Quote:
Originally Posted by Porsche-O-Phile
The place I'm living in has two - one in the main living space that vents to a chimney (shared with a wood-burning stove in the basement, different flue obviously) and the second in one of the bedrooms (goes straight through the exterior wall to a discharge). Both are okay at adding some heat, but honestly I'm a little bit underwhelmed with the amount of heat they produce. Possible they're not sized properly, so I can't entirely blame the technology overall - I'd have to research it more. Both of these use propane from a common tank, which I'm similarly underwhelmed with the performance of. It strikes me as an expensive fuel (well over $3 a gallon) and it just doesn't seem to make much heat. Down the road I'll probably rip the whole mess out and go with a forced-air system of some sort or another; I think one of the big problems with these stove things is lack of heat circulation - I use a fan to blow the heated air around but it's still pretty wimpy at heating the overall volume of this house when it gets cold outside. You need to supplement it by stoking up the wood stove in the basement and/or running the electric baseboard units (which I hate - they cost a fortune to run).
|
The biggest problem I had living in Western Massachusetts was no Natural Gas in the entire town. A new gas line was announced, which would run through the town. Everyone rejoiced with the news, until they found out is was simply a "through" line and no one would be getting gas.
My house was converted to baseboard forced hot water, 10 years before I bought it. It is less expensive to run the copper pipes around the house than to try to run ducts in a house not built for them.
The nice thing about the oil furnace was that it doubled as a hot water heater. If I had to do it again, I would also have an electric hot water heater. The furnace system would be a pre-heater, to reduce hot water costs.