Gas vs. Electric heat

The house we're trying to buy only has electric baseboard radiant heat in each room, there's no forced-air system at all. I'm pretty sure we can save quite a bit on heating costs by having a forced-air system installed. All my previous homes have had gas heat, so I don't have much real-world knowlege of electric heat, other than the heat-pump system in our office at work.

Which is better - gas or electric, and why?

FWIW, the house is in Indiana, in town, and has a gas meter(but no gas appliances). It's a 1920's-ish 2-story wood-frame home, around 2100sqft.

I dunno about your area but heat pumps work well around SC. The drawback: if the power goes out, you have to have a horkin' big generator to run a heat pump or electric strip system. With a gas setup, you only need enough power to run the blower and the control circuits.

Nothing circulates, dries out, and deodorises stale air better than a forced-air gas system. I'd go for it just for that benefit alone.

J

Neither is better, there are pro's and cons to each.

Individual electric allows you to adjust room temperatures specifically and individually. So rooms you're never in, you leave cold, and save that money. To counter that, electric resistance wire heating is darn expensive, until recently it was the most expensive form of heating.

Gas used to be cheap. It's come a long way towards being expensive. In some areas, it's managed to surpass electric on the title of most expensive. A forced air system tends to heat the whole house, though you can close individual dampers and control it. One thermostat though, so that one controls all the heat.

Forced air is inherently drafty, which generally doesn't feel good. Baseboard heat rises gently, and creates a tremendous "ahh" feeling. Gives you something warm to place chilly toes against.

Baseboard heat requires you to keep things away from those baseboards, so the heat can get into the room. A concept my wife is incapable of grasping. Hence, our cold bedroom (hot water baseboard). She complains, but will not uncover the baseboards. With her, anything other than forced air is a disaster.

Forced air lets you install a/c, which can be darn important in the summer.

Forced air systems to a dandy job of spreading filth and growing things in the ductwork. Especially with humidity. Cleaning ductwork is either expensive or difficult, and always messy. Though if you've got Navy pilots willing to pull sonic booms over your house for you, that helps a lot in duct cleaning.

In upstate New York it gets cold in the winter and electricity is way more expensive that gas or oil.

Forced air generated by gas or oil dries out the furniture, your skin & sinuses and collects dust (fire hazard) in the ducts. I find myself oozy when spending a night in a home with hot air heat.

Baseboard is the way to go, that's convection heat. It warms the air in the room not pushing more in. So I guess the question is, can you connect the electric baseboard you have to an oil or gas furnace that pushes water?

No matter what the outcome, as the house was built in the 20s, look at the insulation. See if they used newspapers in the attic or walls, or anything in the walls. Blown in insulation is well worth the investment of time and money. (BTW my house was built in 1894) been there....

http://www.duke-energy.com/pdfs/HeatCost_DukeIn_Nov07.pdf

http://www.duke-energy.com/indiana/savings/heating-costs.asp

As foxtrapper mentioned, there are pros and cons to both.

Electric baseboard is cheap and easy to install. The average DIY'er with reasonable electrical understanding can install a complete system. But as he also mentioned, you have to keep stuff away from the walls... (I have the same problem with my g/f and the hot water baseboard in her house). We DIY replaced some of the existing electric baseboards with hot water and added additional zoned t-stats when she bought a new boiler (5-zone energy kinetics). An advantage here is you can DIY the baseboards, piping (PEX FTW!) & t-stats (the tedious labor stuff) and have a pro install the boiler and make final conenctions.

My own house is oil forced air (w/ a/c). The advantage is it's quick. I typically set my t-stat to 61 when I leave at 6am and bump it up to 68 when I get home at 11pm. The house (small and poorly insulated) will get up to a comfortable temp quickly.

Personally, I like hot-water, radiant floor heating... but it's the most difficult and expensive to install. there is also an electric version.

See www.houseneeds.com for various options and equipment costs. I fiddle with this sort of stuff for a living, so I don't find any of it to be very intimdating.

Individual electric allows you to adjust room temperatures specifically and individually. So rooms you're never in, you leave cold, and save that money.

You know you can just close your vents, right? :wink:

I dig gas heat, for all the reasons Jensenman mentioned. The gas starter in the fireplace is especially nice if the power goes out.

But forget the heat! Does the house not have A/C!?!? That would be a deal-breaker for me. (Yes, I know I'm 'soft.')

Foxtrapper did a pretty good summary.

Petegossett: have you been living in the south?

Forced air has another drawback in the north. The delivery temperature at the grills is generally less than 80*F. That's less than body temp.It will always feel cold when blowing. Radiant heat feels warm (hot) to the touch.

A forced air system is also about the best residential system available for spreading of dirt and germs.

A centralized system will save you money long term IF you intend to keep the entire house up to the same temperature around the clock. Individual room controls (like electric baseboards) allow you to turn off all the rooms not in use. Different habits.

I suspect the payback period for a centralized system is AT LEAST 10 years. Could be infinite, if you develop good habits of turning off the parts of the house you are not using.

If you've gotta have AC, it's a whole different issue.

The biggest deciding factors are:

How expensive is electricity in your area?

How well is your house insulated? Will you need to add (additional) insulation?

How important is it to keep the temps at a certain level (health concerns?) during the winter?

My folks live in Pa. CURRENTLY, the price of electricity is somewhat regulated, but that is about to go away in a few years. My sister and my parents have homes, roughly the same size, a few miles from each other, but they are each with different electric utilities. My parents pay about 1/2 for their electricity, compared to my sister....tho some of that may be because she is very cold blooded (needs it to be VERY warm, quickly) but some of that is due to different electric companies.

The folks you should ask this question of are your neighbors. What do they pay to heat a home for the winter? Do they regret having gas over electric? What is the situation with your LOCAL utilities?

Well, I have lived in apartments with heat pumps and they all sucked, but I hear that the newer ones are much improved. I don't have any experience with a heat pump that was worth a damn.

We have an oil heater in our house and it works very well, makes a cool purring sound that is very soothing and makes the floor vents so hot you don't want to step on one barefoot. We don't even turn the 'stat up past 68, I think it's somewhere around 65 right now, but when it's running you would be wise not to step on a vent. It's pretty efficient for a system that old. I think it was installed in '67. I think we go through 500 gallons of oil in an average winter, we have a 300 gallon tank and I know we can't make it through the whole winter on one tank. 500 gallons seems like a lot typing it out, so maybe it's not efficient at all, but it sure is warm.

My parents house had hot water baseboard heat fired by oil. Out side of the circulator running is was very nice heat.

I use a compination of both electric and gas. Best of both worlds!

I've got gas in my house (2 story), but I've also got an upstairs and downstairs zone controlled by 2 separate thermostats / baffles in the ducting. Works like a champ :D

Even better if have electronic thermostats that you can schedule (I still need to convert the one upstairs to the 21st century lol)

My mom's place in Michigan has gas hot water baseboard radiators except the bathrooms. There the original owners put in radiant floor heating. If I ever build or susbstantially renovate a place, I am doing the same thing. It is SO nice to step onto warm tile floors on a cold day.

The intersting thing about the floors is that they were done in the early 50's when the hose was remodeled. When we moved in the 70's I had never seen radiant floor heat anywhere before. I had a morning paper route as a kid. After a winter or two, I figured out exactly how warmly I needed dress by how hot the bathroom floor was.

Thanks for all the replies.

To answer some of the questions:

1.)No, I'm not from the south. We're just moving ~50mi across the state line from IL, so we're quite familiar with the climate. Every house I've had has been forced-air gas, so I understand the comment about the airflow feeling cool. Though I've not heard about the germ issues before.

2.)I have been talking to as many people as I know in town, but it seems like everyone has their own opinion as to which is best - often with completely unsubstantiated reasons.

3.)I could forsee problems regarding the spacing around the baseboard heaters, as we have teenagers & cats, so I'm sure we'd have to monitor/clean them very frequently.

4.)Right now, we're not too worried about a/c. I really don't mind not having it, and we have a window a/c unit that I can put in the bedroom for my wife, which is pretty much where she hangs out. I would want to make sure the furnace was able to have a/c added though.

5.)Speaking of my wife, she does have a circulatory disorder & is very sensitive to cold, so the bedroom is usually kept in the upper 70's while we're home in the winter. The way the house is laid out, the upstairs would be just our bedroom/office combo, bathroom & one of the kids rooms. Since there's no existing ductwork, the contractor quoted 2-furnaces: one in the basement heating the downstairs, and a 2nd smaller unit on the 2nd floor - which would allow us separate control over it, thus able to keep a much smaller area warmer, while the rest of the house is set to a more reasonable temp.

6.)The house has aluminum siding, so I don't have much access to determine the insulation in the walls. The front porch, however, was originally an exterior wall & there's an hole in it which shows there's older blown-in cellulose type insulation. The back porch has attic access & it has rolled fiberglass, though it looks like it could use more. I've not seen the upstairs attic yet, though.

7.)The house we were looking at prior to this had a hot-water heat, fired by a newer high-efficiency gas boiler. Heating costs were ~$500/mo last winter. After inquiring, we were told by several people we could cut down heating costs by installing a forced-air system, which is part of the reason I'm presuming the existing baseboard radiators in this house aren't our best option.

Anyway, that's a lot of info. Thanks for all the help & suggestions!!!

I've got 6 zones on my gas system. This allows me to shut off sections of the house quite easily and keep bills down.

With programmable thermostats you can fine tune even further.

Not only do I not like the costs of an electric system I don't like the smells as it burns stuff off the the heating coils.

Another important factor is where you live and the cost of the systems involved. In PA where I grew up, the majority of people heated with wood, fuel oil, and coal. In western PA (just 150 miles away) most of the heating was natural gas and electric.

Electric baseboard heat is some of the least efficient. Anything that involves moving air is usually much more effective. You can increase the efficiency of electric baseboard heat with a fan.

You have to think of air and heat as liquid, just opposite of gravity. Let's say you have a room in an old house with a baseboard heater and no air movement. Set the thermostat to 72. The heater will kick on and dump hot air straight up, just like pouring water into a bucket but upside down. The heater will supply hot air until it fills the room down to the point where it reaches the thermostat. In the case of my wife's parent's old farm house, that literally means that everything above the thermostat is 90 degrees or more, while everything below it is 60 degrees. If there were something as simple as a fan to mix that air, things would be so much more efficient.

Baseboard heat is viable, but you MUST have a way of circulating air. A ceiling fan is very effective, but even a small personal fan will work. Imagine you are trying to mix some italian dressing with a blender... hot and cold air don't like to mix, but if you provide enough airflow to mix them up, they'll stay together. People frown on "forced air" systems, but they really are effective. The next best thing is to keep the air in your space in constant motion.

EastCoastMojo wrote: I think we go through 500 gallons of oil in an average winter, we have a 300 gallon tank and I know we can't make it through the whole winter on one tank. 500 gallons seems like a lot typing it out, so maybe it's not efficient at all, but it sure is warm.

Thats not too bad. Last year we used 800 gallons to keep our wee shack a balmy 58 degrees (yes, I'm that cheap)

petegossett wrote: The house we're trying to buy only has electric baseboard radiant heat in each room, there's no forced-air system at all. I'm pretty sure we can save quite a bit on heating costs by having a forced-air system installed. All my previous homes have had gas heat, so I don't have much real-world knowlege of electric heat, other than the heat-pump system in our office at work. Which is better - gas or electric, and why? FWIW, the house is in Indiana, in town, and has a gas meter(but no gas appliances). It's a 1920's-ish 2-story wood-frame home, around 2100sqft.

In Florida, you might get away with electric baseboard heat. In a drafty, poorly-insulated, 80-year-old house in Indiana, forget it. Your electric bills will run you out of town from November to March.

If you have gas available to the house, I would definitely consider adding a gas furnace forced-air system, if you are planning to stay any length of time. It will be a bit of an investment (like $20,000 including AC if they have to run ductwork, which it seems they do) but it will add to the value of the house and it will save you huge operating costs. See if you can find a way to roll that into your purchase financing package (assuming you are financing).

Modern gas furnaces are anywhere from 90-95% efficient, too. I recently had my unit's first-year checkup and it was operating at 98% efficiency and the exhaust temperature was in the 110 degree range - all the rest of the heat is going into the inside air.

[edit] I see from actually reading further that your contractor has recommended two systems - that's perfect. It increases your first cost a bit (offset some by running less ductwork), but as others have mentioned, having more heating zones makes for more efficient heating. If you get new units it is almost guaranteed they will come with programmable thermostats, but if not, that's an easy $30 Home Depot purchase.

Thanks, I've got requests from a couple HVAC contractors who are customers of mine to give me quotes. I've been reading good things about using a heat-pump in conjunction with a smaller high-efficiency gas furnace to keep heating costs down. You let the heat-pump provide heat 100% of the time, and supplement it with gas when it's really cold. I just need to see if we can afford it!

I'm looking at either financing it into the loan - which wouldn't be too much of a stretch, since this is a HUD repo & we got it for a good price(unless their official report has too many high-dollar required repairs, which it shouldn't since the house is overall in pretty good shape...).

Otherwise, I may consider buying the pieces after we close & installing it myself. I don't have much HVAC experience(fixed/modified my home system a few times), but I do have people I can talk to for advice. There's a couple local wholesale outfits to buy from as well.

Wally wrote:

EastCoastMojo wrote: I think we go through 500 gallons of oil in an average winter, we have a 300 gallon tank and I know we can't make it through the whole winter on one tank. 500 gallons seems like a lot typing it out, so maybe it's not efficient at all, but it sure is warm.

Thats not too bad. Last year we used 800 gallons to keep our wee shack a balmy 58 degrees (yes, I'm that cheap)

Living in NC vs. NY makes a huge difference too.

One big factor that hasn't been mentioned is a humidifier. It is possible to humidify the entire house using a built-in on the forced air system. I think electric baseboard heaters (and forced-air w/o a humidifier) really dry out the air, which makes it feel colder and static-y). Our gas forced air system has a humidifier hooked directly into the water line, along with a dial to adjust it. We turn it to 100 in the winter, and zero in the summer.

My old house had electric forced air, and I always had a vaporizer going during the winter.

Why the hell would anyone want to own a humidifier? Or a house without A/C?

Crazy kooks.

Osterkraut wrote: Why the hell would anyone want to own a humidifier? Or a house without A/C? Crazy kooks.

For real.

Osterkraut wrote: Why the hell would anyone want to own a humidifier? Or a house without A/C? Crazy kooks.

A humidifer can be awfully nice in February , in Oh Hi ya , when the cats start throwing sparks off their noses!

I've had every type of furnace and fuel known to mankind. From logs on the fire to State of the art gas furnaces.

My all time favorite? Gravity forced gas, hot air. 1940's style No, sudden blasts, just a gentle warm breeze that tapers off ..

won't work for A/c tho. But it was in a snug, brick double in Euclid Ohio. A window AC unit cooled the bedrooms nicely.