Tag: environment

More tinkering with numbers.

The DOE’s energy calculator is awesome.

I’m very confused right now.

1 kwh = 3412BTU
1 gallon of heating oil is 139,000BTU

Yearly kwh consumption: 1.291e3 * 3.412e3 = 4.4e6
Yearly fuel consumption: 1.162e3 * 1.38000e5 = 1.6e8

This isn’t all that surprising, since we use the oil to both heat the house and to heat our water. All the electric has to do is run the computers and the lights. Plus, there’s some inefficiency in the conversion of fuel oil to heat, otherwise known as “what’s hurtling out the chimney.” I’m willing to believe that keeping the house warm and the shower piping hot is two orders of magnitude more energy than keeping the lights on.

But, if I wanted to buy the same amount of BTUs from the electric company, it would cost a lot more.

1.6e8 BTU / 3.4e3 = 4.7e4
4.7e4 * $1.2e-1 (cost per kwh) = $5.6e3

So, assuming that all the inefficiencies are identical on my end, it would cost me around $5600 to get as many BTUs from electricity as I currently get for $1800 from fuel oil. Of couse, there’s tons of other stuff, like the fact that an electric heater would be more efficient (rather than running hot water around my basement in pipes, I could produce the heat exactly where I need it).

Put that in your electric car and smoke it.

I do love math.

I’m tinkering with data, now that I’ve got a full year of usage information on my house.

* We burned 1162.3 gallons of heating oil last year ($1825)
* We burned 1291.06 kwh of electricity last year. ($1291)
* We used 5,100 gallons cubic feet of water last year. ($199)

I also noticed that last year, fuel oil cost $1.40 per gallon. This year we locked in at $2.50 per gallon, and it’s already retailing at $2.62…so that may have been a good idea. Yes, this is the reason for the insulating frenzy.

There seem to be a lot of pages with totally unsupported claims of “average” residential use. Anyone know a really good resource for specific, regional averages? I found This site, which is pretty awesome. It’s a government sponsored calculator that lets you plug and chug potential savings from various modifications to your house. It’s adjusted for zip code and everything.

I found a water use page claiming that the average american uses about 60 gallons of water per day. Our usage appears to be 5100 * 7.4(gal/cf) / 360 days * 2 people = 52 gallons per day. Once you factor in the fact that we both travel a lot, I suspect that it all averages out.

I’ve got a kill-a-watt on the way, primarily to measure power consumption of the machines I’m benchmarking at work, but I also plan to find out how much energy my appliances are burning.

Edit: I just confirmed that my company’s computers burn more power in a year than my entire house.