall look-see at most HVAC shops and watch the service techs try to casually avoid the oil service calls. Because most do not get their annual service. No annual service for a few years and nozzles begin to clog causing the combustion to go out of adjustment, soot to form and efficiency to plummet until finally someone calls for service. If they were serviced even every other year they would be nice and clean. Same with a natural gas furnace. Of course I'd rather have a nat gas furnace that hasn't been serviced in years than an oil furnace. Oddly enough I'd rather have a furnace that has received proper servicing. Oh, by the way, standing in front of a 750 HP boiler (30,131,000 btu's per hour./ 215 gal. per hour) while it huffs itself out for .5 seconds, and then back into high fire with out shutting off the main fuel valve will forever makeup ones mind on weather or not an oil burner can or cannot explode. Yea, large commercial / industrial boilers of either gas or oil can do interesting things. Recall one story of a fairly small nat. gas commercial boiler on about the 20th floor of a building that had it's own little blowback and blew the boiler door off barely missing the service guys before it went through the wall and fell the 20 stories to the street below. Blowback? Who puts a boiler on the 20th floor? (I could understand a furnace). Blowback, delayed ignition, whatever you want to call it. A gas buildup in the combustion chamber prior to ignition. Boilers are commonly located on upper floors in tall buildings. Furnaces tend not to be used in large (tall) commercial buildings in favor of larger boilers serving multiple heat exchanger air handlers. Blowback? Who puts a boiler on the 20th floor? |
Oil to Natural Gas Conversion Costs
My home here in Nova Scotia is heated with oil. The boiler when I
purchased this home four years ago was then thirty-four years old (so too the separate oil-fired hot water tank) and I suspect neither were all that efficient. If natural gas were available, I would have switched immediately, without a second thought. Since that wasn't an option, I installed a high-efficiency oil-fired Slant Fin boiler, a SuperStor Ultra indirect hot water tank and a Tekmar boiler control system. I chose this particular boiler because it can be easily converted to natural gas when that happy day comes (it's certified to operate on either fuel). Last year, with the addition of a small ductless heat pump, I was able to cut my fuel oil consumption by more than half (from 1,973 litres to 828 litres). Of the remaining 828 litres, I'm guessing roughly 500 litres or so are related to domestic hot water production (an average of 1.4 l/day x 365 days/yr). Given the relatively modest space heating demand, if I had to do it all over again I would have installed an electric boiler as a backup to the heat pump and eliminated oil altogether. With heating oil and electricity here in Nova Scotia running at about par, there would be little or no economic penalty to going with electric and I could eliminate the need to store fuel oil on my property. I should add that the previous homeowners used 5,700 litres of heating oil in the year prior to my purchase (and that happened to be a fairly mild winter). By upgrading the heating and DHW systems, careful air sealing, window and door replacement and adding more insulation (e.g., the attic went from R6 to R60 and the walls from R6 to R22), I was able to reduce my fuel oil consumption by 65 per cent. With the ductless heat pump, I've been able to cut that by more than half again. At current prices, I'm now saving over $4,000.00 a year on my heating and DHW costs. Cheers, Paul On 6 Aug 2006 06:14:41 -0700, wrote: Funny isn't it how any incidents involving oil just get dismissed, while anything bad that happens with nat gas gets carefully logged as a matter of great significance? In addition to the story of outside tanks leaking and causing big problems, every so often I see news reports of the old wrong delivery address incident. This happened again last winter on Long Island, NY. The oil company delivered oil to the wrong address. Turns out where they delivered it the home once had oil heat, removed the basement tank, but did not remove the fill tube. So, they pumped a couple hundred gallons of oil into the wrong home's basement. On TV they showed the huge cleanup underway, the family was forced to leave the home for an indefinite period until the house was declared safe again, etc. Now, this can be traced to stupidity. I wouldn't say it makes oil unsafe, or a bad choice, depending on the other options available, etc. But the difference is, I see this and put it in perspective. While Pete sees anything go wrong with nat gas, and it's suddenly a big issue, blown out of proportion, while oil gets a free pass. |
Oil to Natural Gas Conversion Costs
In addition to the story of outside tanks leaking and causing big problems, every so often I see news reports of the old wrong delivery address incident. This happened again last winter on Long Island, NY. The oil company delivered oil to the wrong address. Turns out where they delivered it the home once had oil heat, removed the basement tank, but did not remove the fill tube. So, they pumped a couple hundred gallons of oil into the wrong home's basement. On TV they showed the huge cleanup underway, the family was forced to leave the home for an indefinite period until the house was declared safe again, etc. thats why when the tank is removed with a permit all the oil feed lines MUST be removed..... Those pesty rules are there for good reasons! |
Oil to Natural Gas Conversion Costs
wrote in message Funny isn't it how any incidents involving oil just get dismissed, while anything bad that happens with nat gas gets carefully logged as a matter of great significance? Just as a plane crash that kills four people halfway across the country makes the news, but in your state today and most every day, that many people are killed in auto accidents. and it is rarely mentioned. Gas explosions are really rare, but oil leaks just don't make the news. They are not "crown pleasers" like the more rare happenings. In addition to the story of outside tanks leaking and causing big problems, every so often I see news reports of the old wrong delivery address incident. Now, this can be traced to stupidity. I wouldn't say it makes oil unsafe, or a bad choice, depending on the other options available, etc. But the difference is, I see this and put it in perspective. While Pete sees anything go wrong with nat gas, and it's suddenly a big issue, blown out of proportion, while oil gets a free pass. A fellow I work with had the tubing from tank to heater broken and about 20 gallons spilled. Cause was trace to stupidity of one of his kids. Cost of cleanup was about $8000. Never made the news. Pete has posted some good information on this newsgroup and is a very knowledgeable person. He also seems to have an un-natural fear of gas though. I respect his opinions and ability, but on this subject he is over reacting against gas. |
Oil to Natural Gas Conversion Costs
Robert Gammon wrote:
Pete C. wrote: John wrote: "Pete C." wrote: John wrote: "Pete C." wrote: trimmed Completely false. This argument against nat. gas is based on facts about it's safety, reliability, cleanliness and the service life of the equipment. Yeah. Decades of living with natural gas and never one service interuption. Real unreliable. Houses are just blowing up all over the place that have natural gas too. I guess everyone is keeping that a big secret from the home insurance companies. Service life? My furnace has a lifetime warranty on the heat exchanger. How many oil furnaces have that? The blower of course will die sooner, but I believe oil furnaces have a blower too. A lifetime warrantee on one component is not necessarily a good thing if you keep replacing the components around it. Well the warranty gives some sort of an indication of how long things are expected to last. And if one thing is going to last a damned long time, I'd want it to be my heat exchanger, which is what separates my house air from my combustion exhaust. That mid range Weil-McLain WTGO4 boiler I just had installed in my mother's place has a comparable warrantee: "Limited Lifetime Warranty Covers cast iron sections. " And what is the efficiency of that unit again? What does efficiency have to do with the lifetime heat exchanger warranty you were crowing about? I have ignored price per BTU since that is constantly in flux. You mean your argument. A FUD one at that. Price is the only argument made in favor of nat. gas that has even short term validity. All other arguments in favor of nat. gas have been based on either myths, or comparisons of brand new gas equipment to 50yr old oil equipment. That's nonsense. Where do you come up with this crap, now you are claiming "50 yr old oil equipment" comparisons. Compare an average highest efficiency gas furnace with an average highest effiency oil furnace. Which is more efficient and wastes the least amount of energy so that it can heat your house instead? Efficiency isn't everything. If the 8% more efficient gas furnace saves me $200 in fuel during a heavy heating season, but subjects me to a gas outage that I have no way to provide backup for which cause $1,000 in damage due to frozen pipes (neglecting the fact that I know to drain the pipes, most people don't). There you go with the claims of all those gas outages again. With so many outages, it makes me wonder how all of those explosions can any gas to blow up. http://www.dailynorthwestern.com/med...rthwestern.com http://www.wric.com/Global/story.asp?S=4218169&nav=0Rcx http://fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2...102003/1163272 http://girardpress.com/stories/12210...51221038.shtml http://www.wowktv.com/story.cfm?func...y&storyid=1683 http://www.ktre.com/global/story.asp...Type=Printable http://www.findarticles.com/p/articl...12/ai_96369163 Etc. No shortage of gas outage reports. Do a search for rail car derailments that spill petroleum products including fuel oil and you find a big collection too, spanning the last 5 years as these stories do. Dp a search for oil pipeline breaks/leaks and you can find several of those too. This is LIFE, SH?T happens from time to time, and there are NO guarantees for ANYTHING. Rail derailments and pipeline ruptures do not happen in my basement or threaten to kill me. Not a good comparison. Heating water with oil is not problem free. Equipment must be maintained and inspected. Leaks must be dealt with, leaks that can contaminate the land to the point that the property may not ever be sold, except to the town, and at a BIG loss. Spot shortages can develop due to several factors, and yes, diesel fuel is a backup. I never said it was problem free, indeed I indicated that both oil and gas burners require annual service. Oil is safer and more reliable than gas. However low the incident probability is overall the probability is lower for oil than gas. is subject to outages and is far more dangerous than oil. With oil you have multiple suppliers in competition that you can choose from, Who all have to buy from the same source yielding little difference in price. you have an on-site fuel supply that is not subject to outages No outage here in 35 years. I've asked several times where Pete lives that he thinks nat gas interruption is a big concern. And I've mentioned several times that I'm referring to the northeast. It's CT in particular where I lived for 36 years before moving a couple years ago. How many gas interruptions did your neighorhood have in Connecticut? My immediate neighborhood did not have gas service, guess the gas company didn't want to spend months of blasting to install lines. The neighborhoods within 10 miles of me that did have gas service had at least a couple outages per year that I heard of and since I was not there to personally count them probably several more per year that got little press. Multiply that times 36 years and compare to the same 36 years of flawless oil service. Well if that was true, I wouldn't want gas service in that neighborhood either, and I wonder how long it took them to switch. To anything. That's my point. If you are in a pretty urban area gas is probably fairly reliable. Out in suburban pushing rural areas and particularly long established area vs. new developments gas service can be fairly unreliable. Unreliable gas service, in my opinion is MUCH more likely to exist in OLD neighborhoods where the piping has been underground for a long time, access to the piping is difficult and expensive due to roads and buildings built over the distribution lines after the piping was installed. That certainly is a factor. Remember that apartment building in I think NJ that was cut in half by a pipeline explosion under it perhaps 8 years ago? In a new development, by definition, everything is new. Only ongoing construction in the area is a risk, but even then the construction crews KNOW where the gas lines are buried. Spotty or unreliable gas service is unlikely. For now. Give it some years and it will become unreliable. Oil service does not have that built in degradation. I suggest that the majority of gas service interruptions are caused by work crews who dig where they are not supposed to, and water lines that are too close to the frost line. Many are, others are the delayed result of improper pipeline installation or damage to the pipeline during installation. I hear of one pipeline rupture on a high pressure pipeline that was traced to a slight nick on the pipe from a backhoe tooth. It did just fine for a number of years before finally failing in the middle of winter. But again, none of those problems affect oil service. A crew digging down the street or a water main break down the street will not affect the oil supply in your basement. Pete C. |
Oil to Natural Gas Conversion Costs
John wrote:
"Pete C." wrote: John wrote: "Pete C." wrote: John wrote: "Pete C." wrote: trimmed Completely false. This argument against nat. gas is based on facts about it's safety, reliability, cleanliness and the service life of the equipment. Yeah. Decades of living with natural gas and never one service interuption. Real unreliable. Houses are just blowing up all over the place that have natural gas too. I guess everyone is keeping that a big secret from the home insurance companies. Service life? My furnace has a lifetime warranty on the heat exchanger. How many oil furnaces have that? The blower of course will die sooner, but I believe oil furnaces have a blower too. A lifetime warrantee on one component is not necessarily a good thing if you keep replacing the components around it. Well the warranty gives some sort of an indication of how long things are expected to last. And if one thing is going to last a damned long time, I'd want it to be my heat exchanger, which is what separates my house air from my combustion exhaust. That mid range Weil-McLain WTGO4 boiler I just had installed in my mother's place has a comparable warrantee: "Limited Lifetime Warranty Covers cast iron sections. " And what is the efficiency of that unit again? What does efficiency have to do with the lifetime heat exchanger warranty you were crowing about? I have ignored price per BTU since that is constantly in flux. You mean your argument. A FUD one at that. Price is the only argument made in favor of nat. gas that has even short term validity. All other arguments in favor of nat. gas have been based on either myths, or comparisons of brand new gas equipment to 50yr old oil equipment. That's nonsense. Where do you come up with this crap, now you are claiming "50 yr old oil equipment" comparisons. Compare an average highest efficiency gas furnace with an average highest effiency oil furnace. Which is more efficient and wastes the least amount of energy so that it can heat your house instead? Efficiency isn't everything. If the 8% more efficient gas furnace saves me $200 in fuel during a heavy heating season, but subjects me to a gas outage that I have no way to provide backup for which cause $1,000 in damage due to frozen pipes (neglecting the fact that I know to drain the pipes, most people don't). There you go with the claims of all those gas outages again. With so many outages, it makes me wonder how all of those explosions can any gas to blow up. http://www.dailynorthwestern.com/med...rthwestern.com http://www.wric.com/Global/story.asp?S=4218169&nav=0Rcx http://fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2...102003/1163272 http://girardpress.com/stories/12210...51221038.shtml http://www.wowktv.com/story.cfm?func...y&storyid=1683 http://www.ktre.com/global/story.asp...Type=Printable http://www.findarticles.com/p/articl...12/ai_96369163 Etc. No shortage of gas outage reports. Yeah, it's just happening all over. Gosh why haven't the insurance companies figured out that natural gas heated houses burn down so much more? Why aren't they as enlightened as you? Because the total number is low enough not to bother them. That does not in any way invalidate the relative difference in safety between oil and gas. is subject to outages and is far more dangerous than oil. With oil you have multiple suppliers in competition that you can choose from, Who all have to buy from the same source yielding little difference in price. you have an on-site fuel supply that is not subject to outages No outage here in 35 years. I've asked several times where Pete lives that he thinks nat gas interruption is a big concern. And I've mentioned several times that I'm referring to the northeast. It's CT in particular where I lived for 36 years before moving a couple years ago. How many gas interruptions did your neighorhood have in Connecticut? My immediate neighborhood did not have gas service, guess the gas company didn't want to spend months of blasting to install lines. The neighborhoods within 10 miles of me that did have gas service had at least a couple outages per year that I heard of and since I was not there to personally count them probably several more per year that got little press. Multiply that times 36 years and compare to the same 36 years of flawless oil service. Well if that was true, I wouldn't want gas service in that neighborhood either, and I wonder how long it took them to switch. To anything. That's my point. If you are in a pretty urban area gas is probably fairly reliable. Out in suburban pushing rural areas and particularly long established area vs. new developments gas service can be fairly unreliable. I live in a suburban/rural area and I have gas. "Not reliable" to you is never having an outage in *DECADES* to me. Different areas have different reliability. If your gas lines were installed fairly recently or your gas company is particularly good about replacing older lines you're lucky. Not everyone has such luck. It obviously isn't for 95% of us who use it. I've had nat gas service for 25+ years, that has never gone out once. I live in central NJ, 50 miles from NYC. But I've sure had electricity go out. Indeed I did as well and when it did I simply started my generator and went back about my normal business without more that a few minutes interruption. Good for you. Yep. Better to be prepared than screwed. Almost like a boy scout, except I was never a scout. And it;s the nature of the two systems that's key. An underground piped system is immune from much of what can halt electric service. A thrunderstorm, snow storm, car hitting a pole, all are common electric system weak points, that gas generally is immune from. You are ignoring the fact that it is possible and economical to provide backup for the electricity, something that is not possible with the gas. Are you nuts? You have never heard of automatic standby generators connected to a gas line? If your electric service is crappy enough to warrant it, that's the way to go. No fuel to have to worry about storing and engines last a long time with nat. gas, maintenance is very low too. You misread that statement. I said it is possible and practical to provide backup for electric service. It is not possible or practical to provide backup for gas service. True. Fortunately that is not really necessary. I suppose not really necessary if you enjoy spending a few nights in a shelter with a hundred other people and don't mind repairing frozen pipes. Huh? Shelter with a hundred other people? Sorry dude, never happened. No outages either. Never happened to you perhaps. I most certainly did happen to people near me. Providing backup for gas service in a residential setting would require a redundant backup furnace or boiler fired by an alternate fuel like oil or electricity. Wood fired boilers are becoming popular in the northeast, but as primary sources, not backup for the most part. Some commercial sized burners are available in dual fuel (oil / gas) though and can switch between fuels at any time. I would hazard to guess that the "popular" percentage is still quite a bit lower than 17%, which is the percentage that you said is "not significant" for oil generation in USA (1973). Correct, wood boilers are probably in the low single digits at this point. Due in large part to their applicability to large heavily wooded lots where you can log your own fuel. Uh huh. So your point? The point was noting the relative impracticality of providing backup for unreliable gas service. Additionally time to repair a damaged electric line is significantly less than time to repair a damaged gas line in most cases. You also don't have to spend additional time purging a repaired electric line before returning it to service as you do with a repaired gas line. Purging a gas line takes seconds or minutes. For lines inside a home, not for the distribution lines in a neighborhood. Wouldn't know. Never needed to be purged since it was up and running. Maybe we'll find out some day if maintenance is needed on the pipeline, like water pipes. Right. Some of the articles noted above give an idea of how long it takes to get the lines purged and get everyone's pilots lit again. Yeah, since pipes need replacing like every year I guess, and they always do that maintenance in the middle of the winter, that's a real concern! The outages aren't often related to maintenance, they are typically unscheduled emergency events. You do bring up the additional point that even scheduled maintenance can cause gas outages though you at least get a few days warning. Again, when you put this in perspective, the gas outtage thing is another red herring. Tell that to the folks who lived within 10 miles of me that had to spend several days in a shelter due to a gas outage. When was that? Where was that? What was the cause? Somewhere between 5 and 10 years ago. In CT, I believe in the Avon / Simsbury area. I think it was a gas line rupture, not a dig up or anything. Should be somewhere in the Hartford Courant archives if you want to look. Well if that ever happens to me, I'll expect I'll heat my house with electric heat for a few days. Or maybe just keep the wood stove working overtime. But it's good to know that they could just move right back into their house, no long lived $$$ environmental clean up required. Why would you have a long cleanup if you ran out of oil, the equivalent of a gas outage? The closest equivalent to an oil leak that would require cleanup would be a gas explosion. No an explosion or fire of any type would be a disaster. Right, but that has no bearing on the multi day gas outage I referenced. The houses were temporarily uninhabitable because the gas service failed and there was no backup for it. No idea how much damage from frozen pipes also resulted, probably a good amount since not many people know how to drain the pipes before leaving. Pete C. |
Oil to Natural Gas Conversion Costs
Robert Gammon wrote:
John wrote: "Pete C." wrote: John wrote: "Pete C." wrote: trimmed Completely false. This argument against nat. gas is based on facts about it's safety, reliability, cleanliness and the service life of the equipment. Yeah. Decades of living with natural gas and never one service interuption. Real unreliable. Houses are just blowing up all over the place that have natural gas too. I guess everyone is keeping that a big secret from the home insurance companies. Service life? My furnace has a lifetime warranty on the heat exchanger. How many oil furnaces have that? The blower of course will die sooner, but I believe oil furnaces have a blower too. A lifetime warrantee on one component is not necessarily a good thing if you keep replacing the components around it. Well the warranty gives some sort of an indication of how long things are expected to last. And if one thing is going to last a damned long time, I'd want it to be my heat exchanger, which is what separates my house air from my combustion exhaust. That mid range Weil-McLain WTGO4 boiler I just had installed in my mother's place has a comparable warrantee: "Limited Lifetime Warranty Covers cast iron sections. " And what is the efficiency of that unit again? 85% according to the web site But keep in mind, this thing heats water that get circulated to radiators in each room, and or to radiant flooring. This is a boiler, not the same as a gas fired forced air heater. Wall thickness in the heat exchanger is much higher as a result of immersion in water, and this also lowers efficiency. But 85% is nothing to sneeze at, pretty darn good. Someone with radiant heat will always stick with radiant heat. Switching to forced air is very expensive. The installation disrupts the house enormously while the vents are installed and radiators removed. In 90+% of cases, a faulty boiler will be replaced with a similar product. Right, the only time hydronic heat is likely to be replaced with FHA is when the owner also wants to add central air. Pete C. |
Oil to Natural Gas Conversion Costs
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Oil to Natural Gas Conversion Costs
"Paul M. Eldridge" wrote:
My home here in Nova Scotia is heated with oil. The boiler when I purchased this home four years ago was then thirty-four years old (so too the separate oil-fired hot water tank) and I suspect neither were all that efficient. If natural gas were available, I would have switched immediately, without a second thought. Since that wasn't an option, I installed a high-efficiency oil-fired Slant Fin boiler, a SuperStor Ultra indirect hot water tank and a Tekmar boiler control system. I chose this particular boiler because it can be easily converted to natural gas when that happy day comes (it's certified to operate on either fuel). Last year, with the addition of a small ductless heat pump, I was able to cut my fuel oil consumption by more than half (from 1,973 litres to 828 litres). Of the remaining 828 litres, I'm guessing roughly 500 litres or so are related to domestic hot water production (an average of 1.4 l/day x 365 days/yr). Given the relatively modest space heating demand, if I had to do it all over again I would have installed an electric boiler as a backup to the heat pump and eliminated oil altogether. With heating oil and electricity here in Nova Scotia running at about par, there would be little or no economic penalty to going with electric and I could eliminate the need to store fuel oil on my property. I should add that the previous homeowners used 5,700 litres of heating oil in the year prior to my purchase (and that happened to be a fairly mild winter). By upgrading the heating and DHW systems, careful air sealing, window and door replacement and adding more insulation (e.g., the attic went from R6 to R60 and the walls from R6 to R22), I was able to reduce my fuel oil consumption by 65 per cent. With the ductless heat pump, I've been able to cut that by more than half again. At current prices, I'm now saving over $4,000.00 a year on my heating and DHW costs. Cheers, Paul Indeed regardless of the fuel source, when you upgrade a decades old system and more importantly address deficiencies in insulation, windows, doors, etc. you can make a big difference in total efficiency and operating costs. I would suggest that before considering a fuel switch or equipment upgrade for the same fuel, anyone with oil equipment manufactured in the last couple decades would be better served to properly address insulation, window and door issues first and wait a month or two to see the change. In many cases the non equipment issues can losses 25% or more. If you have equipment (oil or gas) that is more than say 40 years old you should be looking to replace it unless it's a particularly high end model and efficiency testing shows decent numbers. The 50 year old boiler that was replaced at my mother's house had been testing in the 79-80% range which while not as good as a modern unit wasn't bad at all for a 50 year old unit. Pete C. |
Oil to Natural Gas Conversion Costs
Robert Gammon wrote:
Pete C. wrote: John wrote: "Pete C." wrote: John wrote: "Pete C." wrote: trimmed If you're leaving for vacation and don't review the house status and things like turning off the water and looking at the level on the oil tank then you're an idiot. If I'm getting ready for vacation and the oil tank is low I just call my supplier and ask them to deliver the next day (before I leave). Doesn't cost me any extra and is no more effort than turning off the water or unplugging some appliances. Oh I always turn off the water too. After all any furnace (including oil with that big red RESET button) could sense a fault and shut down or the power could fail, or everything could work perfectly and a pipe breaks etc etc. Someone posted a neat picture (link in this newsgroup I mean) of a house that had been vacant in the winter and the oil company had not filled the tanks with the expected amount of oil and the pipes froze in zero degree F weather. Cool glacier coming down the garage doors. That picture was attributed to not turning off the water before going on vacation when it got very cold and a pipe froze and burst in the ceiling over the unheated garage. I've never seen any reference to the type of heating system in the house or a fault with it. No kidding, except it wasn't a "vacation" and if you did you see you'd know it wasn't just the garage. If you read what I wrote above, you would also know that I was discussing generally why it was a good idea to shut off your water when you're away in the winter because I wrote, "furnace could sense a fault and shut down or the power could fail, or everything could work perfectly and a pipe breaks etc." Right and that situation can occur with both gas and oil and even electric for that matter. Oh by the way, if we do have a power failure, we can still take lots of hot showers and cook on our stove indefinitely. Same here. With my diesel generator and oil heat I can go for weeks. A natural gas generator could keep you going too, offer auto start (and auto charging the batteries weekly, monthly, whenever you prefer) and burn much cleaner than a diesel engine. :) Diesel generators offer auto start, exercise cycles etc. as well. As for burning cleaner that depends on the particular engine. Larger and more expensive units will be cleaner than small inexpensive ones. Run it on biodiesel or WVO and you have yet another comparison. I'm glad you have room for a diesel generator. No way it can burn as cleanly as a natural gas engine can, and that doesn't require stored fuel either. Room? A diesel generator doesn't require any more room than any other type of generator. Oil is a great choice if you have no natural gas service available and your climate is too cold for heat pumps. Oil is indeed a great choice under those conditions and it is also a very good choice under many more conditions, particularly if you are in a cold area even if gas is available. By the way, no climate is too cold for geothermal heat pumps, you just have to get the coils below the frost line where you have a nice constant temperature. That would be nice but unfortunately there is more to geo heat pumps than just putting coils below the frost line. Such as? A properly sized and installed geothermal heat pump will operate just fine in most any environment. Yes, but that "properly sized" part can be a show stopper if you don't have a bunch of land, or a pond nearby, or can use wells. Not really. Vertical loop is workable most everywhere, "wells" typically refers to the old style open loop geothermal which is rarely done these days. The newer trenched vertical coil also doesn't require a lot of area. Pete C. One contractor here in Houston TX recently completed a project for a RESIDENCE that used SIXTY FIVE wells, 300 feet deep. The contractor sizes the project at one well per ton of installed capacity so this was 65 tons of HVAC. Considering that most of us can get by with a ground source heat pump in the 3 ton to 6 ton range, one wonders just how big this house is. 65 tons certainly is a huge house, a commercial building or a deep freeze. The contractor has a 3000sq ft house deep inside the city limits and uses geothermal himself. Lot sizes are small so clearance to neighbor's property line is only a few feet in many cases. One of the wells for his house is under the slab!! He keeps the house at 65F year round and has cooling bills of under $175 Heat in Houston is just not a big concern as there are so few days a year that the temps fall below 40F and almost never get below 25F. What we worry about is keeping cool. I'm north of Dallas and currently all electric. When I look to replace the older A/C in a year or two I will likely go with a geothermal heat pump. I've got a few acres so the newer trenched vertical "slinky" loop configuration will probably be most economical given the modest ~3 ton requirement. Pete C. |
Oil to Natural Gas Conversion Costs
Robert Gammon wrote:
Pete C. wrote: John wrote: "Pete C." wrote: John wrote: "Pete C." wrote: John wrote: "Pete C." wrote: " wrote: Gas being lighter than air normally dissapates if it leaks. That only works to a limited extent and less and less as homes get "tighter". If windows and doors are closed well nat. gas will just accumulate from the ceiling down. LP gas is heavier and will accumulate from the floor up. In either case unless the home is quite drafty / leaky it will continue to accumulate until it finds an ignition source. There shouldn't be any gas at all outside the furnace or plumbing. There shouldn't, if pipes, regulators, valves and controls were all 100% reliable. As can plainly be seen from all the gas explosions that occur, that is not the case. How many explosions is "all the gas explosions?" Or people that awake to find their home and its contents are destroyed by oil or that their basement is now an oil spill site? Relative to the total number of units? Very few. Relative to each other there is a significant difference. In numbers, what is the "significant difference" that you claim? I don't feel like digging up numbers at the moment. Oil pools and settles , causing a possible safety clean up issue with guys in moon suits hauling away contaminated soil:( This is *not* a safety issue, it is an over hyped environmental issue. When your house is not inhabitable due to heavy oil contamination and fumes, it *is* a safety issue. "Over hyped" environmental issue? Yeah right, unless you consider oil contaminated earth and pollution as part of your environment. First off, uninhabitable meaning you have to leave during cleanup, and uninhabitable because it collapsed after the gas explosion are vastly different things. If you are home when the oil leaks you simply leave, safe and sound. If you are home when the gas leaks you can easily end up dead. As for the environmental part, yes, it is over hyped. Cleanup of even 300 gal of fuel oil that leaks in a concrete basement is pretty minor if it's done reasonably soon. Cite? I know it is a lot more than that because a house near me had exactly that happen to it, and the house was condemned during the cleanup last year. Yes, well it can be overblown if you let yourself be taken in by the hype. Even then it still pales in comparison to rebuilding from the crater the gas explosion left, or paying for the funeral. Yeah an oil spill into the ground causing environmental damage to the ground, not to mention the damage to the house and its contents and/or making the house uninhabitable is just "hype." I don't think there is a difference in funeral costs from people dying in burning houses caused by oil, gas, or whatever. If oil is so much safer, which insurance companies give the oil heat discount or gas heat surcharge? The idea that an oil spill on the ground automatically is some environmental disaster is exactly the hype I'm talking about. Unless that oil is getting into ground water or heading for a stream there is no environmental damage. Oil getting into ground water takes a good amount of time, after all the ground water isn't 3" under your house or your house would be floating. Have a spill and clean it up promptly and the oil has not had an opportunity to go anywhere and there is no damage despite what some dropout eco-nut might claim. Killing some soil bacteria 3" below my basement slab is not environmental damage. Well there is the environmental cleanup issue with the soil that is contaminated. Any such leak to the soil ANYWHERE on your property, if detected by others MAY make the property UNSALEABLE!!! Unsaleable to the uninformed perhaps. To those who understand that removing a few yards of soil and giving it to a construction company for use under a road (where there is plenty of petroleum contamination anyway) is pretty simple it should not affect saleability. Too much uninformed and irrational hysteria in this country. Pete C. |
Oil to Natural Gas Conversion Costs
John wrote:
"Pete C." wrote: John wrote: "Pete C." wrote: zero wrote: On Fri, 04 Aug 2006 21:10:29 GMT, "Pete C." wrote: CO deaths are a result of poor combustion adjustment combined with flue leakage, both of which have a higher probability with a gas furnace due to: 1) People believing that a gas furnace does not require annual inspections / service. This creates a greater probability of the furnace falling into disrepair and the poor adjustment and leakage forming. And the average Oil burner in a home that is not serviced properly is JUST as dangerous. That has been my point when people keep claiming that gas burners don't need service. The fact is that any combustion appliance is dangerous if it's not serviced properly. Who was claiming that gas burners don't need service, let alone "keeps claiming" that? Someone in this thread. Who? Don't recall and I'm not searching the whole thread to find it either. No disrespect intended, Pete. This whole thread seams to be diminishing the attention due to oil burning equipment. A delayed ignition that has not left the confines of the combustion chamber may not be an explosion according to some, however it is an unplanned event. It also rarely occurs without human intervention not heeding the warnings on the unit. New units take the human factor into account as well with lockout modes. What you learn in a classroom is fine. It prepares you to go into the field. Once you've been in the field for 3-4 years, you realize just how little you knew that first year. Many things go wrong with oil burners. YOU may know to stop resetting your protectorelay after the third time, however most DO look at it like an elevator button. Right, but that is not the fault of the oil burner and newer oil burners prevent that as well. Most are filthy. Just have a fly on the wall look-see at most HVAC shops and watch the service techs try to casually avoid the oil service calls. Because most do not get their annual service. No annual service for a few years and nozzles begin to clog causing the combustion to go out of adjustment, soot to form and efficiency to plummet until finally someone calls for service. If they were serviced even every other year they would be nice and clean. Same with a natural gas furnace. Of course I'd rather have a nat gas furnace that hasn't been serviced in years than an oil furnace. Oddly enough I'd rather have a furnace that has received proper servicing. Oh, by the way, standing in front of a 750 HP boiler (30,131,000 btu's per hour./ 215 gal. per hour) while it huffs itself out for .5 seconds, and then back into high fire with out shutting off the main fuel valve will forever makeup ones mind on weather or not an oil burner can or cannot explode. Yea, large commercial / industrial boilers of either gas or oil can do interesting things. Recall one story of a fairly small nat. gas commercial boiler on about the 20th floor of a building that had it's own little blowback and blew the boiler door off barely missing the service guys before it went through the wall and fell the 20 stories to the street below. Blowback? Who puts a boiler on the 20th floor? (I could understand a furnace). Blowback, delayed ignition, whatever you want to call it. A gas buildup in the combustion chamber prior to ignition. Boilers are commonly located on upper floors in tall buildings. Furnaces tend not to be used in large (tall) commercial buildings in favor of larger boilers serving multiple heat exchanger air handlers. Blowback? Who puts a boiler on the 20th floor? People who understand commercial construction as you apparently do not. Pete C. |
Oil to Natural Gas Conversion Costs
"Pete C." wrote: John wrote: "Pete C." wrote: John wrote: "Pete C." wrote: John wrote: "Pete C." wrote: " wrote: Gas being lighter than air normally dissapates if it leaks. That only works to a limited extent and less and less as homes get "tighter". If windows and doors are closed well nat. gas will just accumulate from the ceiling down. LP gas is heavier and will accumulate from the floor up. In either case unless the home is quite drafty / leaky it will continue to accumulate until it finds an ignition source. There shouldn't be any gas at all outside the furnace or plumbing. There shouldn't, if pipes, regulators, valves and controls were all 100% reliable. As can plainly be seen from all the gas explosions that occur, that is not the case. How many explosions is "all the gas explosions?" Or people that awake to find their home and its contents are destroyed by oil or that their basement is now an oil spill site? Relative to the total number of units? Very few. Relative to each other there is a significant difference. In numbers, what is the "significant difference" that you claim? I don't feel like digging up numbers at the moment. Of course not. We'll just take your word for it, since you appear to be so knowedgeable. Oil pools and settles , causing a possible safety clean up issue with guys in moon suits hauling away contaminated soil:( This is *not* a safety issue, it is an over hyped environmental issue. When your house is not inhabitable due to heavy oil contamination and fumes, it *is* a safety issue. "Over hyped" environmental issue? Yeah right, unless you consider oil contaminated earth and pollution as part of your environment. First off, uninhabitable meaning you have to leave during cleanup, and uninhabitable because it collapsed after the gas explosion are vastly different things. If you are home when the oil leaks you simply leave, safe and sound. If you are home when the gas leaks you can easily end up dead. As for the environmental part, yes, it is over hyped. Cleanup of even 300 gal of fuel oil that leaks in a concrete basement is pretty minor if it's done reasonably soon. Cite? I know it is a lot more than that because a house near me had exactly that happen to it, and the house was condemned during the cleanup last year. Yes, well it can be overblown if you let yourself be taken in by the hype. Even then it still pales in comparison to rebuilding from the crater the gas explosion left, or paying for the funeral. Yeah an oil spill into the ground causing environmental damage to the ground, not to mention the damage to the house and its contents and/or making the house uninhabitable is just "hype." I don't think there is a difference in funeral costs from people dying in burning houses caused by oil, gas, or whatever. If oil is so much safer, which insurance companies give the oil heat discount or gas heat surcharge? The idea that an oil spill on the ground automatically is some environmental disaster is exactly the hype I'm talking about. Unless that oil is getting into ground water or heading for a stream there is no environmental damage. Oil getting into ground water takes a good amount of time, after all the ground water isn't 3" under your house or your house would be floating. Have a spill and clean it up promptly and the oil has not had an opportunity to go anywhere and there is no damage despite what some dropout eco-nut might claim. Killing some soil bacteria 3" below my basement slab is not environmental damage. If you think that an oil spill and petroleum contaminated soil is merely "killing some bacteria" than you don't have even a remote clue at what you are talking about. Soil removal and remediation is mandatory by law. Just because you don't mind living atop a toxic site doesn't mean that it is safe for everyone else or legal. Cleanup of oil leaked from an underground tank is a different matter since until the advent of the double wall tanks with monitoring you aren't likely to detect the leak for months or years. That is why we replace 50 yr old underground tanks with indoor tanks or new double wall underground tanks. I'm suspicious of underground tanks for residential use. And who is doing all of the required monitoring? If the inner tank breaks, why can't the outer tank break too? If the outer tank is already corroded when the inner tank breaks, what good is it (or the monitoring system?) The outer tanks are poly or fiberglass and they have leak detectors between the inner and outer walls that will trigger an alarm mounted in the house. Basically just a smaller version of the tanks they now use at gas stations. Great. So this residential detector needs to be working properly in a decade or two or three when the tank starts leaking. How common is this? More like five or six or more decades. I don't know how common it is, probably fairly common with some XL houses in the northeast where a couple 300 gal indoor tanks won't really do. "Probably." Not particularly cheap, but if you need the capacity and don't have the room for several conventional 300 gal indoor tanks they are a good option. Gas station tanks have caused enough horrors (at least 7 spill sites from leaking tanks in my town alone), and they supposedly are tightly regulated and inspected regularly. Recall that the MTBE fiasco is caused primarily from gasoline leaking from underground tanks! Old tanks certainly caused problems, new tanks generally do not. The MTBE fiasco was caused primarily by eco-nuts pressing for something to be done without adequate research. The problem was not just from leaking tanks and those tanks were likely old tanks, not new. What are they putting in your Texas water? The problem with MTBE is that it gets into the water and travels. It travels much farther than the leaking gasoline/petroleum mess in service station leaking tanks disasters. Nothing in my water, I've got rather good water here. Nice and soft too, I don't miss the hard water in the northeast at all. Huh? What do the characteristics of the MTBE problem have to do with why we have the MTBE problem? The fact is that loud moth eco-nuts badgered the government into requiring MTBE without adequate research and the MTBE problems are the result of that knee jerk reaction. Yeah the "eco-nuts," like the oil industry that came up with MTBE. The problem that the MTBE lowered mileage enough to cause more gas to be consumed to offset any pollution reduction was an even bigger problem resulting from the knee jerk nonsense. So not only was no pollution reduced from the tailpipe, That's false. MTBE actually did help meet clean air goals, which is the reason it was used. The oil companies weren't buying it for nothing. In the cylinder, this ether is an oxygenate. Oil companies bought it because it was required by the feds, not because it did anything productive. MTBE looked like it helped meet clean air goals based on the emissions from combustion of a gal of gas with MTBE vs. without MTBE. The reality that was discovered later was that the MTBE reduced the mileage of vehicles using the gas with it so they used more gas with the MTBE in order to travel the necessary distances thereby producing pretty much the same emissions as they did burning less gas without MTBE. Cite for your 'same emissions' theory? Come on, don't be shy. I"m sure you have it "bookmarked!" There are other technologies available to get extra oxygen into the engine without resorting to chemical additives in the gas by the way. These of course require changes to the engine so if they were introduced in new cars they it would take some time to achieve any significant vehicle turnover. Which technologies are you discussing? Cite? additional pollution from the additive was generated, all of which could have been avoided with a year of research and testing. Yeah, it's all the "eco-nuts" fault. Like President Bush, who just eliminated federal protections for oil companies for MTBE lawsuits. Funny how all of the oil companies phased out their MBTE faster than they could lift up a price changing pole. The fed government didn't ban MTBE by the way; several states have. Why should the oil companies by liable for problems from an additive that the federal government required them to put in their product? Want to blame someone for the MTBE problem blame those who pushed for it and those that pushed it on the refiners. The federal government never mandated the product, they mandated the outcomes. In fact some companies (e.g. Getty) chose to meet their goals without using MTBE. MTBE was one way to meet these outcomes. I don't really have a problem with MTBE per se by the way. I *DO* have a problem with leaking tanks. Fuel oil has a strong smell and is very likely to be noticed before much leaks. Even when a lot leaks, most undamaged concrete floors contain it pretty well if it's discovered and cleaned in a day or two. I guess if your concrete floors are watertight and sealed (so the oil doesn't soak into them) and you don't have any drains or perimeter drains. Oh and if you don't mind everything saturated in #2 oil. Concrete floors are fairly water tight if they are in good condition. Oil will eventually soak through, but at a pretty slow rate. Not that many basements actually have drains either. Well just about every house around me has a perimeter drain. Prevents any concerns of water in the basement. I didn't realize that basement floors and walls were supposed to be petroleum spill containment systems. Actually, per building codes, they are. There is supposed to be a concrete or block containment wall around tanks of sufficient height to contain the contents of the largest single tank in the space. I don't have the codes handy, but I think it should have a sealer applied to the wall and floor as well. Fairly recent code. I have never seen that, even in brand spanking new houses finished two months ago. Which building code are you talking about? Last reference to it was in CT, but I believe it is in the IRC codes. I was researching when looking at building a house in CT and the oil tank room required a short concrete containment wall around it. There was also a limit of I believe 600 gal in a single fire rated space. "At any rate, there is no requirement under Use Group R-3 to provide secondary containment for fuel oil storage in the basement, regardless of the amount of fuel oil stored inside the building. For Use Group R-4, Section 2701.2 of the CABO code states that the maximum amount of fuel oil stored inside of a building shall be 660 gallons with no mention of any requirement for secondary containment." http://www.ct.gov/dps/lib/dps/office...00/i-11-00.pdf As for saturated in #2, I'd vastly prefer that over a smoldering crater where my house used to be. The oil can be readily pumped and vacuumed up from the surface and the concrete if it's saturated can be removed and replaced with far less expense than rebuilding the whole house after the gas explosion (if I survived the explosion). Gas just doesn't blow up a house unless something goes really wrong, like a backhoe out front hitting a pipe. Even then the smell of the gas is pretty obvious before it reaches an explosive ratio with oxygen. In that case it doesn't matter if your particular house has gas service if the gas follows a water or sewer or electrical conduit into your basment instead of following the outside of a gas line. Well, I keep hearing of people killed in gas explosions in their houses. Many are elderly which may be a result of reduced ability to smell the leaking gas, not remembering warnings to not turn on lights and get out if they smell gas, forgetfulness in having the equipment serviced regularly, very old equipment, or a combination of all of those. Yeah, it's so common now, the news doesn't even bother covering it anymore. There was someone killed in a gas explosion at a motel somewhere within the past month. Collapsed the whole corner of the two story building. It was on the news and I think CNN. Certainly a search on CNN.com for "gas explosion" produces quite a few valid results including some doosies like one that ripped up a mall parking lot. Yep. Well you are right about one thing. Gas explosions only happen with gas. Good thing houses with oil never burn down. Thats why homeownerts insurance is requiring oil tank replacement based on age of tank. And that is why new underground oil tanks are double wall construction, just like new tanks at gas stations. Some new indoor tanks are double wall as well though most are still single wall since there is minimal risk. Just because a 50 year old single wall underground tank is no longer viable in no way means that oil heat is no longer viable. Technology changes and advances and the current high velocity flame retention burners and controls with pre and post purge cycles are a far cry from the old burners as well. Yeah, technology changes, like inducer motors that shut everything down if there is an exhaust blockage in gas furnaces (very very rare). Current oil furnaces have the same feature available. But as you pointed out, CO for oil furnaces isn't a concern for you since you can just smell the dirtier oil furnace fumes. When they are out of adjustment and producing a lot of CO, yes. When they are operating properly they produce little CO and little fumes. You keep changing your topics. My comment was directed at your complaints that natural gas burns too cleanly for someone to smell the fumes if somehow they come into the house, unlike oil, thus CO would be more likely to kill. Even if that was true, it's moot with CO detectors, which everyone should have anyway. You're the one who keeps claiming that nat. gas burns cleanly and oil is dirty which is false. Both are pretty clean with proper combustion adjustments. Improperly adjusted, oil is more detectable than improperly adjusted gas. It's not a function of cleanliness, its a function of different detection thresholds for different chemicals. Yeah, it's just my claim that natural gas burns more cleaner than oil. "Natural gas burns cleaner than other fossil fuels, such as oil and coal, and produces less greenhouse gas per unit energy released. For an equivalent amount of heat, burning natural gas produces about 30% less carbon dioxide than burning petroleum and about 45% less than burning coal" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_gas So, what oil company do you work for? Typical new high efficency gas furnaces get about 94-96% efficiency (AFUE) My neighbor has the exact same house as I do and he has oil heat. I keep my house a little warmer and last winter's bill was less than 2/3 of his. After comparing numbers, he's very interested in switching too. What is the AFUE of your oil furnace? I work for a bank. How old are each of your furnaces? Where in the model range is each one? Both make a big difference. New vs. 30yr old isn't a fair comparison and neither is new high end vs. new low end. About five years old. Fine, let's compare it with a four or even a brand new oil furnace. What AFUE rating Also since both nat. gas costs and oil costs fluctuate it's difficult to make a really valid comparison based on cost, particularly when someone buying their oil off season can get lower prices than someone buying just month to month. Rate lock-ins are also more frequently available for oil service. The last furnace I just had installed at my mothers house this spring (Weil-McLain WTGO4 with a Becket burner) is 85% AFUE, but it is not a high end unit. If I was going for high end it would be a Buderus boiler with a Riello burner. The house needs a lot more insulation so the burner efficiency is a small factor at present. What oil furnaces can do 92%-96% AFUE? Ones that presently cost too much for residential use. And which ones are those ? With that huge residential oil market, why would it cost so much to make a high efficient furnace from a such a superior product like oil, when they've been around for years with natural gas? Maybe the natural gas market is just so much larger due to the need to keep replacing the furnaces when the house keeps blowing up. I've already noted why the nat. gas market is larger. A few gas explosions: http://archives.cnn.com/2002/US/08/1...ion/index.html http://cbs4boston.com/local/local_story_313162110.html http://cbs4denver.com/local/local_story_089161935.html http://wcbstv.com/topstories/topstor...347103431.html http://www.boston.com/news/local/art...gas_explosion/ http://wboy.com/story.cfm?func=viewstory&storyid=10207 http://news.minnesota.publicradio.or.../04/27_ap_gas/ http://ksdk.com/news/news_article.aspx?storyid=89827 http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/a...WS05/603070325 http://www.11alive.com/news/usnews_a...?storyid=74159 http://cbs2chicago.com/topstories/lo...087114934.html http://www.wutc.wa.gov/webimage.nsf/...7!OpenDocument http://cbs4.com/topstories/local_story_105231940.html http://www.texnews.com/1998/2003/tex...ural_g220.html Just a sample, plenty more to be found. Some doosies too. You can "prove" anything with anecdotal evidence. From your cited articles: "Now, bomb and arson investigators are calling the blast suspicious and have declared the fire a possible arson." "Authorities blamed the blast on a gas leak that opened when a line was hit during an excavation. " "A natural gas explosion that killed three people last December was due to a metal pipe connector that failed because it was not designed for use on plastic pipe, state officials said Wednesday." "Officials said preliminary investigations showed that a pit dug by construction workers who were trying to remove an underground oil tank collapsed and pinched a gas line just before 9 a.m." |
Oil to Natural Gas Conversion Costs
"Pete C." wrote: John wrote: "Pete C." wrote: John wrote: "Pete C." wrote: zero wrote: On Fri, 04 Aug 2006 21:10:29 GMT, "Pete C." wrote: CO deaths are a result of poor combustion adjustment combined with flue leakage, both of which have a higher probability with a gas furnace due to: 1) People believing that a gas furnace does not require annual inspections / service. This creates a greater probability of the furnace falling into disrepair and the poor adjustment and leakage forming. And the average Oil burner in a home that is not serviced properly is JUST as dangerous. That has been my point when people keep claiming that gas burners don't need service. The fact is that any combustion appliance is dangerous if it's not serviced properly. Who was claiming that gas burners don't need service, let alone "keeps claiming" that? Someone in this thread. Who? Don't recall and I'm not searching the whole thread to find it either. Oh course not. You just like to make stuff up and then make whimsical references to whatever suits you. No disrespect intended, Pete. This whole thread seams to be diminishing the attention due to oil burning equipment. A delayed ignition that has not left the confines of the combustion chamber may not be an explosion according to some, however it is an unplanned event. It also rarely occurs without human intervention not heeding the warnings on the unit. New units take the human factor into account as well with lockout modes. What you learn in a classroom is fine. It prepares you to go into the field. Once you've been in the field for 3-4 years, you realize just how little you knew that first year. Many things go wrong with oil burners. YOU may know to stop resetting your protectorelay after the third time, however most DO look at it like an elevator button. Right, but that is not the fault of the oil burner and newer oil burners prevent that as well. Most are filthy. Just have a fly on the wall look-see at most HVAC shops and watch the service techs try to casually avoid the oil service calls. Because most do not get their annual service. No annual service for a few years and nozzles begin to clog causing the combustion to go out of adjustment, soot to form and efficiency to plummet until finally someone calls for service. If they were serviced even every other year they would be nice and clean. Same with a natural gas furnace. Of course I'd rather have a nat gas furnace that hasn't been serviced in years than an oil furnace. Oddly enough I'd rather have a furnace that has received proper servicing. Oh, by the way, standing in front of a 750 HP boiler (30,131,000 btu's per hour./ 215 gal. per hour) while it huffs itself out for .5 seconds, and then back into high fire with out shutting off the main fuel valve will forever makeup ones mind on weather or not an oil burner can or cannot explode. Yea, large commercial / industrial boilers of either gas or oil can do interesting things. Recall one story of a fairly small nat. gas commercial boiler on about the 20th floor of a building that had it's own little blowback and blew the boiler door off barely missing the service guys before it went through the wall and fell the 20 stories to the street below. Blowback? Who puts a boiler on the 20th floor? (I could understand a furnace). Blowback, delayed ignition, whatever you want to call it. A gas buildup in the combustion chamber prior to ignition. Boilers are commonly located on upper floors in tall buildings. Furnaces tend not to be used in large (tall) commercial buildings in favor of larger boilers serving multiple heat exchanger air handlers. Blowback? Who puts a boiler on the 20th floor? People who understand commercial construction as you apparently do not. Yeah they were such geniuses that according to you the gas boiler had "blowback" and a "boiler door" that fell 20 stories. |
Oil to Natural Gas Conversion Costs
"Pete C." wrote: Robert Gammon wrote: Pete C. wrote: John wrote: "Pete C." wrote: John wrote: "Pete C." wrote: John wrote: "Pete C." wrote: " wrote: Gas being lighter than air normally dissapates if it leaks. That only works to a limited extent and less and less as homes get "tighter". If windows and doors are closed well nat. gas will just accumulate from the ceiling down. LP gas is heavier and will accumulate from the floor up. In either case unless the home is quite drafty / leaky it will continue to accumulate until it finds an ignition source. There shouldn't be any gas at all outside the furnace or plumbing. There shouldn't, if pipes, regulators, valves and controls were all 100% reliable. As can plainly be seen from all the gas explosions that occur, that is not the case. How many explosions is "all the gas explosions?" Or people that awake to find their home and its contents are destroyed by oil or that their basement is now an oil spill site? Relative to the total number of units? Very few. Relative to each other there is a significant difference. In numbers, what is the "significant difference" that you claim? I don't feel like digging up numbers at the moment. Oil pools and settles , causing a possible safety clean up issue with guys in moon suits hauling away contaminated soil:( This is *not* a safety issue, it is an over hyped environmental issue. When your house is not inhabitable due to heavy oil contamination and fumes, it *is* a safety issue. "Over hyped" environmental issue? Yeah right, unless you consider oil contaminated earth and pollution as part of your environment. First off, uninhabitable meaning you have to leave during cleanup, and uninhabitable because it collapsed after the gas explosion are vastly different things. If you are home when the oil leaks you simply leave, safe and sound. If you are home when the gas leaks you can easily end up dead. As for the environmental part, yes, it is over hyped. Cleanup of even 300 gal of fuel oil that leaks in a concrete basement is pretty minor if it's done reasonably soon. Cite? I know it is a lot more than that because a house near me had exactly that happen to it, and the house was condemned during the cleanup last year. Yes, well it can be overblown if you let yourself be taken in by the hype. Even then it still pales in comparison to rebuilding from the crater the gas explosion left, or paying for the funeral. Yeah an oil spill into the ground causing environmental damage to the ground, not to mention the damage to the house and its contents and/or making the house uninhabitable is just "hype." I don't think there is a difference in funeral costs from people dying in burning houses caused by oil, gas, or whatever. If oil is so much safer, which insurance companies give the oil heat discount or gas heat surcharge? The idea that an oil spill on the ground automatically is some environmental disaster is exactly the hype I'm talking about. Unless that oil is getting into ground water or heading for a stream there is no environmental damage. Oil getting into ground water takes a good amount of time, after all the ground water isn't 3" under your house or your house would be floating. Have a spill and clean it up promptly and the oil has not had an opportunity to go anywhere and there is no damage despite what some dropout eco-nut might claim. Killing some soil bacteria 3" below my basement slab is not environmental damage. Well there is the environmental cleanup issue with the soil that is contaminated. Any such leak to the soil ANYWHERE on your property, if detected by others MAY make the property UNSALEABLE!!! Unsaleable to the uninformed perhaps. To those who understand that removing a few yards of soil and giving it to a construction company for use under a road (where there is plenty of petroleum contamination anyway) is pretty simple it should not affect saleability. Too much uninformed and irrational hysteria in this country. Oh yeah. Unsaleable to the informed dolts who don't want an oil mess and environmental liability on their property. How stupid they are! Thank goodness we have 'smart' people like you around. |
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