The major pipelines don’t extend all the way into much of New England. LNG facilities are increasing but they’re also controversial. The price of natural gas is still much better than oil and propane around here. I don’t know if regulation or subsidy is behind this. Heating oil is subsidized to some extent making it more practical in a somewhat unstable market. Still, even from local facilities natural gas makes it to the end user by pipe for minimal transport cost.
Yes. Some people are on a natural gas line (many people aren’t) and others schlep into town for propane or get a propane tank filled. But fuel oil is quite common. Outside the urban areas, wood is also fairly common, though often in combination with a heat source that doesn’t need to be tended to as often.
New York State was trying to force a switch away from all fossil fuels in new construction, but I think it ran into politics.
The map on this website is interesting (to me, anyway). It shows the prevalent sources of heating fuel across the US. As I have learned, here and elsewhere, fuel oil is more or less confined to the Northeast, from eastern Pennsylvania on up through the New England states. Also used extensively in Alaska.
I guess it’s not surprising that I’ve never seen a fuel-oil furnace.
Thanks to all who have responded. Ignorance fought, again.
When I was in NH, it was about 50/50 propane and oil. I’d suspect that’s true for most on NE outside the cities. A small number of areas (downtowns, Manchester) had gas in the streets.
I was always very happy with my oil burner, and it was also a tankless water heater.
One major consideration when you’re building in an area without pipelines for natural gas is cost per BTU. In Maine while propane is readily available, the cost per BTU is as much as 50% higher than the cost for heating oil. So when you’re looking at a heating system that will last for 20 years, it’s a no brainer to go with oil.
This is almost always true. One exception would be a remote location where refilling a heating oil tank could have problems because of heavy snowfall. A very large or multiple propane tanks that will heat a house through the winter can be more practical than a very large heating oil tank.
Why? I mean, we use propane in MT but used oil in Maine. Propane requires a pressure vessel and regulators and is less energy dense than oil. You have spill concerns with oil but a thousand gallon oil tank should be lighter than a similar propane tank and will easily last a full season for a normal size house in the most extreme weather.
We have a 1917 house in Duluth Minnesota that originally had an oil-burning boiler (radiators, yay!). Strangely, it had a city natural gas hookup for the gas stove and a gas fireplace. The tank was in the basement, as is common in Duluth. The first winter there, we filled it halfway once, then waited for it to get mostly empty before we installed a NG boiler. The new system was to be installed on Monday, so of course the tank ran empty Friday night. My daughter, who was living there while going to college, was not pleased, but the NG fireplace put out enough heat (barely) until the new system got installed. They had to cut the tank in half to get it out of the basement.
That is a beautiful, very informative map. Thank you!
True. But it’s a very low pressure vessel & very simple regulator. I think some of the tanks are even plastic or wound-filament fiberglass these days. Stouter and hence more expensive than a simple galvanized sheet steel oil tank, but not by much. And, as you suggest, propane tanks can certainly leak, but unlike they don’t produce a Superfund site when they do.
Just looking at procurement & installation costs, I doubt propane vs oil is a material cost difference.
For darn sure, whichever source of BTUs is locally cheaper should dominate the decision-making. But as we see with often pitiful insulation R values in buildings, I wonder how much contractors and construction companies simply favor lowest newly installed cost versus lowest lifetime cost of ownership plus operation.
We have a winner!
A gallon of propane contains around 91,500 BTUs, while a gallon of diesel/oil contains approximately 138,000 BTU, so about 50% more energy, plus you really can’t use the bottom 15% or top 15% of a propane tank. If the cost were the same per BTU and I was in an extreme environment, I’d choose oil. Unless it gets -40 for 2 months (the oil will slowly gel), but even Fairbanks doesn’t do that.
BTW, NG and propane users, if you get a batch of gas that has a little too much moisture in it your regulator can freeze up in temps below 0F. Fun times. A hairdryer does the trick.
This is a question I always have when I buy propane for the generator. Are those %'s accurate?
Sorta. They will not fill a tank over 85%. In smaller tanks I expect that’s baked in, but our 1000 gallon tank gets 80-85% depending on the supplier’s protocol. It would just pop off so it’s not a rupture hazard, but still. For a generator you could run a smaller tank to empty, but a larger tank may or may not have contaminants or mess with a more finicky machine–your boiler.
I grew up in rural Rhode Island with oil-fired hot air furnace [with wood stove backup because the furnace required reliable electricity, rare during snowstorms] - my urban RI home has a natural gas fired boiler with vintage thermopile gas valve - the pilot light generates a millivolt current to hold the valve open, so it does not rely on outside electric power. My next door neighbor on one side has oil fired steam boiler. A developer nearby just built two nearly identical houses mirroring each other on a dead end court and was very surprised to find that the gas company would happily hook up the left hand house to the street main, but the right hand house was about a foot past the end of the main in the street and had to get a big propane pig taking up one of the limited off street parking spaces. Last few years a lot of folks put up grid-tied photovoltaics to run heat pumps, but the government deals supporting that are almost certain to melt away…
Why? Why!?! Because i must not have saved an edit explaining further. It’s not just the tank size. If an oil tank can’t be kept inside or buried below the frost line there can be problems from the cold coagulating the oil and dealing with the sludge and moisture that accumulates in the bottom of the tank. In addition you need electrical power to run an oil heater while propane devices can be manually ignited. And propane can also power a stove and other devices, including a generator where it it will have an advantage over gasoline in ease of starting and maintenance. These are extreme situations though, heating oil has been reliably more economical than propane for a long time.
Yeah, but those tanks are ugly to look at and have on one’s property. I know they can be buried, but assume that’s at a significant cost since I see so many, dingy and gross, on the side of houses.
Even then, since in the old days a buried tank would stay warm, and these days they’re all inside the house.
I think they may have banned buried tanks (also for farm etc. gas and diesel tanks) because, if they start leaking, nobody’s going to notice until quite a lot of the ground’s contaminated. If the tank’s in a basement, there’s a significant chance that somebody will notice while it’s still not a huge deal to clean up the mess.
If you do have a tank in the basement – go look at it once in a while. It’s a really good idea.
Again, out of curiosity: what’s the capacity of these indoor tanks? 100 gallons? 200 gallons? More? Less?
And how are the indoor tanks filled when they run low, and the supplier shows up with his bulk truck? Is there an outdoor filler spout?
Standard sizes are 275 or 330 gallons. Yes, there is a supply pipe to the exterior of the building. There is also a vent so that as oil is pumped in, air is expelled. Makes a whistling sound and by change of pitch the delivery guy knows when tank is full.
Mine, and every one I’ve seen:
250 gallons. They are about 4 feet high, 2 feet deep, and six feet long. They stand on legs. There’s a filler tube (and a vent) that goes up and out, usually just above the sill/foundation. A nice man (or woman) comes with a truck with a long hose and pumps the oil in, and since it’s on the outside you don’t have to be home.
For my modern (1987) house, I would go through about 4 tanks/year, heat and hot water. In the freezing depths of winter, my shortest time between tanks might be 4 weeks