Yikes, that seems like a lot to heat one room. Have you considered going to an electric mattress pad? They pull WAY less power than that heater. Then you could put your heater on a timer so it doesn't have to run all night long.

Here is a great example:

ElectricMattressPad

On the highest setting it only uses 43W vs the oil heater that is using 1000W.

If you could just run the oil heater for say 2 hours before you get up, you could save yourself 5.75 kWh per night. For most of us, that is around $0.70 a night. After a year you'd be $255 ahead minus the cost of a mattress pad which is like $50-100.

It isn't so much a cold bed I have trouble getting out of the warm bed lol

I should probably sleep in some heavier pajamas.

Yeah, that could definitely help. :) If that doesn't get you all the way there, I would definitely give the timer a shot though. You should be able to REALLY cut down on the power usage with one. They're really cheap too.

My house is from the 70's and so is the insulation. Right now I don't have the budget to add insulation so my daily energy consumption is between 20 and 30kwh. I have been doing a few things to reduce that but I have a 13 year old heat pump and 30 year old furnace... I wish I could just park my Jeep in my room at night... 600lb iron block...that sucker will keep you warm for hours!

Weekdays: 70 morning, 60 leave, 68 return, 65 night.
Weekends same but no leave, goes from 70 to 68 @ 9:00am.

Low 60s. Helps with losing weight and really gets my PC to perform great.
Duct the air from the garage (or front of the Jeep if you don't have a garage) to the heat pump outdoor unit.

I have tried 62F for the last month and its a bit cold so I put it up to 64F. With my block house if do temp swings I loose the thermal mass effect :(


Got my first heating bill this week and had a few questions for people, how does your bill look month to month from Oct- April? I would expect it go up as it gets colder out but by how much? what typical for you?

Check out the link in my sig. It goes over my bills... yeah I really need to update it too haha.

you do need to update it..... any progress on the site being able to help log energy usage? should just be a fuel log modified a bit.....

We have an energy tracker... its um... still in development and has been for quite some time. :)

http://ecorenovator.org/forum/forum-...our-input.html

Wife and I leave the thermostat at 68 during the winter for our 1300 sq ft rental house. We have a heat pump. Our utility providers rates are 0.08 c/kWh - 0.09 c/kWh. Our entire bill is combined (water, trash, and electricity) and we almost always below $200 per month. The only time it will go over $200 is in Jan or Feb.

68* is the magic number it seems, 70* can feel hot at times and 72* is stifling , for me. I wear a sweat shirt or what have you over a long sleeve and I am winterized.

This Year my electric bill including baseboard heat and lights etc. hit a all time low of $70 per month on the equal payment plan. I credit that to my conservation in the house as a whole in this 2,000sq ft. 1970's house.

How many people living in the house?

We are still finding 21C/69.8F is just about perfect for us.
I wear long sleeve medium weight shirts over tee-shirts.
If I have to visit the basement, the hoodie goes on..

It's been so cold lately, we are burning up the kwh like crazy this year..
We are going to burn over 800 kwh during this cycle. (136USD).
Almost 27 kwh per day on average. Not been this cold in a while.
These 20 days of Dec 2013 ave= 28.6 °F.
It was warmer the last two years.. We got off easy. :p
Averages of 35.2 °F in 2012 and 36.8 °F in 2011

This last month had some pretty deep drops in temp..
That's when the Sanyos suck up a lot of wattage..
http://ecorenovator.org/forum/attach...1&d=1387542479
At least they are deep for the Boston area (near the sea)..

http://i46.photobucket.com/albums/f1...ps2dae2e6a.jpg

Mostly just me and my fearless Guard Dog a 110# Organic Heater.
Also i am not heating the downstairs , the heaters down there are on the freeze stand by setting or right next to the off click on the wall thermostats. I have conserved a lot of energy just by paying attention to the kill a watt meter and doing adjustments. My TV now uses around 50 watts instead of 150 watts just by turning the back lighting down in the TV's menu and turning the brightness up (it uses no wattage to turn the brightness up , oddly enough) Unplugged
a UPS power back up for the computer that was drawing 30 watts 24-7 for years.
Turned the water heater Way down , insulated my fridge extensively, the list goes on.
Last year I put white Styrofoam sheet from a large package over unused north facing window , its accumulative conserving really.

We stay warmer than most here 68-69 @ night then 72-74 during the day.
This is for the main living areas (using the mini splits). We keep the some rooms unheated for the most part and leave the doors open this helps heat them.

Your temperatures are more common than most on this message board. The members here as a whole are "conservation geeks" and keep their heat cooler than average, AC warmer than average. Average for our area is 70 heat/75 cool.

Our mini-splits had to be shut down last night. Too much blowing snow
was causing a lot of defrost cycles. They were still pumping in some
heat down to around 4 degrees, but the power use was extra high.
We plugged in some space heaters and also burned some oil.

A failure of the circulating pump kept me up most of the night.
At least I had cable TV to watch..
Dark Matter Does Matter! | National Geographic Channel
(The show turned out to be about everyone on earth being frozen solid)..


We only had about three good Sanyo hours during the day today.
Today's Extremes
High Temperature 11.9°F @ 1:56pm
Low Temperature -0.4°F @ 9:37pm
It's amazing how much heat they can pull out of 10-12 deg air..
It actually got a little too warm this afternoon!

It's zero now and heading south! We are burning oil like it was cheap..
Got a few space heaters running too.

The logging program is shows we are holding between 68 & 69 F tonight. (so far).
Very close to the settings we use with the Sanyos.

We made 61.1 kwh yesterday good solar day but it was cold so at the end of the day we ended up using 4.4 kwh heating with mini splits and one car charge.

This is why Ground Source Heat Pumps were invented.

-AC

This is true. But your ROI has to include how many days there are in a year where really low temperatures exist. A lot of people use the principle of using the least expensive technology available that will cover 90 to 95 percent of their needs before going to a much more expensive technology that will cover 100 percent of their needs. I'm not one to decide which is best but I think both philosophies have merit.

How long you stay in your present house will enter into that equation.

We currently don't have an inside thermostat, using weather compensation to adjust the buffer tank temperature for the UFH.
Whilst we aim for 20C (68) the house does fluctuate depending on solar gain and occupancy in a room.
House is heated 24/7 to the same temp by a tiny ASHP.

Since I'll be 68 this month, I don't plan on living in this house more than another 10 or 15 years.. :p

This is just a freak cold spell. Right now, temperatures are normal in Greenland.
Record Cold Temperatures Are Projected to Hit Much of the U.S. | TIME.com

While the U.S. as a whole has warmed by about 1.3º F (0.71º C)over the past 100 years, winter has seen the fastest warming. Winter nights across the country have warmed about 30% faster than nights over the whole year. Since 1912, the coldest states have warmed nearly twice as fast as the rest of the country. In a warming world, winter loses its sting.


This kind of cold snap should be a rarity, in the coming decades.
If my ASHP Sanyos wear out, I'll buy more of the same.

Sounds really sensible if you are in California right now and the weather is fairly pleasant.

If you had three Sanyos, or maybe four Sanyos you might be able to ride out this foul streak with ease.


But the kind of weather you are now facing is the situation that Ground source Heat Pumps were made to handle well.


Twenty-five feet down in the ground, the temperature is around 47 degrees F, not -4 degrees F.

You may decide that the technology does not fit your budget, or that you'll never live long enough to pay it off... but physics will not be denied.

-AC

The cost of digging for the ground loop is a BIG factor in determining payback time. If you do it when the house is built and the construction equipment is on site, the upfront expense isn't nearly as much as a retrofit install.

Good point. If I had to dig the ground loop GSHP on a preexisting house as a retrofit in Mass I'd stick with Xringer's position. I'm 60 myself so I can identify with an ROI that may not be optimistic. I'm not the young buck AC is.:eek:

Just because I'm 69 and I dug my loop field by hand doesn't mean I expect anyone else to get up out of their lounge chairs.

-AC

Here's our schedule, it's been modified to 70 for wake and 55 for day.

http://ecorenovator.org/forum/attach...2_191711_0-jpg

I live on the north side of a 200 foot hill that's made out of solid rock.
The soil here isn't very thick, and it's fill with boulders the size of VW Beatles..

Digging anything over 8 or 10 feet deep is going to require explosives. :eek:

We keep the temperature around 65 degrees, our 3-Fujitsu's air source heat pumps (two 1-ton units and one 1.5 ton unit) have been able to provide us with all of our heat. -3 degrees has been the coldest temperature that I have witnessed this month. We live close to Gillette stadium where the New England Patriots play their home games in Foxboro, Massachusetts.

Our upstairs heat pump is set to 60/62 degrees, downstairs we have two heat pumps (1-ton and 1.5 ton) and the 1.5 ton is set to 70 degrees and the 1-ton is set to 62/64 degrees. 1840 square foot cape style house built in the late 1970's.

My Sanyos were working down to 3.5 F, but there were many defrost cycles.
The power use was high too. We shut them down and went to back-up heat.
When it got up to 10F yesterday, I said "Summer again!" and turned them back on! :p

How well did those Fujitsu units work while it was down around zero?
Did they maintain 65F the whole time it was down in the zero range?

This is why wood stoves were invented. :D

I've been keeping my heat around 66F during this cold winter weather... dropping it back at nite to 63f. If the sun is out like today, the house stays nice and the furnace takes a break. Calling for -20Fs tonite and torrow nite...ugh

Xringer,

No, the room did not maintain 65F, I had noted at 2.3 degrees the room was 63.7 and the temperature coming from the inside air handler was 108.1 degrees. This was early in the morning and the temperature in the room increased as the outside temperature increased. We used to keep our house at 62F when we used the oil fired furnace so 63.7F was an improvement. I too noticed the heat pumps had many defrost cycles and if both heat pumps have the defrost cycle and the same time the room temperature really drops.

Very happy with the performance of the heat pumps with this cold weather, today with the 35F temperature it feels like a heat wave?

Last billing period (National Grid) we used 1387 kWh total.


Poleikleng

Got a 'wood' mode on my oil burner..
 

If the grid dies and the generator won't start, I've got a pile of wood ready to burn.. :)
http://i46.photobucket.com/albums/f1...HSTARMOT35.jpg

touche! (as in sword fighting)

Is there a reason why you don't choose wood over the spendy oil?

The wood is outdoors, and the oil is in the tank, connected to the burner..
This is no country for old men, from Texas.. :o

I've been saving that old oil just for this kind of occasion..
It's the backup, that I never wanted to use.

I didn't think that I would ever have to use it.
But, this global warming is getting worse every year..:rolleyes:

I just reprogrammed my thermostat for some additional savings. It used to be 70F while I was at home and awake, and 60F when I am not and while I'm sleeping. I have now made it so that it is 70F when I am home and awake, 60F when I am at home and sleeping, and 50F when I am not home.

Depending on how well this works, I might try to drop my temperature while sleeping, and bump the temperature up in the morning to get ready for work. I currently just keep it at 60F until I leave the house in the morning, and then it goes to 50F.

I'm hoping these changes show up good on my energy usage. Its been a very cold winter so far.


Here is my typical week day when I'm home in the afternoon.
http://ecorenovator.org/forum/attach...1&d=1389890122


Here is my typical week day when I'm not home in the afternoon. Dropping the temp to 50F should show sizable gains on these days especially.
http://ecorenovator.org/forum/attach...1&d=1389890220

http://i40.tinypic.com/294rqtj.jpg

Notice the temp vs last year...My bill for 32 days was just a hair over $180. That is high efficiency gas furnace, powervent gas hot water heater. Family of 5 keeping the temp around 65F to at most 67F. One problem we do have is the amount of baths that are taken every day. Seems like several a day are becoming common this time of year (kids are like fish).

If I insulate the basement (on my list) and dense pack the walls (on my list)...i should be able to shave at least another $20 off on a bill like this, if not more? Plus keep the house more comfortable. I also think the home energy audit last winter has really helped (sealed things up pretty tight)...ranch home/1000 sq ft or so/3 bd/1 bath.

Its been about two weeks since reprogramming for 50F nights. I'm honestly quite happy to say that I haven't been cold at all at night, and am sleeping very well. No heated mattress pad has been used.

I'd recommend more of you guys try setting your temperature back farther at night. Even if its just a few degrees more, it isn't costing you anything but a minute or two to reprogram your thermostat.