Posted on 11/19/2022 6:22:58 AM PST by karpov
As the first frigid weather of autumn chills the Northeast, many people are faced with a tough decision: deal with the surging costs of heating their homes or live without it.
Home heating prices are skyrocketing yet again this winter, up 18% nationwide on top of last year’s 17% spike, according to the National Energy Assistance Directors Association (NEADA).
Charmaine Johnson works in the call center at Philadelphia’s Heater Hotline, part of a non-profit that assists low-income families with their heating systems and bills. Johnson, 63, can relate to the concerns she’s hearing all day. She, too, is struggling to afford her heating bills.
With help from her son, Johnson just paid more than $1,000 to fill part of her oil tank, which she hopes will last her most of the winter.
Johnson says she doesn’t qualify for government assistance with her heating bills. As inflation also pushes up her food budget and other expenses, she is bundling up and keeping the heat turned down, hoping to stretch that oil for as long as possible.
“It’s miserable,” she said. “It’s like living in an igloo.”
Several factors are driving hikes in home heating prices, including the war in Ukraine, OPEC+ cuts, a surge in energy exports, lower energy inventories, and a high demand for natural gas in the US electric power sector, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA).
EIA projects heating a home with natural gas will cost an extra 25% this winter, and heating with electric will run 11% higher. The steepest hike will be on heating oil, which is expected to be 45% more expensive than last winter, squeezing roughly 5 million households, mostly in the Northeast.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
Embrace The Suck!
Line your closet with aluminum foil, place a slab of stone on floor, place 4 candles in the center(10 hour candles should suffice), place one terracotta planter upside down and over the candles. You’ll need two bricks to support planter.
Light candles and shut closet door 🚪
You’ve made a heater
/S
I still enjoy that picture of Jimmy Carter wearing two sweaters and sitting in front of a roaring fire while telling Americans to turn down their thermostats.
In the late fall, winter and early spring we can isolate about 60% of our home from where we live, eat and sleep at a lower temp.
We have had help /with engineer family members and a local HVAC company re guidance with these temporary shut up of our unlived in space.
At first, we were told to keep the separate thermostat for the basically unused part of our home at 63/64 degrees . That had been changed to 62/64. That has been changed to 60/61.
Once a week, we were told to set the temp at 67/68 for a
few hours. That works well with my wife’s weekly bible study group. We warm up that section of the house to 68 degrees.
After the last guest leaves, we lower the thermostat down to 60/61.
We have 2 HVAC systems. One for where we spend most of our lives and one with guests.
Our PG&E bill is several hundred $’s less per month than neighbors with similar size homes. They set their thermostats to 70+-/24 hours day, 365 days per year.
We also, use the Brit logic of wearing a sweater and warm sweat pants/socks during the day.
Two homes owned by neighboring retired MDs will be sold so they can live at 74 degrees, 24/365. They will pay about 30 grand apiece per year for that heat.
A bit of diesel for my sub-compact tractor, gasoline, two stroke oil, bar and chain oil. Probably cost $50-60.00 for a Winter's worth of heat.
Meanwhile my ex-wife never got around to filling her propane tank, recently spent over $100 for space heaters and plans to buy one more big one. Electric will probably be $100/mth more running them. In sub-zero temps in an older mobile home, space heaters aren't going to do much. We get a lot of ice here in the Ozarks and if we get enough, it snaps trees and powerlines.
Can lose power for a couple of weeks.
He shut down the pipelines on his first day in the WH - literally.
When I saw that, I said: “There it is.” Right out loud.
9 deg?..... bummer. Nice warm 18 deg here in northern MN.
It doesn’t. A candle contains only so many BTUs and there’s no way to increase that figure. One also needs to remember that as the temperature differential increases, the difference between the inside and outside temp, the heat transfer rate increases so that one needs more btuhs to make up the difference.
“In PA home heating oil is more than twice what it was last year. Over $5/gal now.”
I remember my grandma freaking out when it hit $0.30.
Well this does answer the intense discussion on whether butter can be left on the counter or should be kept in the fridge.
DemocRat voters are incapable of correlating their voting habits to their financial/social situations.
EVs suck in cold weather. The distance between charges is about 25-30% of the warm weather distance.
... It’s too bad the experts didn’t have a cost effective alternative to disabling oil and gas. Lack of foresight on leadership part have walked us off of the peer, with no awaiting boat to get to the other side.
They could have waited for the technology to change making cost effective alternatives, but our overlords wanted the great capitalist nation to suffer first.
The Obama items game plan doesn’t stop here neither.
And Xiden has sworn to shut down coal.
Heating costs are outrageous and getting worse. I absolutely hate being cold in my own house. Experimenting with thermostat at 60 when not home, then 68-76 when home, depending on what I am doing. A work in progress and not sure if it is saving or not.
Butter on the counter? Mine was too hard this morning to spread on toast. Not happy.
Ain't that a fact.! Pretty soon it will be cheaper to burn dollar bills to keep warm instead of oil.. maybe that's what they mean by "green energy".. (spit)
Easy solution for liberal a-holes: set your electric battery vehicles on fire this winter, that will give them a nice toasty 3000 degree fire for a few days.
A single tea candle produces ~ 80 BTUs. 45 BTUs are needed to heat 1 square foot, so a single candle won’t even heat two square feet. A 100-square-foot room (10x10) would need 4,500 BTUs to be heated effectively, which would take over 56 candles. Tea candles cost ~15 cents each or 6 BTUs/.01$. 1 gallon of propane yields 91,451 BTU and will cost $2.304 or ~ 400 BTUs/.01$ (winter ’21 price).
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