Propane shortage: Winter storm prompts energy emergency in Midwest

[NickB79]

http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/Energy-Voices/2014/0121/Propane-shortage-Winter-storm-prompts-energy-emergency-in-Midwest-video

The propane shortage has driven up prices. Last week, residential propane cost $2.86 a gallon, up 3 cents from a week ago and 6 cents year-over-year.

Cold weather has made a bad situation worse with early January's polar vortex taking 1.5 million barrels out of Upper Midwest inventories. Winter weather has also made it difficult for fuel-tank drivers to make their deliveries.

"The month of December brought historically cold weather, ice and snow, which further inhibited the transportation of propane. Demand for residential, commercial and agricultural heat soared,” David Field, executive vice president of the Ohio Propane Gas Association, told Fox8.com. "All these combined to prevent regional inventories from recovering and the existing pipeline and terminal infrastructure has been unable to recover."

I am SOO thankful we installed a ton of new insulation and weatherization on our house the past 3 years, as well as a new high-efficiency woodstove. In a power outage last winter, I heated our 1500 sq. ft house with wood alone for 2 days. I figure the wood stove will pay for itself in only a few more years.

[Kaleva]

1. Propane went from $1.79 a gallon to $3.24 a gallon in less then a month

[hunter]

2. The "gas liquids" and "natural" gas have become hydrogen sources for refining heavier oils and tar.

"Peak Oil" got swept under the rug as more carbon dioxide in the air, fracking, strip mining, and increasingly synthetic fuels.

[madokie]

3. One of my older brothers

retired from a local propane company and he was telling another of my brothers that propane was at $3.60 a gallon today and would be over 4 bucks next week.

When we purchased this place about 12 years ago during the remodeling I removed the propane stoves from this house. I'm scared of it plus I've been around it for years and see this price gouging anytime the weather gets like it is now.

We've been heating for 21 years now using wood pellets, this last spring I installed a inverter mini-split heatpump/aircondition. So far this winter I've burned 12 bags of pellets where last winter I was well on my second ton by now. If you heat with propane check out the high efficiency heat pumps available. Ours has an SEER of 19.2 and is good for heat down to 5 degrees. About two weeks ago it got down to 1 degree over night and when I went to bed I turned the heat pump off and started the pellet stove. It was 6 degrees at that point and the heat pump was still putting out heat, and still had the house warm. My electric bill has been dropping ever since we installed this mini-split. We're on an average and the bill was $103.00 a month at the beginning and last month it was 90 bucks with September, October and November at 80 bucks.
Can't hardly bitch about a 90 dollar a month heating bill when in that bill it is our hot water, lights etc, cook stove too.

This is the model we purchased. I bought it on eBay and after paying an air conditioner person to connect it for us we had a tad under 1500 bucks in it. It will pay for itself in savings over wood pellets in three heating seasons. Wood pellets are much cheaper to heat with than propane is. When we first bought our first pellet stove it paid for itself in three winters over what propane cost.

In the 21 years we've been heating with pellets we're close to 7000 dollars to the good even after paying for the stoves. Anyways what I'm getting at is if you own your own home you can do much better than propane for heat by buying a pellet stove and from my first winter with the heat pump it will be even a bigger savings.

Our pellet stove is a Harman Advance and when we bought it three years ago we paid 3200 bucks for it. Got $1100 of that back on our taxes. I'm not sure if the heat pump will have any tax rebates associated with it or not. I'll be checking that out when we have our taxes done.

[NickB79]

4. Thanks for the info!

Our woodstove is a Vermont Castings Encore catalytic model which has been working admirably so far. Currently it's -13F (during the middle of the day!), with a low of -25F expected tonight, yet it's 72F in the living room. The propane furnace has fired up exactly ONCE in the past 24 hours.

We live in a very cold climate (Minnesota). In the past, I've heard heat pump technology was not up to the task of functioning well this far north. Since you seem very knowledgeable on this, can you tell me if this is still true, or if there are now models that can operate in frigid weather? I see the model you bought has a min. temp of 5F; are there any that will work in below-zero weather?

Thanks!

[madokie]

5. At 6 degrees ours was still putting out hot air

I don't think it would have kept the house as warm as we like it at that temperature though. On those days where it isn't so cold the savings in cost helps to offset those days where you have to use the wood stove or propane in not biting the ol wallet quiet so hard. If I would have had this heat pump last winter I wouldn't have had to burn any wood pellets at all.

The best I've found on these inverter type heat pumps like we have is they're good down to 5 degrees. The older type heat pumps were only good down to 35-40 degrees so this is a big step in the right direction. I think where you are a wood stove or a pellet stove would be a requirement, or would be for me.

We looked at and thought about buying a Vermont Castings Soap Stone stove when we bought our first pellet stove and would have except here we might have 20 degrees at night and get back up to 50 during the afternoon and with a stove that holds so much heat it makes it pretty uncomfortable when it gets warm like that. A pellet stove doesn't hold any heat so it only takes a few minutes to be blowing out hot air and likewise when you hit the off botton it only takes 20 maybe 30 minutes until its back to room temperature which works good for our kinds of normal winters. This winter though a soap stone stove or even a regular stove would have been ok because our temperatures have stayed so cold for days on end. Normally not that way though.
I could not imagine living where the temperature is like it is where you're at. You probably couldn't imagine living where it gets so hot and humid like it does here in the summers either.

Vermont Castings makes excellent heating stoves. Sounds to me like you have a good system going with your present setup for where you live.

I wonder if Vermont Castings makes a pellet stove