[beamgirl]

My dad is a retired heat and power engineer up in Maine (20something years at a paper mill). We probably spent half of Christmas talking about his new minisplit. He has been tracking his electricity bill and heating oil bills in spreadsheets for years. He still has the old oil boiler in place for emergencies, but as far as I know he hasn't had to use it yet this year. He said he wanted more data before he made a definitive statement about the savings, but initial results seemed pretty promising even in the cold spells we've had

[thehappypm]

This is my system. Heat pumps are just finicky. Tons of moving parts and things to go wrong. The backup is 100% necessary, at least for now.

[zdragnar]

To be fair, pretty much anything would save money over heating oil, including just burning money.

[sbradford26]

I know it is sarcastic but there is a website where you can calculate how much it would cost to heat with dollar bills.

https://coalpail.com/fuel-comparison-calculator-home-heating

[zdragnar]

Where on earth did they get $250 for a cord of wood? Unless you're buying them 10-13 logger's cords at a time, then cutting and splitting it yourself, a cord of oak around where I live (which is not at all far from oak trees) is in the $450-550 range.

You can maybe push it down to $300/cord if you know a guy, but then you're not getting properly seasoned stuff, you're getting stuff recently cut from a dead tree left standing for a few years.

[sbradford26]

Those prices are just generic prices that you fill out with current prices. I have no idea on the validity of any of the prices filled in by default there, but I assume it is prices that whoever made the site many years ago had in their area.

[beamgirl]

Even the coal price is super outdated. If you get a reaaaaaaly awesome deal, a ton of anthracite is at minimum $350 a ton now. Those are like 2010 prices.

[beamgirl]

Coalpail is a really handy site. They've got all the hookups on the cheap coal distributors. The guy I buy from isn't listed, you just call him and ask for an appointment to meet him at his coal shed.