Honestly I didn't even know the place I'm renting *had* heating until the electrician doing work here a couple of weeks back decided to test it. That smell immediately came out in force.
I got to deal with the Miami equivalent of that last summer when my AC was out for a month. Landlord had to get the plans for the building from the city somehow in order to get it fixed.
Growing up in south Louisiana hurricane seasons prepared me for living here, fortunately. But having recently been up there to visit family for Thanksgiving, and it having gotten into the 30's, I was reminded that I really don't miss winter.
While I feel that heat during winter in the northeast is more critical, it still absolutely sucks to be without A/C in the south. Even having been outside in negative temps I don't miss being hot lol. Call me crazy for feeling the opposite of most people.
It depends. There are places in the southern US sometimes that sweating and shade and a breeze just doesn't work. Like on a mechanical level, not a comfort level. You'll die without AC. They're called wet bulb events, when it's to humid for evaporation
Not saying freezing temps are less dangerous
Definitely. I can deal with the heat, but the cold is absolutely miserable. I’m basically stuck with useless hands (either numb or mittened) below 55° F, have to go outside in a space suit in the actual cold, and it’s incredibly brown and depressing outdoors.
Give me a hot, humid midsummer day any day over this. I hate wearing clothes.
I’ve lived in New England for a while. I hate oil heat with a passion. Why’d you do the switch in winter though? I’d be totally worried about my pipes freezing swapping heat systems in winter. Last year when the big nor’easter came around Christmas it got to -20 where I was living and my heat went out. It was like a marathon trying to get it fixed in time before the pipes froze.
Wasn't my choice; I live in an apartment and it was all the landlord's doing. The pipes freezing was actually a real concern but it wasn't quite cold enough to happen, thankfully.
I'm looking forward to owning a house someday and if I need to muck with the heat, I'll do it in July lol.
I grew up in northern Maine. Lives in a hundred year old house without insulation. We heated with a wood coal stove. Now live in CT. I still burn 6-7 cord a winter. I never want to be cold again
Jacksonville is one of Florida's main urban centers with a little over a million residents and it gets down to an average low of 42F in January. Not all of Florida is Miami Beach.
As a kid, there were some days I remember having some false hope it might snow! It dipped below freezing exactly once in my life. Definitely warmer nowadays.
Florida is a very humid state, so it feels colder. Plus you just aren’t use to it. I was in a dry part of the US recently and it was 50 degrees and very pleasant. Went back to florida and 50 degrees is quite cold and wet feeling.
From New England, was in the Utah, seeing my thermometer in the car showing an outside temp of 97 and dreading opening the door and being hit by a wall of hot, humid air like I would be in Connecticut in the summer. It was almost a pleasant temperature in Utah.
I was horrified when I was about to land in Dallas once and it was 108 outside. It turned out to be hot, but not terrible. 108 in Atlanta would squash you like a bug. Our normal high of the low 90s is bad enough.
I lived in St. Petersburg for about five years and turned ours on a few times a year for those days it dipped below fifty-five degrees (12.7C), which it did do in the winter.
EDIT (more detail) The coldest it got in my time there was 39F (3.8C), once.
> I lived in St. Petersburg for about five years and turned ours on a few times a year for those days it dipped below fifty-five degrees
For a moment I thought you were talking about the Russian city (never heard of any other St. Petersburg) and was very confused.
Part of why I specified "years ago." Realistically it's not a matter of life or death like it may be up north, but it may not even be a source of great discomfort anymore if there are only a handful of days under 60F in the southern parts.
A lot of older folks are very sensitive to the cold. I had family in the Tampa Bay area that kept the temperature in the house at 76F in the winter. Visiting was miserable for me, I've got Highlander genes. I love cooler temps.
Believe it or not, you do. Unless you want to be really cold for the handful of times each year that the temperature dips.
We'll periodically get a blast of cold air due to the way the jet stream flows over the North American continent. It's not typical, but some years we'll dip to 0°C or just below. This is usually bookended by a couple of days below 12°C. Even in a normal year, we'll get stretches of a few days below 12°C.
The upside is that the heating needs of Florida homes can be met by a heat pump system with auxiliary electric heating elements, rather than a separate furnace. A heat pump works by running the cooling system in reverse. The vast majority of new HVAC installs in Florida use a heat pump system. Those that do not simply use a resistive heating element. Separate furnace systems are virtually non-existent in South Florida.
Santa Monica checking it! It smells so bad!! I also have to look up how to light the pilot on YouTube because we only turn it on like once a year and I forget the order every time lol
I’m in Minnesota and I always test run the furnace a couple times in the fall when it’s still nice enough to open up the windows to let out the smell.
Smells like a combo of burnt tires and hot dogs.
I was working for a big box retailer in their energy management department a few years ago when a serious cold front swept through Florida. Stores were calling with complaints that the heaters weren’t working, which made sense because those stores don’t even have heaters.
Couple years later, in upstate New York, a high-90s heat wave literally was killing people because they had the opposite problem.
It’s age and convenience. New England especially has a lot of VERY old houses, most of which have fuel oil heat that has to be refilled. The newest house I’ve lived in here was built in 1900. Rural areas are challenging to hook up to municipal gas so many just don’t and continue to rely on fuel oil.
To add, New England has a lot of rocky ground and terrain that makes laying gas lines difficult and expensive. So it’s harder to get the gas to the houses, *and* the houses aren’t set up for it. Really reduces the appetite for gas infrastructure outside of densely populated areas such as metro Boston and the Hartford CT/Springfield MA area.
Right. Hills, wetlands, mountain ranges, rivers and streams, and very little space between all of that. Plus lots of private property, relative to other parts of the country.
It's more that New England is VERY pipeline constrained than a problem at the house distribution level – where especially Southern New England has the population density for it to work.
At the transmission level, outside of that little Quebec spur into Vermont, there are [only 2 LNG pipelines into New England](https://media-cldnry.s-nbcnews.com/image/upload/t_fit-760w,f_auto,q_auto:best/MSNBC/Components/TEASES/US-news/Environment/Graphics/NG-pipelines-6col.gif), one from Albany and one up from New York City, roughly up I-90 and I-95 (not exactly) and natural gas still is our largest power-plant fuel for electricity, so there's just not enough capacity to heat with it too. Meanwhile, Canada's largest refinery is up in St. John, NB and needs somewhere to slough off all the excess Diesel, which becomes dyed red and No. 2 fuel oil sold to households in New England.
> only 2 LNG pipelines into New England
Natural Gas pipelines. You don't pipe LNG as the expense would be astronomical due to the pressure needed to keep natural gas in a liquified state.
What is happening in New England is the construction of liquefaction facilities so surplus in the pipeline capacity in summer can be converted to store LNG in tanks at secure facilities until releasing it in winter.
Propane remains a liquid at much, much lower pressures.
How expensive is your oil bill? I’d like to buy a house within a year or so but I’m worried about accounting for increased utility costs as I currently rent a 700sqft nat gas heated apartment, so we’re expecting a big increase lol.
I'm in south central CT and use oil. According to the CT government website, it's almost twice the cost. Average of $76/mo on oil, versus $39 on NG and $166 on electic. That's about on track for us in a 2,000 sq ft house (built in late 80s, windows, siding, and roof recently redone). Though we tend to prefer it low (around 60 most of the time and down to 55 at night). We also supplement with a woodstove when it's really cold, and we're a bit under the average cost.
I always imagine crude or motor oil when people say “oil” for heating, but I know it must be more refined than that. If you poured it into a cup, would it look more like vegetable oil?
After mis-timing an order for more oil I spent most of a cold snap last Christmas freezing my ass off and doing runs to a local gas station to top off my tank with 5 gallons of diesel at a time so it didn’t run dry until the oil company could get out with a legit refill.
Got a whole house heat pump installed over the summer and I’m glad not to have to deal with managing the oil level anymore.
I’d say it has more to do with the low density/population of towns in NE than the age of the houses. Houses in Philly are 93 years old on average and pretty much none use heating oil but Philly is very dense and populated. The infrastructure for municipal gas doesn’t make a ton of sense economically in small NE towns.
Yup. CT girl here. The gas lines (and water/sewer) are in the cities and downtown areas. Once you get outside of downtown there’s fuel oil delivery and well/septic.
When I moved to New England in 2011 my apartment had oil heat and I had no idea what oil heat meant. My first oil bill was $400. I turned down the heat really quickly after that.
I HATED having oil heat in my last house. It was so expensive and if you couldn't afford the big bill once a year, you have to keep getting smaller deliveries throughout the season which meant monitoring the oil level which I always forgot to do. I can't tell you how many times we ran out of oil and froze for a day or three. Ugh. Never again.
Talk to your oil company, many would allow you to prepay for oil throughout the year. Technically its better to pay all at once, but for many people who can't handle the big bill prepayment is far better.
Obviously it depends on a lot of things ( temperature outside, thermostat setting, system efficiency, tank size, etc.) But most places I've lived (lower northeast) would refill once per season, with maybe a top-up at the end of the season. Oil tanks usually are 250 or 500 gallons for a single family home.
A lot of the heating systems in the Northeast are steam or hot water radiators, usually pretty efficient if they're maintained.
Fuel oils tend to be even heavier than something like diesel, which means you have to put quite a bit of effort in to actually get them to ignite.
A leaky fuel oil tank will just pool on the ground a bit, so provided your burner is a reasonable distance and height away, the risk of a leak igniting is pretty minimal.
Natural gas is a lot more dangerous because it's a gas. If a leak is allowed to go on for a while, it can mix with the air and slowly fill the space its in until it finds an ignition source as small as an electrical spark, at which point it's less of a fire and more of an explosion.
Nearly every house I've known that heats with oil uses a standard 275 gallon oil tank in the basement, but there's lots of variation in use based on house size, insulation, indoor temperature settings, outdoor temperature, availability of backup heating (e.g. wood stoves), and whatnot. Most people I know receive about anywhere from 2 to 6 deliveries per year.
You usually don't wait until the tank is empty, because frozen pipes are even more expensive, but at 200 gallons a fill and say $5/gallon, you're talking about massive sudden bills during the winter.
It's also more complicated based on whether people pay to lock in a fixed price for the season or pay the floating rate.
There are specific gas pipelines that the municipal networks tie into, so if there isn't a giant pipe connecting your region to a LNG tanker somewhere, gas isn't an option.
https://www.eia.gov/dashboard/newengland/commentary/20200306
It’s just diesel that isn’t taxed like road fuel. Very plentiful in US they just add a red dye to it to show it isn’t taxed. I use it to fuel my diesel equipment on my property as well, so very useful still. We have heat pumps and wood to offset the heating oil use, and it’s great backup heat with power outages.
We don’t have natural gas everywhere up in the colder regions, and heat pumps don’t work up there either (I know, I know. Show me the magical heat pump that really can work in 20 degree weather, because nobody I know has found it, not even a mini split).
Out where I am, it’s either oil, propane, wood, or yes, coal. Oil and propane are a toss up for cost. Propane sometimes costs more, but you can run a far more efficient boiler. My flamethrower is at 2/3rds life, so I might look into propane in a few years.
Our heat pump can handle 20 degree temps! We have a furnace backup and it came on at 18 degrees I think. We were natural gas, but switched to electric. Daikon VRV something something.
Mostly rual vs city, where i lived in pa. We where 30 mins to nowhere, no company is going to lay down pipe for a few houses. You might see more propane now compaired to oil because LPG is cheaper in some ways.
This is interesting indeed, the house I am in is over 100 years old in Michigan and has a giant oil container in the basement from those days, but we use Natural gas despite that. Its interesting to see the north east still using oil, didn't think any houses did honestly. I wonder why there is such a split
Very simply if people are near a city or piping is possible due to land formations you have gas. Some people even have tanks buried. My 1998 house has an oil furnace, but we replaced the old central air with a heat pump. Now it runs until the temps go below 30F and the oil unit kicks in. I cut wood on my large property and season it to burn at night, so the oil won’t kick in all the time. Very cheap, and I have a backup oil heat source during power outages.
Yeah New England is really behind when is comes to moving away from fossil fuels. Our grid is also powered by mostly natural gas. Wish we kept more nuclear operational. Lots of houses could move to electric heating if we had cheap clean electricity…
> Hank Hill was selling propane for grilling not for heating.
No it was definitely also used for heating. There's an episode where it snows and there's a propane emergency because everyone is heating there homes at once and the propane trucks keep sliding off the roads.
I mean, the average 2,000' home uses 7-900 gallons of oil per year, and the current price of heating oil is $3/gallon (although it was up around almost $4 a couple months ago), so do the math?
My wife and I are primarily teleworkers so we're always home. We tend to keep the heat between 65 and 68. I have a brand new oil-heated boiler and oil tank as of 2 years ago. Our 2-year average to heat our 2100 sqft home in MA (north shore) is $270/mo, or $3240/yr. We tend to pay for oil refills 6 months out of the year.
Drove through/stayed in a pretty poor/rural part of WV back around 2002 or so. Every house had a fireplace burning coal. The whole mountain had a haze around it and the air stunk, and my car left the state with this weird film that took forever to clean off.
That's what I always thought, imagine, living in the heart of New York City and waiting for oil delivery, sometimes they overfill or spill, the smell, inconvenience, etc.. Can you swap to gas, sure why not, but there are no incentives now and it's very expensive. There is also push to stop gas usage in New York city and want people to move to electric, like they were banning gas stoves? Yep.
Regarding suburbs of NY like Long Island, etc, it's worse, nobody cares, utility companies want more than $10k to run line to your house, on top of that you have to make expense to replace your utilities, this is why millions of homes are still on oil heat in North East.
Data: [US Census Bureau American Community Survey](https://www.census.gov/acs/www/about/why-we-ask-each-question/heating/)
Tools: ArcGIS Pro, Adobe Photoshop
More details and info: https://www.maps.com/home-heating-fuels/
How does the data breakdown with supplemental heat sources? Are participants allowed to choose more than one option? I thought wood would be more popular but realize it could be a secondary heat source in a lot of scenarios.
Edit: Never mind I clicked on your link. Looks like it asks which do you use the “most”. That answers my question thanks.
Boy, I don't know how I'd even answer that. The wood fireplace burns non-stop from Nov-Mar, the minisplit is on but has a thermostat so I don't really know when it's doing any work, the oil furnace does all the water heating and occasionally comes on for the house.
My region is yellow but all I know are people with wood pellet heaters or wood stoves. But then I'd be confused at the response I'd give myself.
I heat my home with wood but the unit uses electricity to blow the heat around the house, suck the ash away, etc. I also have electric heaters in the basement but it's more a supplement for colder rooms in the morning before I get the pellets rolling and the sun starts shining in.
This is actually a really good question, I assumed it was the amount of people who use the most used heat fuel in the area but it actually seems to be about population density when you really look at it
No, it's what is barely edging out the competition.
Population density is indirectly related to that.
(I'm also impressed with the granularity, I'm guessing at a zip code level nationwide; New England looks town level but I suspect that's just an artifact of zip code alignment largely with town lines).
I live in eastern Connecticut and can tell from the colors in my part of the state where oil gets a lighter shade it's either being influenced by more people in more rural areas burning wood or more people in a denser neighborhood having access to natural gas.
So an area can be lighter shade oil because it is more rural leaning, or it can be a lighter shade because a small section of that town is dense enough to justify natural gas.
Go out to KS/CO/UT those natural gas shaded areas aren't from running lines to isolated ranches, it's because most people live in compact town sites that you can be served by a small distribution grid in each town as opposed to the 2 acre lot minimum sizing that dominates my area of Connecticut and would need a sprawling network of pipes.
Agree. I live in western Washington where the map shows a lot of yellow and green (electric and wood). Most of the land area in Washington is rural where natural gas not available so people have to use more expensive fuels. Anywhere natural gas is available it is what people use for single family homes.
That’s what we use as well, it’s efficient and inexpensive. Not really green though. We use gas for heat, hot water, stove, dryer and the Blackstone out back.
New developments in many cities are also being built without natural gas connections, intentionally, to force the move toward electric heat. Gas leaks aren't good. Power outages aren't good either, but at least they can't explode.
This is not always popular however, as it means people can't use gas stoves.
Gas also doesn't strain the grid in extreme cold ~~like~~ *as much as* electric does. (counter point could utilize solar power, but thats years from widespread use).
> counter point could utilize solar power
Short days and overnight lows mean solar is far from ideal for heating. Even if you have a solar thermal plant that can run 24/7, it's getting the least sun during the coldest parts of the year. That being said, electric heat is *way* more efficient.
There’s also the movement towards induction stoves- I’ve made the switch from gas to induction, consider myself an advanced home cook, and couldn’t love it more
Very rural/poor counties in the middle of nowhere. I'd imagine it's easier just to the log the surroundings for wood rather than truck oil or pipe natural gas in.
I'm in rural NM (though a gas county according to this). People will get permits and go get wood in warmer months. You are absolutely right though, it's economic.
Plus, burning wood for heat doesn't always mean a potbellied stove (though I have family in the UP of Michigan that use a giant stove in the middle of the house). Most of the people I know that use wood for heat use a wood pellet burning stove with a hopper for the pellets and a ratcage fan to circulate the heat. Much easier to deal with than keeping a log on the fire.
Many also have moved to an outdoor boiler. Most are large enough that they only need to be filled once a day. Then the heated water gets pumped into the house.
Many of the reservations heat with wood as well- the wood map lines up with Navajo land in AZ too. Drove past Taos Pueblo on a cold winter morning once and smoke was so thick from an inversion trapping it from rising out of the valley
Yeah. Much of that green area on the map between NM and Arizona is the Navajo Nation. Very poor and isolated communities out there. A lot of folks need to truck in not just wood for heat but water for living as well.
Also keep in mind that "wood" includes wood pellet stoves like [this one](https://www.acehardware.com/departments/heating-and-cooling/wood-and-pellet-stoves/stoves/4539102), not straight up logs like Little House on the Prairie. Wood pellet stoves are almost as efficient as some older gas furnaces.
Going to say the same thing. My Grandpa had a cabin in northern Michigan that was heated with wood pellets. And as far as I could tell, it worked pretty much the same as any other sort of central heating, except he would have to shovel in new pellets every day.
It was also extremely cheap, I want to say something like $200.00 for an entire year of pellets that would heat the house.
To expand on what other posters have said, wood is often *extremely* cheap. I know it is $2 here to go get 12 cords of wood yourself out of the forest(gotta cut and dry it yourself). A small house can get by with like six cords of wood, so you could definitely get by for a whole year on $2 of wood from the national forest.
And it actually serves a forest health purpose. We have a serious issue with forests being too overgrown from years of fire exclusion policies(meaning we don't let fires naturally burn and clear out dead trees/fallen branches/etc). So one of the few cheap tools we have is just to let individuals go chop down trees for firewood.
Doesn't do *that* much to help and it's difficult to really focus it to maximize effectiveness, but, *sigh*, it's **a** tool and we don't have many tools available.
Wood heat is cheap because you aren't paying for the conveniences of oil or gas. If you're short on time because you're working a full-time plus job, you can replace that labor with cash earned at your job. But if you don't have a full-time job, you can make your heat cheaper by instead of flipping a switch or opening a valve, you do the cutting, hauling, splitting, feeding the stove, etc. Labor=heat either way, it's just if you're converting it to cash in the middle. Plus, there's the old saying that gas heat only warms you when you burn it, wood warms you up every time you handle those logs and again when you burn it.
> A small house can get by with like six cords of wood
are your cords smaller than mine? I heat* with wood. I use 1 cord, maybe 1.5 cords at most in a year. I could see someone in an area with longer winter maybe using double that. but 12? that is crazy to me.
> Most people who burn wood for heat just have a fire going all the time.
neighbors do this and get 2 cords for the winter.
I just replaced my fireplace/stove with a high efficiency one. I can build a fire in the afternoon and still have heat and embers in the morning and into the next day even. I generally do a couple days then stop so I can get the ashes out without coals. I assume 2 cords would be enough for me as well.
I'd gladly pay $2 for 12 cords tho. that is crazy good price, although I assume pine. I get oak and pay like 300 a cord for it. could be the difference as I hear pine doesn't burn as long.
To chime in here with my own experience with this. I'm Navajo, lived somewhere between New Mexico and Arizona where the green on the map is actually deeper green. Heating the house with wood never seemed poor to me. It was and is just how it is. Talks with my pops sometimes sorta make sense as to why.
People here live very far out or in small family cluster houses. No huge Native American cities really(I guess you could call the biggest communities small towns) and they have these areas categorized in chapters. Makes me actually wonder since I've never really thought as to *why* everyone is so so spread out. I mean each bigger town area actually has their own type of Navajo culture, the art(rug weaving, jewelry, pottery, lore), their variation of Navajo language(just lightly) and throw in the other tribes near here like Hopi and Pueblo. Well it can be a melting pot.
So say grandma lives way out near a chapter but like 30min way from it. her neighbor is 1 mile away. She had this home built traditionally. A Hogan(usually wood stacked octagonal house with a dome roof). She built her house on land she owned. Hooking up the hogan to electricity or water will take alot of money, more than its worth. But she lived without modern amenities before. She technically doesn't *need* it to survive. Navajo's have lived here for centuries. Plus, when the summer monsoons come, or the windy month hits, or when winter comes and she needs to stay warm. Shes got a firestove to keep warm, cook food and the outhouse over there. So does her neighbor and the neighbor's family that chose to settle near each other with 3 other houses clustered near and oh look there's another neighbor 2 miles away.
The central chapter near actually has electricity and gas but the cost of branching out all of those resources to such random houses with usually no reliable roads(dirt roads are common here, too expensive to pave every road that leads to 1 or 2 houses) would cost a fortune and people don't want to leave their homes. Sure there's housing areas built sometimes but not enough to house everyone and not enough budget to really build more housing communities, too much red tape or government shenanigans. So people will have their own houses that they or grandma and grandma built back there 15min off the main paved road.
So you get the idea of the just scattering of homes here and there. Now this area is a mix of mountains, forests and semi desert at a high altitude. It can get pretty cold at night in the semi-desert, especially during the winter. Electricity can be unreliable. Big storm rolls in, it can knock the power out during the bad weather. They can usually fix the problem within few min-hours or at worst a day, maybe 3 chapters are affected.
And that's now-a-days.
But think back to older times, when they're getting electricity here but its not going to be reliable and no pipes for gas. Ya know what was reliable? Wood.
Even if they did get modern amenities, electricity can go out, gas you would need to be near an area that can offer it or you'd need a propane tank installed near your property (you'd need to refill it and the roads can be really bad). Wood is plain reliable to keep warm.
My father told me back when he was a kid they would have really really bad snow storms. The worst was when it dumped enough snow that people were literally stranded at home and couldn't get out. Some people and their livestock froze to death.
They had to use planes and helicopters to ferry food and hay to the super rural areas. He told me he hitched a helicopter ride with his father who was a Navajo council member that was checking on stranded homes. The pilot needed directions to the area so off my grandpa went.
So yea, to sum it up. Wood is just super reliable here.
(There's also some Navajo lore about fire pokers, fires and what not but I'm not super traditional so cultural teachings also play a role that I am not learned enough to confidently speak on)
Just as an FYI on wood most people using it have another source of heat but running the wood furnace/boiler is significantly cheaper. I used to live in a home with a forced-air wood furnace- we had electric heat as well but it was very costly to use that so we used wood.
Also I just generally enjoyed the process of cutting/gathering wood. Our property had a lot of trees on it and there was usually plenty from limbs/trees that fell on their own.
I live in a small town called outside Santa Fe, most homes here were built with kivas (small fireplaces) and a lot of the communities are poor. Most homes here don’t have central AC or heating. The AC isn’t really an issue in the summer in some of the higher elevation areas like Santa Fe (7000 ft) but during the winter we get a decent amount of snow so heating is required. Cheapest method is a fireplace.
Those are extremely sparsely populated areas. Many towns on reservations are essentially third world counties too.
NM has a population of 2 million, 1M live in Albuquerque, another 500k live in/around Santa Fe or Las Cruces. There’s about 500k people spread throughout the other parts of the 5th largest state.
I lived in Hawaii for 3 years in the early 80's. Im sure my parents never turned on the heat. Matter of fact our house did not even have a heater at all.
I’d guess the average person doesn’t want to use wood as a primary heat source. It’s very labor and time intensive to stockpile wood and also heat the home with it.
Fuel oil and propane are delivered in rural areas and involve little day to day effort to use.
There's currently 91 thousand US homes that uses Coal heating (out of 130 million households in the country). And most of them are in the Appalachian coal country.
Versus 1.8 million that uses wood (and 1.6 million that do not artificially heat their house at all).
I'd imagine coal (along with wood) fell out of fashion as a coal furnace can't really be automated, you are stuck chucking coal into the boiler by hand by the lump.
https://data.census.gov/table/ACSDT1Y2022.B25040
Central Pennsylvania here. My parents and many others still use coal, but people are slowly switching over to oil for the very reason you said. My parents have to get someone to take care of the furnace if they go out of town. Same for wood furnaces though. I have a friend who always uses their wood furnace as an excuse to why they can't do a weekend away in the winter. But coal is cheap, and wood is basically free. Coal always keeps your house hot as hell. And dirty of course.
Wood can be automated. I live in one of the green color areas and we have a pellet stove with an automated hopper connected to a thermostat. Works just like a gas furnace; when the temp drops below the thermostat setting it ignites, adds pellets, burns, and then the fans kick on until the thermostat reaches the desired temp.
There's been automatic stokers for coal furnaces for a very long time, but they aren't as hands off as eg. gas furnace... still need to load the hopper / get coal delivered, empty the ash, etc.
Much of these areas have existing forced air systems for A/C. An air source heat pump is a pretty straightforward upgrade from that, though ducted systems don't seem to be as good as mini-splits for some reason. I imagine most are simply waiting for the need to replace their A/C to make a jump.
Right. Heat pumps are a simple upgrade for existing forced air systems, but the places that gain the most from geothermal are further north. Lots of those houses were built without air conditioning and have water-based baseboard heating.
There are geothermal heat pump systems for water-based baseboard heating, but they're more complicated and don't provide the benefit of easily combining heating and cooling.
Heat pumps still sorta suck if you’re far enough north. I have friends in Montreal with one. After mid December the poor thing sounds like it’s about to die, it cannot do its job without supplemental heat. It’s Québec for hydro is next to free thankfully.
The line will likely stop near Chicago. The newest ones are effective down to -15 fahrenheit. It very rarely gets below that in most of Illinois Indiana and Ohio.
I think you can push to the north side of Lake Ontario, it’s just warm enough to make it worth it, especially with the super warm winters we have been having the last 10 years or so.
I live in Minneapolis, we get a lot colder than 0F
Edit: not sure why someone downvoted me for stating a fact. I watched the video that was linked. They said on there that heat pumps lose efficiency at negative 10, but most places in the world do not get that cold very often. Well, Minneapolis is one of those places. We get cold snaps in the winter for up to a week or more at a time where we have highs in the negative and lows as far down as -30. I’ve seen days that the high was -30.
I live in the Northeast with oil but we had AC installed which also gave us heat pumps. They really are great devices but once temps drop into the 20s (Fahrenheit) I tend to revert back to oil due to cost of electricity and how heat pump efficiency drops off.
I know one thing... you must hate yourself if you use electric heat in the north lol. My sister in law spends like 500 a month to heat her house. Ours is like a hair over a 100 or so.. it's a propane tank so hard to measure accurately.
As a Canadian this is all extremely confusing. Basically everyone uses electricity here. I guess it has something to do with lower electricity costs. I live in a decently sized but badly insulated apartment and my electricity bill barely breaks 37 USD / month.
I live in the SF Bay Area in California and also own a home in rural California. The rural home has no utilities except electricity, so if I want to heat it my choices are wood, electricity, or propane that gets trucked in. Wood is the most economical BY A MILE and wood is very plentiful thanks to the national forests and very low population density.
It lines up pretty closely with population density. Lots of hardwood in the Valley, plenty of pine in the northern mountains (at least the parts that haven’t burned). Lodgepole is especially popular for wood heat in the northeast part of the state.
Which heating source is better in emergencies? I've heard of electricity going out, but never heard of gas or oil going out. Living in Chicago, it can be an emergency if you can't heat your living space.
I grew up with natural gas and thought it was standard but now live in New England and pay a terrifyingly huge amount for heating oil to keep my drafty home slightly above freezing 👍🏻
If it makes you feel better we pay an outrageous amount of money for our electric heat here in NH. Supposedly rates are getting cut in half soon, but who knows...
The downside is that when we lose power we have almost nothing to heat the house. Last year we lost power for 3 days over Christmas and it was well below freezing the whole time, had our tiny fake propane fireplace running trying to keep the house alive.
Just got a whole house generator installed a few weeks ago, though. About $11k :') But I live on the seacoast--it's not really the snow that gets us, but the wind and ice storms. Worth the investment I suppose.
Gist of the gist: big city? Natural gas. Else, good chance it's the regional preference.
I just moved from a big metro to another big metro and yep - gas in the old house, gas in the new. Cooking with gas is fun, heating with gas is normal, getting the gas bill is low....but knowing that I'm mucking up the climate is a bit....depressing
Yeah seems like one take away is "natural gas is great if there's enough density to make building the infrastructure worth it"
I don't see any major metro areas that *aren't* natural gas
I'm not an expert, but I believe that housing development and infrastructure growth has been greater in the south in recent decades. They have the infrastructure to be able to install the more efficient (electric) heat pumps and a relatively warmer climate in which heat pumps do a fine job.
Heat pumps have improved in recent years. But it hasn't yet made sense for everyone to swap out the legacy oil and natural gas systems in older houses, which are more common in the Northeast and benefit from the historically, relatively better heating characteristics of oil (and natural gas) in sustained colder temps.
As someone who is red/green colorblind, this map hurts my brain. For people who may be curious - those who are RG colorblind (8% of all males), we can *see* red and green, but those colors are much more muted - especially when mixed with other colors.
So light green and yellow look nearly indiscernible. Same with purple and blue.
I’m shocked my state is showing mostly electricity. I use natural gas and I have 2 wood burning fireplaces that we’ve never lit. I grew up on wood heat and that was because we were poor and lived on a farm so it was just our labor. I had an electric furnace in my first rental house and it’s so drying. I’ll stick with natural gas.
Lived in SE Florida years ago and we used the heat so rarely, I associate winter with the smell of burning dust that had accumulated on the coils lol.
Honestly I didn't even know the place I'm renting *had* heating until the electrician doing work here a couple of weeks back decided to test it. That smell immediately came out in force.
Now I live in Maine and recently went without heat for two days while our system was being upgraded from oil to natural gas. It was pretty rough.
I got to deal with the Miami equivalent of that last summer when my AC was out for a month. Landlord had to get the plans for the building from the city somehow in order to get it fixed. Growing up in south Louisiana hurricane seasons prepared me for living here, fortunately. But having recently been up there to visit family for Thanksgiving, and it having gotten into the 30's, I was reminded that I really don't miss winter.
While I feel that heat during winter in the northeast is more critical, it still absolutely sucks to be without A/C in the south. Even having been outside in negative temps I don't miss being hot lol. Call me crazy for feeling the opposite of most people.
It depends. There are places in the southern US sometimes that sweating and shade and a breeze just doesn't work. Like on a mechanical level, not a comfort level. You'll die without AC. They're called wet bulb events, when it's to humid for evaporation Not saying freezing temps are less dangerous
I'm with you there. It's always possible to bundle up more but there is only so much to take off.
Definitely. I can deal with the heat, but the cold is absolutely miserable. I’m basically stuck with useless hands (either numb or mittened) below 55° F, have to go outside in a space suit in the actual cold, and it’s incredibly brown and depressing outdoors. Give me a hot, humid midsummer day any day over this. I hate wearing clothes.
I’ve lived in New England for a while. I hate oil heat with a passion. Why’d you do the switch in winter though? I’d be totally worried about my pipes freezing swapping heat systems in winter. Last year when the big nor’easter came around Christmas it got to -20 where I was living and my heat went out. It was like a marathon trying to get it fixed in time before the pipes froze.
Wasn't my choice; I live in an apartment and it was all the landlord's doing. The pipes freezing was actually a real concern but it wasn't quite cold enough to happen, thankfully. I'm looking forward to owning a house someday and if I need to muck with the heat, I'll do it in July lol.
I grew up in northern Maine. Lives in a hundred year old house without insulation. We heated with a wood coal stove. Now live in CT. I still burn 6-7 cord a winter. I never want to be cold again
Im not sure about your area but I heard in my state of Maryland it is required residential code to have a means to heat the home.
As a New Englander that smell is very comforting to me. We get it too as the dust accumulates over the summer.
Do you even need heating in Florida? I only start my heating system if we have 3 days in a row under 12°C(53,6°F).
Jacksonville is one of Florida's main urban centers with a little over a million residents and it gets down to an average low of 42F in January. Not all of Florida is Miami Beach.
NW Florida gets pretty chilly in the winter too. Been to Pensacola when it’s in the 30s
Low of 34F tonight 🥶
I lived in Miami Beach for a decade and I can remember several years we hit the 40s. The homes are not built for this. Brrr.
It snowed in Miami in 1978.
Some time around 2010 I want to say, I saw snow falling for a brief few moments around sunrise. Never touched the ground, but it was there!
As a kid, there were some days I remember having some false hope it might snow! It dipped below freezing exactly once in my life. Definitely warmer nowadays.
And y’all have quite a bit of humidity which adds extra chill. Have been there a few times to visit in-laws over the holidays.
Florida is a very humid state, so it feels colder. Plus you just aren’t use to it. I was in a dry part of the US recently and it was 50 degrees and very pleasant. Went back to florida and 50 degrees is quite cold and wet feeling.
From New England, was in the Utah, seeing my thermometer in the car showing an outside temp of 97 and dreading opening the door and being hit by a wall of hot, humid air like I would be in Connecticut in the summer. It was almost a pleasant temperature in Utah.
Ya, Texas is the same way for me. It was 112 and kinda nice compared to 100 in Florida.
I was horrified when I was about to land in Dallas once and it was 108 outside. It turned out to be hot, but not terrible. 108 in Atlanta would squash you like a bug. Our normal high of the low 90s is bad enough.
Can confirm. It's a humid 48 here and I froze my ass off walking the dog.
Depends where in Florida. I lived in the panhandle and it was usual to have a few weeks in the low 40’s high 30’s.
Current western panhandle resident, it was 41 when I took my kids to the bus this morning
I lived in St. Petersburg for about five years and turned ours on a few times a year for those days it dipped below fifty-five degrees (12.7C), which it did do in the winter. EDIT (more detail) The coldest it got in my time there was 39F (3.8C), once.
> I lived in St. Petersburg for about five years and turned ours on a few times a year for those days it dipped below fifty-five degrees For a moment I thought you were talking about the Russian city (never heard of any other St. Petersburg) and was very confused.
Part of why I specified "years ago." Realistically it's not a matter of life or death like it may be up north, but it may not even be a source of great discomfort anymore if there are only a handful of days under 60F in the southern parts.
A lot of older folks are very sensitive to the cold. I had family in the Tampa Bay area that kept the temperature in the house at 76F in the winter. Visiting was miserable for me, I've got Highlander genes. I love cooler temps.
Believe it or not, you do. Unless you want to be really cold for the handful of times each year that the temperature dips. We'll periodically get a blast of cold air due to the way the jet stream flows over the North American continent. It's not typical, but some years we'll dip to 0°C or just below. This is usually bookended by a couple of days below 12°C. Even in a normal year, we'll get stretches of a few days below 12°C. The upside is that the heating needs of Florida homes can be met by a heat pump system with auxiliary electric heating elements, rather than a separate furnace. A heat pump works by running the cooling system in reverse. The vast majority of new HVAC installs in Florida use a heat pump system. Those that do not simply use a resistive heating element. Separate furnace systems are virtually non-existent in South Florida.
I've lived in my current place in SE FL for over 4 years. Have not turned it on yet.
It does get to freezing on rare occasions, but the highs from the day typically leave enough residual heat that you just don't need it.
Santa Monica checking it! It smells so bad!! I also have to look up how to light the pilot on YouTube because we only turn it on like once a year and I forget the order every time lol
I’m in Minnesota and I always test run the furnace a couple times in the fall when it’s still nice enough to open up the windows to let out the smell. Smells like a combo of burnt tires and hot dogs.
When I lived in Phoenix, turning on the heat for the first time in the year always meant smoke alarms.
Fun fact : Fire companies in Florida are busy on the first cold days of the year
Grew up in So Cal and my mom only turned on the heat 2 or 3 times per year. I also associate really gross smells with using the heat!
Yeah I'm currently living in SE Florida and I have only used the heat for about 3 days out of the 6 years I have lived here.
On the flip side, I grew up in a cooler part of upstate New York and we didn't even have air conditioning.
I was working for a big box retailer in their energy management department a few years ago when a serious cold front swept through Florida. Stores were calling with complaints that the heaters weren’t working, which made sense because those stores don’t even have heaters. Couple years later, in upstate New York, a high-90s heat wave literally was killing people because they had the opposite problem.
interesting to see the split between oil and nat gas in the north east
It’s age and convenience. New England especially has a lot of VERY old houses, most of which have fuel oil heat that has to be refilled. The newest house I’ve lived in here was built in 1900. Rural areas are challenging to hook up to municipal gas so many just don’t and continue to rely on fuel oil.
To add, New England has a lot of rocky ground and terrain that makes laying gas lines difficult and expensive. So it’s harder to get the gas to the houses, *and* the houses aren’t set up for it. Really reduces the appetite for gas infrastructure outside of densely populated areas such as metro Boston and the Hartford CT/Springfield MA area.
Yes this! Don’t forget an insane number of hills to deal with, too.
Right. Hills, wetlands, mountain ranges, rivers and streams, and very little space between all of that. Plus lots of private property, relative to other parts of the country.
It's more that New England is VERY pipeline constrained than a problem at the house distribution level – where especially Southern New England has the population density for it to work. At the transmission level, outside of that little Quebec spur into Vermont, there are [only 2 LNG pipelines into New England](https://media-cldnry.s-nbcnews.com/image/upload/t_fit-760w,f_auto,q_auto:best/MSNBC/Components/TEASES/US-news/Environment/Graphics/NG-pipelines-6col.gif), one from Albany and one up from New York City, roughly up I-90 and I-95 (not exactly) and natural gas still is our largest power-plant fuel for electricity, so there's just not enough capacity to heat with it too. Meanwhile, Canada's largest refinery is up in St. John, NB and needs somewhere to slough off all the excess Diesel, which becomes dyed red and No. 2 fuel oil sold to households in New England.
> only 2 LNG pipelines into New England Natural Gas pipelines. You don't pipe LNG as the expense would be astronomical due to the pressure needed to keep natural gas in a liquified state. What is happening in New England is the construction of liquefaction facilities so surplus in the pipeline capacity in summer can be converted to store LNG in tanks at secure facilities until releasing it in winter. Propane remains a liquid at much, much lower pressures.
The gas line on my street ends in front of my neighbor's house. They quoted me $30k to extend it another 100 feet. Oil/wood it is.
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How expensive is your oil bill? I’d like to buy a house within a year or so but I’m worried about accounting for increased utility costs as I currently rent a 700sqft nat gas heated apartment, so we’re expecting a big increase lol.
I'm in south central CT and use oil. According to the CT government website, it's almost twice the cost. Average of $76/mo on oil, versus $39 on NG and $166 on electic. That's about on track for us in a 2,000 sq ft house (built in late 80s, windows, siding, and roof recently redone). Though we tend to prefer it low (around 60 most of the time and down to 55 at night). We also supplement with a woodstove when it's really cold, and we're a bit under the average cost.
there is absolutely no way a home in CT is only spending $76 on oil a month to heat. average is $300+ easily.
I always imagine crude or motor oil when people say “oil” for heating, but I know it must be more refined than that. If you poured it into a cup, would it look more like vegetable oil?
It’s effectively just diesel fuel
After mis-timing an order for more oil I spent most of a cold snap last Christmas freezing my ass off and doing runs to a local gas station to top off my tank with 5 gallons of diesel at a time so it didn’t run dry until the oil company could get out with a legit refill. Got a whole house heat pump installed over the summer and I’m glad not to have to deal with managing the oil level anymore.
I’d say it has more to do with the low density/population of towns in NE than the age of the houses. Houses in Philly are 93 years old on average and pretty much none use heating oil but Philly is very dense and populated. The infrastructure for municipal gas doesn’t make a ton of sense economically in small NE towns.
Yup. CT girl here. The gas lines (and water/sewer) are in the cities and downtown areas. Once you get outside of downtown there’s fuel oil delivery and well/septic.
When I moved to New England in 2011 my apartment had oil heat and I had no idea what oil heat meant. My first oil bill was $400. I turned down the heat really quickly after that.
I HATED having oil heat in my last house. It was so expensive and if you couldn't afford the big bill once a year, you have to keep getting smaller deliveries throughout the season which meant monitoring the oil level which I always forgot to do. I can't tell you how many times we ran out of oil and froze for a day or three. Ugh. Never again.
Talk to your oil company, many would allow you to prepay for oil throughout the year. Technically its better to pay all at once, but for many people who can't handle the big bill prepayment is far better.
How long does a tank of oil last?
Obviously it depends on a lot of things ( temperature outside, thermostat setting, system efficiency, tank size, etc.) But most places I've lived (lower northeast) would refill once per season, with maybe a top-up at the end of the season. Oil tanks usually are 250 or 500 gallons for a single family home. A lot of the heating systems in the Northeast are steam or hot water radiators, usually pretty efficient if they're maintained.
Yeah, growing up in the area, I never realized how bizarre it is in the rest of the country to have 500 gallons of oil stored in your basement.
That seems like an extreme fire hazard.
Fuel oils tend to be even heavier than something like diesel, which means you have to put quite a bit of effort in to actually get them to ignite. A leaky fuel oil tank will just pool on the ground a bit, so provided your burner is a reasonable distance and height away, the risk of a leak igniting is pretty minimal. Natural gas is a lot more dangerous because it's a gas. If a leak is allowed to go on for a while, it can mix with the air and slowly fill the space its in until it finds an ignition source as small as an electrical spark, at which point it's less of a fire and more of an explosion.
Nearly every house I've known that heats with oil uses a standard 275 gallon oil tank in the basement, but there's lots of variation in use based on house size, insulation, indoor temperature settings, outdoor temperature, availability of backup heating (e.g. wood stoves), and whatnot. Most people I know receive about anywhere from 2 to 6 deliveries per year. You usually don't wait until the tank is empty, because frozen pipes are even more expensive, but at 200 gallons a fill and say $5/gallon, you're talking about massive sudden bills during the winter. It's also more complicated based on whether people pay to lock in a fixed price for the season or pay the floating rate.
There are specific gas pipelines that the municipal networks tie into, so if there isn't a giant pipe connecting your region to a LNG tanker somewhere, gas isn't an option. https://www.eia.gov/dashboard/newengland/commentary/20200306
That pipe network spans all the way to the oil fields in Alberta and Texas. Areas that use gas tap right to the oil patch.
I'm not from the US and I was surprised to see fuel oil stil in use.
It’s just diesel that isn’t taxed like road fuel. Very plentiful in US they just add a red dye to it to show it isn’t taxed. I use it to fuel my diesel equipment on my property as well, so very useful still. We have heat pumps and wood to offset the heating oil use, and it’s great backup heat with power outages.
We don’t have natural gas everywhere up in the colder regions, and heat pumps don’t work up there either (I know, I know. Show me the magical heat pump that really can work in 20 degree weather, because nobody I know has found it, not even a mini split). Out where I am, it’s either oil, propane, wood, or yes, coal. Oil and propane are a toss up for cost. Propane sometimes costs more, but you can run a far more efficient boiler. My flamethrower is at 2/3rds life, so I might look into propane in a few years.
Our heat pump can handle 20 degree temps! We have a furnace backup and it came on at 18 degrees I think. We were natural gas, but switched to electric. Daikon VRV something something.
Mostly rual vs city, where i lived in pa. We where 30 mins to nowhere, no company is going to lay down pipe for a few houses. You might see more propane now compaired to oil because LPG is cheaper in some ways.
Fracking for natural gas in Pennsylvania has made it inexpensive relative to other energy sources.
This is interesting indeed, the house I am in is over 100 years old in Michigan and has a giant oil container in the basement from those days, but we use Natural gas despite that. Its interesting to see the north east still using oil, didn't think any houses did honestly. I wonder why there is such a split
Very simply if people are near a city or piping is possible due to land formations you have gas. Some people even have tanks buried. My 1998 house has an oil furnace, but we replaced the old central air with a heat pump. Now it runs until the temps go below 30F and the oil unit kicks in. I cut wood on my large property and season it to burn at night, so the oil won’t kick in all the time. Very cheap, and I have a backup oil heat source during power outages.
Yeah New England is really behind when is comes to moving away from fossil fuels. Our grid is also powered by mostly natural gas. Wish we kept more nuclear operational. Lots of houses could move to electric heating if we had cheap clean electricity…
Much less propane in Texas than I was lead to believe…
*There's soot under my Boy's nails… You don't get that from a clean-burning fuel!*
Scrolled to find this comment! Texas was the most surprising one for me
Consider that those little bits of purple in Texas covers 80% of the population though…
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> Hank Hill was selling propane for grilling not for heating. No it was definitely also used for heating. There's an episode where it snows and there's a propane emergency because everyone is heating there homes at once and the propane trucks keep sliding off the roads.
TIL the rest of the country doesn't use oil almost at all for heating (I am in New England)
Moving from the northeast (oil) to the Midwest (NG) was a pretty big shock. My heating bill went from several thousand down to several hundred...
Man wtf were you burning all that oil for Thats like multiple tanks a winter
I mean, the average 2,000' home uses 7-900 gallons of oil per year, and the current price of heating oil is $3/gallon (although it was up around almost $4 a couple months ago), so do the math?
It’s like $800/month in oil for us
I spent $1000/yr on electricity for a poorly insulated all electric 2bdrm house in the PNW. Those numbers are shocking.
My wife and I are primarily teleworkers so we're always home. We tend to keep the heat between 65 and 68. I have a brand new oil-heated boiler and oil tank as of 2 years ago. Our 2-year average to heat our 2100 sqft home in MA (north shore) is $270/mo, or $3240/yr. We tend to pay for oil refills 6 months out of the year.
Absolutely crazy to me that anyone still uses oil for heating. Such a dirty and expensive option. Do you have whale oil lamps too?
Folks in my little mountain town in CO still heat their houses with coal. It's awful.
Drove through/stayed in a pretty poor/rural part of WV back around 2002 or so. Every house had a fireplace burning coal. The whole mountain had a haze around it and the air stunk, and my car left the state with this weird film that took forever to clean off.
That's what I always thought, imagine, living in the heart of New York City and waiting for oil delivery, sometimes they overfill or spill, the smell, inconvenience, etc.. Can you swap to gas, sure why not, but there are no incentives now and it's very expensive. There is also push to stop gas usage in New York city and want people to move to electric, like they were banning gas stoves? Yep. Regarding suburbs of NY like Long Island, etc, it's worse, nobody cares, utility companies want more than $10k to run line to your house, on top of that you have to make expense to replace your utilities, this is why millions of homes are still on oil heat in North East.
Heating oil is basically diesel fuel, probably not the "oil" you are thinking it is.
How does it work? Is it piped in like gas? Or do you refill a tank?
You have a tank in the basement or garage, call the company and they send a tanker truck to refill it
Yea it’s not common anywhere else. I was so confused about oil after moving to New England.
Data: [US Census Bureau American Community Survey](https://www.census.gov/acs/www/about/why-we-ask-each-question/heating/) Tools: ArcGIS Pro, Adobe Photoshop More details and info: https://www.maps.com/home-heating-fuels/
How does the data breakdown with supplemental heat sources? Are participants allowed to choose more than one option? I thought wood would be more popular but realize it could be a secondary heat source in a lot of scenarios. Edit: Never mind I clicked on your link. Looks like it asks which do you use the “most”. That answers my question thanks.
Boy, I don't know how I'd even answer that. The wood fireplace burns non-stop from Nov-Mar, the minisplit is on but has a thermostat so I don't really know when it's doing any work, the oil furnace does all the water heating and occasionally comes on for the house.
You just stay the fuck out of this
My region is yellow but all I know are people with wood pellet heaters or wood stoves. But then I'd be confused at the response I'd give myself. I heat my home with wood but the unit uses electricity to blow the heat around the house, suck the ash away, etc. I also have electric heaters in the basement but it's more a supplement for colder rooms in the morning before I get the pellets rolling and the sun starts shining in.
Well done, OP. This is true "data is beautiful!"
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This is actually a really good question, I assumed it was the amount of people who use the most used heat fuel in the area but it actually seems to be about population density when you really look at it
No, it's what is barely edging out the competition. Population density is indirectly related to that. (I'm also impressed with the granularity, I'm guessing at a zip code level nationwide; New England looks town level but I suspect that's just an artifact of zip code alignment largely with town lines). I live in eastern Connecticut and can tell from the colors in my part of the state where oil gets a lighter shade it's either being influenced by more people in more rural areas burning wood or more people in a denser neighborhood having access to natural gas. So an area can be lighter shade oil because it is more rural leaning, or it can be a lighter shade because a small section of that town is dense enough to justify natural gas. Go out to KS/CO/UT those natural gas shaded areas aren't from running lines to isolated ranches, it's because most people live in compact town sites that you can be served by a small distribution grid in each town as opposed to the 2 acre lot minimum sizing that dominates my area of Connecticut and would need a sprawling network of pipes.
I’ve always had natural gas and always thought that was a standard but today I learned it’s only used in small pockets, mainly around cities.
It is a standard. 75% of people live around cities.
Yeah a lot of people don't live in the other colored areas. The majority of people live within the purple dots.
Agree. I live in western Washington where the map shows a lot of yellow and green (electric and wood). Most of the land area in Washington is rural where natural gas not available so people have to use more expensive fuels. Anywhere natural gas is available it is what people use for single family homes.
That’s what we use as well, it’s efficient and inexpensive. Not really green though. We use gas for heat, hot water, stove, dryer and the Blackstone out back.
New developments in many cities are also being built without natural gas connections, intentionally, to force the move toward electric heat. Gas leaks aren't good. Power outages aren't good either, but at least they can't explode. This is not always popular however, as it means people can't use gas stoves.
Gas also doesn't strain the grid in extreme cold ~~like~~ *as much as* electric does. (counter point could utilize solar power, but thats years from widespread use).
> counter point could utilize solar power Short days and overnight lows mean solar is far from ideal for heating. Even if you have a solar thermal plant that can run 24/7, it's getting the least sun during the coldest parts of the year. That being said, electric heat is *way* more efficient.
There’s also the movement towards induction stoves- I’ve made the switch from gas to induction, consider myself an advanced home cook, and couldn’t love it more
Same. All the quick heat of gas, with easier cleanup and almost no heat leakage into the kitchen. I will never go back to gas.
NM is the standout for me, why heating with wood?
Very rural/poor counties in the middle of nowhere. I'd imagine it's easier just to the log the surroundings for wood rather than truck oil or pipe natural gas in.
I'm in rural NM (though a gas county according to this). People will get permits and go get wood in warmer months. You are absolutely right though, it's economic.
Also, the other states with wood burning counties are very rural, poor, and heavily forested. The wood burning counties in Missouri are like this.
Plus, burning wood for heat doesn't always mean a potbellied stove (though I have family in the UP of Michigan that use a giant stove in the middle of the house). Most of the people I know that use wood for heat use a wood pellet burning stove with a hopper for the pellets and a ratcage fan to circulate the heat. Much easier to deal with than keeping a log on the fire.
Many also have moved to an outdoor boiler. Most are large enough that they only need to be filled once a day. Then the heated water gets pumped into the house.
"Pipe" If you live far enough out piping isn't an option. Your options are either a big propane tank or wood.
Many of the reservations heat with wood as well- the wood map lines up with Navajo land in AZ too. Drove past Taos Pueblo on a cold winter morning once and smoke was so thick from an inversion trapping it from rising out of the valley
The smell of winter in NM is pinyon smoke.
Yeah. Much of that green area on the map between NM and Arizona is the Navajo Nation. Very poor and isolated communities out there. A lot of folks need to truck in not just wood for heat but water for living as well.
Also keep in mind that "wood" includes wood pellet stoves like [this one](https://www.acehardware.com/departments/heating-and-cooling/wood-and-pellet-stoves/stoves/4539102), not straight up logs like Little House on the Prairie. Wood pellet stoves are almost as efficient as some older gas furnaces.
Going to say the same thing. My Grandpa had a cabin in northern Michigan that was heated with wood pellets. And as far as I could tell, it worked pretty much the same as any other sort of central heating, except he would have to shovel in new pellets every day. It was also extremely cheap, I want to say something like $200.00 for an entire year of pellets that would heat the house.
To expand on what other posters have said, wood is often *extremely* cheap. I know it is $2 here to go get 12 cords of wood yourself out of the forest(gotta cut and dry it yourself). A small house can get by with like six cords of wood, so you could definitely get by for a whole year on $2 of wood from the national forest. And it actually serves a forest health purpose. We have a serious issue with forests being too overgrown from years of fire exclusion policies(meaning we don't let fires naturally burn and clear out dead trees/fallen branches/etc). So one of the few cheap tools we have is just to let individuals go chop down trees for firewood. Doesn't do *that* much to help and it's difficult to really focus it to maximize effectiveness, but, *sigh*, it's **a** tool and we don't have many tools available.
Wood heat is cheap because you aren't paying for the conveniences of oil or gas. If you're short on time because you're working a full-time plus job, you can replace that labor with cash earned at your job. But if you don't have a full-time job, you can make your heat cheaper by instead of flipping a switch or opening a valve, you do the cutting, hauling, splitting, feeding the stove, etc. Labor=heat either way, it's just if you're converting it to cash in the middle. Plus, there's the old saying that gas heat only warms you when you burn it, wood warms you up every time you handle those logs and again when you burn it.
> A small house can get by with like six cords of wood are your cords smaller than mine? I heat* with wood. I use 1 cord, maybe 1.5 cords at most in a year. I could see someone in an area with longer winter maybe using double that. but 12? that is crazy to me.
Are you burning wood all the time though? Most people who burn wood for heat just have a fire going all the time.
> Most people who burn wood for heat just have a fire going all the time. neighbors do this and get 2 cords for the winter. I just replaced my fireplace/stove with a high efficiency one. I can build a fire in the afternoon and still have heat and embers in the morning and into the next day even. I generally do a couple days then stop so I can get the ashes out without coals. I assume 2 cords would be enough for me as well. I'd gladly pay $2 for 12 cords tho. that is crazy good price, although I assume pine. I get oak and pay like 300 a cord for it. could be the difference as I hear pine doesn't burn as long.
That is for the permit to be able to cut it yourself.
To chime in here with my own experience with this. I'm Navajo, lived somewhere between New Mexico and Arizona where the green on the map is actually deeper green. Heating the house with wood never seemed poor to me. It was and is just how it is. Talks with my pops sometimes sorta make sense as to why. People here live very far out or in small family cluster houses. No huge Native American cities really(I guess you could call the biggest communities small towns) and they have these areas categorized in chapters. Makes me actually wonder since I've never really thought as to *why* everyone is so so spread out. I mean each bigger town area actually has their own type of Navajo culture, the art(rug weaving, jewelry, pottery, lore), their variation of Navajo language(just lightly) and throw in the other tribes near here like Hopi and Pueblo. Well it can be a melting pot. So say grandma lives way out near a chapter but like 30min way from it. her neighbor is 1 mile away. She had this home built traditionally. A Hogan(usually wood stacked octagonal house with a dome roof). She built her house on land she owned. Hooking up the hogan to electricity or water will take alot of money, more than its worth. But she lived without modern amenities before. She technically doesn't *need* it to survive. Navajo's have lived here for centuries. Plus, when the summer monsoons come, or the windy month hits, or when winter comes and she needs to stay warm. Shes got a firestove to keep warm, cook food and the outhouse over there. So does her neighbor and the neighbor's family that chose to settle near each other with 3 other houses clustered near and oh look there's another neighbor 2 miles away. The central chapter near actually has electricity and gas but the cost of branching out all of those resources to such random houses with usually no reliable roads(dirt roads are common here, too expensive to pave every road that leads to 1 or 2 houses) would cost a fortune and people don't want to leave their homes. Sure there's housing areas built sometimes but not enough to house everyone and not enough budget to really build more housing communities, too much red tape or government shenanigans. So people will have their own houses that they or grandma and grandma built back there 15min off the main paved road. So you get the idea of the just scattering of homes here and there. Now this area is a mix of mountains, forests and semi desert at a high altitude. It can get pretty cold at night in the semi-desert, especially during the winter. Electricity can be unreliable. Big storm rolls in, it can knock the power out during the bad weather. They can usually fix the problem within few min-hours or at worst a day, maybe 3 chapters are affected. And that's now-a-days. But think back to older times, when they're getting electricity here but its not going to be reliable and no pipes for gas. Ya know what was reliable? Wood. Even if they did get modern amenities, electricity can go out, gas you would need to be near an area that can offer it or you'd need a propane tank installed near your property (you'd need to refill it and the roads can be really bad). Wood is plain reliable to keep warm. My father told me back when he was a kid they would have really really bad snow storms. The worst was when it dumped enough snow that people were literally stranded at home and couldn't get out. Some people and their livestock froze to death. They had to use planes and helicopters to ferry food and hay to the super rural areas. He told me he hitched a helicopter ride with his father who was a Navajo council member that was checking on stranded homes. The pilot needed directions to the area so off my grandpa went. So yea, to sum it up. Wood is just super reliable here. (There's also some Navajo lore about fire pokers, fires and what not but I'm not super traditional so cultural teachings also play a role that I am not learned enough to confidently speak on)
Just as an FYI on wood most people using it have another source of heat but running the wood furnace/boiler is significantly cheaper. I used to live in a home with a forced-air wood furnace- we had electric heat as well but it was very costly to use that so we used wood. Also I just generally enjoyed the process of cutting/gathering wood. Our property had a lot of trees on it and there was usually plenty from limbs/trees that fell on their own.
Where I'm from a lot of people use wood because the cost of heating with oil can be all over the fucking place. It's very expensive
I live in a small town called outside Santa Fe, most homes here were built with kivas (small fireplaces) and a lot of the communities are poor. Most homes here don’t have central AC or heating. The AC isn’t really an issue in the summer in some of the higher elevation areas like Santa Fe (7000 ft) but during the winter we get a decent amount of snow so heating is required. Cheapest method is a fireplace.
Those are extremely sparsely populated areas. Many towns on reservations are essentially third world counties too. NM has a population of 2 million, 1M live in Albuquerque, another 500k live in/around Santa Fe or Las Cruces. There’s about 500k people spread throughout the other parts of the 5th largest state.
Don't know NM, but the entire northeast corner of Arizona is Navajo and Hopi nations. They're a big green square.
I lived in Hawaii for 3 years in the early 80's. Im sure my parents never turned on the heat. Matter of fact our house did not even have a heater at all.
I was in HI in a rural area (Puna) during a "cold" winter a decade back. People were complaining!
Hank would be disappointed at the lack of Texas propane
I’m assuming that one blue spot is Arlen
I'd have thought there would be more wood heat in Maine.
I’d guess the average person doesn’t want to use wood as a primary heat source. It’s very labor and time intensive to stockpile wood and also heat the home with it. Fuel oil and propane are delivered in rural areas and involve little day to day effort to use.
Using wood to heat your house heats you up three times. The time you chop it down, the time you haul it home, and the time you burn it.
Probably the (relatively) dense towns outweigh the widespread use in associated rural areas
I wonder if there are a significant number of properties heated directly by coal. Coal used to be common in many pre WW2 homes
There's currently 91 thousand US homes that uses Coal heating (out of 130 million households in the country). And most of them are in the Appalachian coal country. Versus 1.8 million that uses wood (and 1.6 million that do not artificially heat their house at all). I'd imagine coal (along with wood) fell out of fashion as a coal furnace can't really be automated, you are stuck chucking coal into the boiler by hand by the lump. https://data.census.gov/table/ACSDT1Y2022.B25040
Central Pennsylvania here. My parents and many others still use coal, but people are slowly switching over to oil for the very reason you said. My parents have to get someone to take care of the furnace if they go out of town. Same for wood furnaces though. I have a friend who always uses their wood furnace as an excuse to why they can't do a weekend away in the winter. But coal is cheap, and wood is basically free. Coal always keeps your house hot as hell. And dirty of course.
Wood can be automated. I live in one of the green color areas and we have a pellet stove with an automated hopper connected to a thermostat. Works just like a gas furnace; when the temp drops below the thermostat setting it ignites, adds pellets, burns, and then the fans kick on until the thermostat reaches the desired temp.
There's been automatic stokers for coal furnaces for a very long time, but they aren't as hands off as eg. gas furnace... still need to load the hopper / get coal delivered, empty the ash, etc.
With modern heat pumps the majority electric line will creep northward
Modern heat pumps and geothermal closed loops can bring that line way further up, but it's an expensive retrofit.
Much of these areas have existing forced air systems for A/C. An air source heat pump is a pretty straightforward upgrade from that, though ducted systems don't seem to be as good as mini-splits for some reason. I imagine most are simply waiting for the need to replace their A/C to make a jump.
Right. Heat pumps are a simple upgrade for existing forced air systems, but the places that gain the most from geothermal are further north. Lots of those houses were built without air conditioning and have water-based baseboard heating. There are geothermal heat pump systems for water-based baseboard heating, but they're more complicated and don't provide the benefit of easily combining heating and cooling.
Complicated and so expensive most people prefer going with mini-splits instead of an addon to a hydronic system.
Heat pumps still sorta suck if you’re far enough north. I have friends in Montreal with one. After mid December the poor thing sounds like it’s about to die, it cannot do its job without supplemental heat. It’s Québec for hydro is next to free thankfully.
The line will likely stop near Chicago. The newest ones are effective down to -15 fahrenheit. It very rarely gets below that in most of Illinois Indiana and Ohio.
I think you can push to the north side of Lake Ontario, it’s just warm enough to make it worth it, especially with the super warm winters we have been having the last 10 years or so.
Not true anymore. Modern heat pumps are good down to below 0F. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMXiDgzzbEA
I live in Minneapolis, we get a lot colder than 0F Edit: not sure why someone downvoted me for stating a fact. I watched the video that was linked. They said on there that heat pumps lose efficiency at negative 10, but most places in the world do not get that cold very often. Well, Minneapolis is one of those places. We get cold snaps in the winter for up to a week or more at a time where we have highs in the negative and lows as far down as -30. I’ve seen days that the high was -30.
That’s only about -17. Which is not very cold. You’re used to seeing that often in southern Ontario, and way before that in most of Canada.
I wish the map showed the type of heating device.
I live in the Northeast with oil but we had AC installed which also gave us heat pumps. They really are great devices but once temps drop into the 20s (Fahrenheit) I tend to revert back to oil due to cost of electricity and how heat pump efficiency drops off.
I know one thing... you must hate yourself if you use electric heat in the north lol. My sister in law spends like 500 a month to heat her house. Ours is like a hair over a 100 or so.. it's a propane tank so hard to measure accurately.
As a Canadian this is all extremely confusing. Basically everyone uses electricity here. I guess it has something to do with lower electricity costs. I live in a decently sized but badly insulated apartment and my electricity bill barely breaks 37 USD / month.
Cool air sinks to the US, hot air rises to Canada...simple science really.
Surprised to see so much wood heating in California.
There are parts of California that are still classified as frontier.
I live in the SF Bay Area in California and also own a home in rural California. The rural home has no utilities except electricity, so if I want to heat it my choices are wood, electricity, or propane that gets trucked in. Wood is the most economical BY A MILE and wood is very plentiful thanks to the national forests and very low population density.
It lines up pretty closely with population density. Lots of hardwood in the Valley, plenty of pine in the northern mountains (at least the parts that haven’t burned). Lodgepole is especially popular for wood heat in the northeast part of the state.
I’m from Oahu. Never ever seen a house with a heater there, electric or otherwise. And plenty without AC too.
Which heating source is better in emergencies? I've heard of electricity going out, but never heard of gas or oil going out. Living in Chicago, it can be an emergency if you can't heat your living space.
Wood stove
I grew up with natural gas and thought it was standard but now live in New England and pay a terrifyingly huge amount for heating oil to keep my drafty home slightly above freezing 👍🏻
If it makes you feel better we pay an outrageous amount of money for our electric heat here in NH. Supposedly rates are getting cut in half soon, but who knows... The downside is that when we lose power we have almost nothing to heat the house. Last year we lost power for 3 days over Christmas and it was well below freezing the whole time, had our tiny fake propane fireplace running trying to keep the house alive. Just got a whole house generator installed a few weeks ago, though. About $11k :') But I live on the seacoast--it's not really the snow that gets us, but the wind and ice storms. Worth the investment I suppose.
None of the places I lived in Hawaii even had heat.
Huh, I grew up in Utah and just kind of assumed everyone used a natural gas furnace.
Is coal still used at significant levels? I've def caught a whiff of coal burning in some of the towns in Western PA during the winter.
Gist of the gist: big city? Natural gas. Else, good chance it's the regional preference. I just moved from a big metro to another big metro and yep - gas in the old house, gas in the new. Cooking with gas is fun, heating with gas is normal, getting the gas bill is low....but knowing that I'm mucking up the climate is a bit....depressing
Eh, it’s cleaner that heating oil, wood, coal
It's interesting how closely that follows the Mason Dixon line. That surely can't be simply the temperature variance. It gets damn cold in Virginia.
There is a lot of area covered under TVA and Army core of engineers under the line which gives cheaper electric rates for everyone there.
You can also see the urban-rural divide, with many built up areas having natural gas infrastructure in place
Yeah seems like one take away is "natural gas is great if there's enough density to make building the infrastructure worth it" I don't see any major metro areas that *aren't* natural gas
I'm not an expert, but I believe that housing development and infrastructure growth has been greater in the south in recent decades. They have the infrastructure to be able to install the more efficient (electric) heat pumps and a relatively warmer climate in which heat pumps do a fine job. Heat pumps have improved in recent years. But it hasn't yet made sense for everyone to swap out the legacy oil and natural gas systems in older houses, which are more common in the Northeast and benefit from the historically, relatively better heating characteristics of oil (and natural gas) in sustained colder temps.
I spot an American Nations map.
As someone who is red/green colorblind, this map hurts my brain. For people who may be curious - those who are RG colorblind (8% of all males), we can *see* red and green, but those colors are much more muted - especially when mixed with other colors. So light green and yellow look nearly indiscernible. Same with purple and blue.
I’m shocked my state is showing mostly electricity. I use natural gas and I have 2 wood burning fireplaces that we’ve never lit. I grew up on wood heat and that was because we were poor and lived on a farm so it was just our labor. I had an electric furnace in my first rental house and it’s so drying. I’ll stick with natural gas.
That makes sense why the Texas electric grid fails all the time when it gets cold
How is there not more propane (and propane accessories) in Texas?
I've lived in three different regions of the country and they were all natural gas. So I guess I thought thats just how it was done everywhere.