Longview Hills @ Newport Oregon

Thinking about the biggest winter electrical expense...

ron thomas

Forced air heating. Having been to air conditioning school and certified by Carrier as a refrigeration technician. Some insight into heating was also studied. That was a small part of my job in a previous life. Learning about refigeration is also learning about heating and the physics involved with it.

Getting our minds around this problem of heating may well be the biggest positive thing we can do to reduce our electric bill.

The forced air in these homes runs under the floors and comes up in vents in the floor with the idea you close the vents you don't use to conserve heat. An older repairman once told me that under the floor duct work was about the worst thing you could have. He seemed to think it had more chance of leaking than through the attic duct work. We do suspect that closing the vents to rooms you don't want to heat has its problems. The blower is configured to blow the maximum amount of air through the ducts so as you close off a floor vent you actually increase the back pressure on the fan motor causing it to work harder and use more electricity. Then too we all have only one thermostat that tracks only the air around it not the air all over the house. So the house will be hotter in some rooms and colder in others. Depending on where your thermostat is you may have to run hotter in order to heat rooms more distant from the thermostat... To make things more difficult heat rises to the highest point of the home because it is lighter than heavier cold air. This means the heater has to run even longer to heat up the area closer to the floor where we live.

So our forced air heating has these problems:

• Duct work that may leak under the house and waste heat. Especially from back pressure.
  
• Duct work that may spread dust and mold through out the home.
• One thermostat for the entire house.
• Rising heat to the ceiling of the home.

You might consider .. The question do you really need to heat the entire house in the winter? You could probably make the case that if you had company coming then yeah maybe so. Most of the time though it's your wife and you or in some cases those that live alone have only have one person. Where do you spend the most time? Maybe you might consider just heating those spaces you need with a local heater? A ceiling fan in that same area would cause a convection effect that would circulate the hot air down from those vaulted ceilings causing the air to mix better and less heating to be needed. A local heater would need to have a thermostat and it may be a good deal to have one in the ceiling fan also. One heater mentioned below even can be controlled with what looks like a channel changer.

Here are some ideas we have seen folks implementing around the park... We aren't to sure how they have worked out but being pioneers and being the first in the neighborhood to try new solutions perhaps they will comment on what they have discovered.

Wood pellet stoves... We have seen Bob Abbott has installed one in his garage. Dan and Sue Wilson have one installed also. Wayne and Liz Hill have one that has given them some problems. Jim Rose has purchased one and it will be installed in June. I have seen other smoke stacks in the neighborhood and wonder if there are others willing to share what it costs to buy and operate one and what kind of maintenance and drawbacks they have found. What are the positive aspects of these stoves?

Simulated Electric fire place with thermostat and fan .... When we first moved here I saw one of these at Sam Wilcox's home. I thought it was the coolest thing and copied its layout to build a faux fire place for my daughter. But thinking about it now I think there may be merit in this heater. Not only is it very realistic and the fire looks as real as any you have ever seen but it is a heater with a blower and can be operated by a remote controller. It can also be thermostatically controlled and works off any wall outlet...Just plug it in and go. It doesn't need to be vented either. You can even take it with you if you move.