What type of heating system do you use in your house?

[Shawn Pixley]

Cooktop is natural gas. Ovens are electric. Furnace and waterheater are gas (highest efficiency available). I have solar PV panels on the roof.

[Greg R Bradley]

HEATING?

None. I'm working on my house and the gas has been disconnected to the central gas heating for almost 10 years. You only miss it about 10 days a year.

I frequently have to turn on the A/C in my office or bedroom in what we laughingly call "Winter" in SoCal. I planted 7 24" box trees to shade the west side of my house last fall so hopefully I won't have to run the A/C so much next winter.

[Rick Potter]

Greg, you sound just like my brother. Could you possibly be a bachelor?

He lives in W. Covina, alone, and always brags about how cheap he can heat the house. We had a family Christmas there one year, and everybody wore their jackets in the house until my wife got up, said "that's enough", and fired up his furnace for him.

Rick Potter

[Garth Almgren]

My former house was a townhouse with electric baseboard heaters and electric hot water. Garage and entry on the first floor, living space on the 2nd and 3rd floors. The very first electric bill I got was a huge shock - turns out the entry way was a bit of a heat sink, and the heater down there was working 24/7 to try and heat the entry, only to have all the heat escape up the stairway to the living area. I very quickly installed programmable thermostats in the living areas, and shut off that entry heater completely. Kept the thermostats at 52 during the day when nobody was home, 68 in the morning and evenings, and 58 at night. I also installed a blower in the gas fireplace, and with the fireplace running for a couple hours with the blower on, it would heat the whole 2nd and 3rd floor nicely. The entry was frigid year round, but my very next electric bill was reduced by around 60%, whereas my gas bill was only increased by about $10 a month.

My new house has a natural gas furnace (forced air) and gas water heater. Our gas bill has gone up but gas is still pretty cheap here, and the electric bill has stayed about the same so utilities have come out to be not much more than the townhouse despite having about 1000 more square feet.

My parents had propane inserts installed in both of their fireplaces, and they're on automatic thermostats with blowers. Those two fireplaces really heat the house well.

Can you tell I'm a fan of gas heat? That, and programmable thermostats.

[Joe Mioux]

forced hot air using natural gas..... would much rather have hot water heat boiler. At one of my shops, we have in floor hot water, very very nice!

[David Weaver]

forced hot air using natural gas..... would much rather have hot water heat boiler. At one of my shops, we have in floor hot water, very very nice!

I grew up with baseboard heat, hot water. We had a lot of trouble in really cold months with pipes freezing. Now that I have hot air, I've gone the other way - it's faster to heat and cool, though there are no static "hot" points that you can stand near. And the big benefit, to me, is that almost all of the dust in the entire house ends up in the furnace filter instead of sitting on everything in the house.

Parents have a radiant floor in part of their house, water fired, and I'll admit that's really nice in the winter. Knocks the dogs and cats right out - they know exactly where the warmest spot of the floor is.

[Brian Elfert]

One of my co-workers has an old house with cast iron radiators. She loves the radiant heat and says she would never live in a house with forced air. She seems to think the heat distributes better and she doesn't like the drafts and noise with forced air. She is getting central A/C installed in the attic and then it will just gravity feed the rest of the house. No idea how that will work.

I'm the exact opposite. I really don't want anything to do with radiant heat. Radiant heat is somewhat common it seems in houses built in the 60 and 70s around here. I want central air and not really possible without forced air.

[David Weaver]

One of my co-workers has an old house with cast iron radiators. She loves the radiant heat and says she would never live in a house with forced air. She seems to think the heat distributes better and she doesn't like the drafts and noise with forced air. She is getting central A/C installed in the attic and then it will just gravity feed the rest of the house. No idea how that will work.

I'm the exact opposite. I really don't want anything to do with radiant heat. Radiant heat is somewhat common it seems in houses built in the 60 and 70s around here. I want central air and not really possible without forced air.

Central A/C is definitely an issue, and so is distribution of supplemental heat if you have another source. Retrofit for my parents' house was $18k.

FIL heats with oil, and he's getting tired of paying for oil. He's got an extra flue in his basement that he'd like to put a wood stove to, but no way to distribute the hot air other than to leave the basement door open (which his wife won't tolerate). if he had a forced air system, he'd only need to get the heat to one part of the house and then let the ducting circulate it.

Bot my parents and FIL have the same sense that your co-worker has, that the baseboard and radiator heat is "better heat" because of the lack of fluctuation, and the noise, I suppose. When the circulator turns on, though, both FIL and parents' houses make plenty of noise as the hot water starts to flow.

[Mike Chance in Iowa]

Hooooolyyyyyy schnikees... 2-3 pallets/month?! That's mucho expensive!

Yes. Very. All the more reason we need out of that place. We were only supposed to live in it long enough to build a new house on the acreage and then tear it down. The owner kept flip-flopping on the deal and seriously believes the farmhouse property is worth over $200k more than it really is. He's in total denial on how bad a shape the farmhouse really is. The roof "can't leak because the pitch of the roof is too steep" .... yet we have buckets all over the place. We would have moved to another rental years ago, but easier said then done when you have livestock. We would need to goat-proof any fencing at the rental and just like the farmhouse, we won't recover any of those costs.

[Grant Wilkinson]

I'm in the Great White North.

My forced air high efficiency furnace is natural gas, as are my cook top and oven, my hot water tank, my clothes dryer, my fireplace and my barbecue.

[Dennis Aspö]

Finland (63.1°N), hydronic floor heating in a floating and insulated concrete slab. Nibe F1245 heat pump connected to a 130 meter deep borehole that's in front of the house.

There's a sealed loop of brine like fluid going between the pump and borehole, this extracts heat from the ground water, the pump is incredibly effective at extracting heat from the small differential and this heats the house and provides warm water needs, when it gets really cold (can get down to -30C or more in winter here) there's an electric resistance heater that can kick in for supplemental energy.

Our house is so new that we have not yet been able to log how much electricity we'll use per year. But for houses of similar size we're read that about 6000kwh per year in electricy for heating purposes is likely. With direct electric heating we'd look at 20 000kwh or more per year.

It will be interesting to see as we're building to high energy standards, thick insulation, the works, and we're buying energy efficient machines (just got my 3-phase 400v induction stove top) and using almost exclusively LED based lighting. Even the ground around the house and to foundation itself is insulated out to a meter.

We also have a fireplace with an accumulating masonry heater (the material absorbs heat and releases it for many hours, it weighs over a metric ton) for additional cheap heating and the ventilation system recycles heat from air that's leaving the house and uses it to heat incoming air to minimize energy losses there too.

[Dan Hintz]

Even the ground around the house and to foundation itself is insulated out to a meter.

Want more info on this one, Dennis... foam insulation in a protective box?

[Dennis Aspö]

Well I guess pictures might help, fortunately I've keep a detailed photo journal of the construction since we started last year, here's the foundation when it was first cast:


On the inside you can see a layer of insulation. That's the "vertical insulation", then on the inside it's first filled with a layer of gravel that has capillary action breaking properties. Then I think it was 200mm of "horizontal foam insulation". Then there's more gravel on top of that. Then they cast the slab that will be the floor on inside this, after all the pipe work and such is done of course.

The ground outside the foundation is also fitted with weeping tile and drainage wells in 4 corners and more weeping tile that drains the whole system on the edge of the property. Then foam insulation is laid on the ground around the foundation, then plastic (not needed to meet code but we went further than required) to protect the foam as despite it being water resistant over many years it can still become waterlogged. Finally another layer of black plastic is laid around the foundation and the ground filled in to near final ground level. Looks like this when all said and done (before casting concrete):


I have no pictures of the insulation itself being laid out around the house unfortunately but it's under there.

[Ed Aumiller]

Put in geothermal heat pump over 20 years ago for house... only way to go in my opinion... provides both heating and a/c...

Just put LP gas furnace in stand alone shop.... expect to pay about $300 for gas this winter for shop...

Installed an air tight wood stove when built house (37 years ago)... barely used it except in emergency until Superstorm Sandy hit and we were without power for days...
Brought in firewood I keep for camping and loved the heat the stove provided... so last year heated mostly with wood... have plenty on my property so no cost for it...

[Moses Yoder]

We had a wood forced air furnace with propane furnace back up when we moved in. We burned wood for a while but that is a lot of work and messy. I probably would have kept it up except for the fact that we were cutting wood for my parents first and then cutting ours. We took the wood stove out and have never regretted it. We had several furnaces go bad and finally spent about $2K on an Amana installed by a reputable dealer. It is a nice two stage deal, keeps the house comfortable. One of the advantages of living in a small house (1200 sq ft) is lower heating costs. If I ever have to replace the furnace I am buying a pellet fired furnace.