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Comment by cmurphycode | Hacker News Reader

I was curious about this a while ago and did some napkin math.

Natural gas is roughly $15 for 1 million BTU. There are 3412 BTU in a kwhr, so if you heated resistively, you'd need 293 kwhr to get 1 million BTU.

In my area, which I feel has pretty high electricity cost, we pay $.24 per kwhr, so that'd be $70.

Therefore, you need a 70/15 (4.666) COP for your heat pump to match natural gas by price. My understanding is that that would be an unusually high number for cold weather conditions.

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The State of NH Office of Strategic Initiatives has a nice Fuel Price comparison page that they keep up to date (and are adjusted according to cost per MMBTU):

https://www.nh.gov/osi/energy/energy-nh/fuel-prices/index.ht...

You can see that as of June 2, measured at $ per MMBTU (million BTU):

  Natural Gas           $8.31
  Oil                  $17.62
  Propane              $32.93
  Wood pellets         $21.92
  Resistive electric   $48.84
  Air src heat pump    $18.74

The fossil fuels are all measured assuming 80% heating efficiency, whereas for propane or natural gas you might well have a high efficiency unit up to 97% which gains you a bit more savings.

These prices may vary depending on location and also I think natural gas isn't that common in NH as it's a mostly rural state.

Holy moly. That price per million btu is a lot less than the number I stumbled across. Makes it even more obvious.

Remember, oil prices cratered over the past few months. I'd take the current numbers with a grain of salt.

We also don't know what the long-term fallout is going to be. Natural gas has been unusually cheap recently because it's a byproduct of fracking for oil. But low demand for oil means less demand for fracking which mean less natural gas production.

It's really hard to predict where prices are going to be in a year, because you really have to predict how well the oil industry can predict future demand in this environment. If they shut down too much production and then demand comes back there could be a price spike. If they expect a quick recovery and are wrong, prices could remain on the floor for a good while.

This is also the "off" season for heating oil, so it's usually cheaper.

According to the NH page, that price was June 2. For the Commonwealth of MA, as of late May it was $2.07 on average and it's down 33% on last year:

https://www.mass.gov/service-details/massachusetts-retail-he...

You can see it has dropped from $3.04 on Jan 7 2020.

I'm really glad I recently replaced my old 80% efficient oil boiler with a 97% efficient natural gas boiler. My winter bills are less than half what they were and it barely uses any gas during the summer for hot water.

With 80% efficiency, you have to burn 1/0.8=1.25 units of fuel to get one fuel unit worth of useful heat. With 97% efficiency it's 1/.97≈1.03 units.

So if fuel prices and the amount of useful heat usage stayed the same, then your bill should be 1.03/1.25≈82% of what it was before. If your bill is "less than half" then something else must have changed.

He switched from burning oil to burning natural gas. According to the table, gas is way cheaper.

Yes, I switched from an oil burner (#2 heating oil) to a high efficiency natural gas boiler. The other key ingredient is that the oil boiler was 20 years old and did not have "cold start" (so it always keeps itself at temp even in the summer).

Any modern boiler (gas or oil) will almost certainly be cold start, so it only fires when there's a call for heat. This alone probably saves a gallon of oil a day at least.

There's a reason the Energy Saving Trust over here in the UK discourages people from replacing their gas boilers with heat pumps thinking it'll save them money, even though our climate is more suited to it than the colder parts of North America. Unfortunately, that doesn't stop our press pushing the idea we should go for heat pumps because Germany has. (They don't have such widespread natural gas connections to homes as the UK and so are reliant on oil-fired home heating, which as you can see has very different economics.)

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