How do you heat your house?

[moyer777]

Hi everyone!

Rico asked me about my pellet stove.  It's how we heat our home in the winter.   

The pictures below are:
1.  The stove itself
2.  The pellets in my hand
3.  The hopper the pellets rest in.

It's a cool system, but our stove is getting old so it sometimes smokes.  It uses compressed sawdust made into little pellets.  The 40 pound bags cost around 4-6 dollars and last about a day or day and a half considering the temerature outside.

What do you use to heat your home?

I'm curious!

[Rico]

That heats the whole house?  Does it have some type of exhaust in back?  We just have standard gas heated forced air.  Works pretty well for those cold Michigan winter nights.

[moyer777]

The fan just shoots out the front and then we have two ceiling fans that push it around, other than that, electric blankets in the bedrooms, and we don't have an upstairs!  :)  it does get cold in the back of the house.

[billybob476]

Rick, have you ever thought of throwing some electric baseboard heaters into the cold back rooms? Seems like the easiest way to go about painlessly adding heating to a house.

[Bryancd]

Electric forced air...but it's on infrequently in AZ :). Now AC, that's another story! We also have a gas fireplace that throws a lot of heat in our family room.

[Jen]

We have a wood burning fireplace that we use when we have  stocked up on firewood from my parent's farm. We also have a propane heater that heats the whole house, but we like to conserve that so we use the fireplace when it's not as cold. We also use electric blankets and a single space heater for our bedroom.  Here in Central Texas it freezes a lot, but we don't see very much snow. Some flurries here and there but nothing significant. It usually gets into the teens at its coldest. The day Dave and I got married was a record low: January 1996 16 degrees F

[moyer777]

Rick, have you ever thought of throwing some electric baseboard heaters into the cold back rooms? Seems like the easiest way to go about painlessly adding heating to a house.

We have electric in our bedrooms, but if we use it, we don't have groceries!  :)  Very expensive!

[billybob476]

Yikes!

[Feathers]

What is this 'forced air' of which you speak? Presumably some sort of blown ventilation/heating system?

Is that a typical heating method for US/Canada?

We have a gas boiler in the kitchen pumping hot water around the radiators in each room of the house. Don't use it at night though (not that the suburbs of London get that cold, even in winter).

[billybob476]

I can only speak for "Central" Canada (Ontario and Quebec) but most older homes have boilers and radiators. Newer homes tend to have forced air. Basically this involves ducts running through the entire house with a central furnace heating the air and then blowing it through the ducts out of vents in the floors/walls/ceilings. Good thing about the ducting is it makes it very simple to add in central A/C as well as it uses the same ducts.

The furnace can be anything really. Electric (which you see a lot of here since we have relatively cheap hydro electricity), natural gas (also a lot), oil, etc.

At least I think that's right. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

[sheldor]

Standard gas furnace.  I had a new roof put in 10 months ago.  They blew in 18" of insulation and fixed some problems.  House stays VERY nice at 68.

Back in high school, I was with a singing group in Australia.  NO CENTRAL HEAT in the host-family dwelling.  They had these small radiant heaters for each room.  First morning getting out of the shower was quite the sensation. ;D

[Rico]

Gas forced air is used a lot in the US.  Basically natural gas heats air in your furnace which is "forced" by a fan and duct system through the home.  Since Michigan homes need heat about 6 months of the year it works pretty well and if the home is well insulated the cost isn't too bad.  I personally don't like the cold much and it lasts way too long.  I can take hot weather much better.  Lived here without AC for most of my life and we do have some hot/humid summers.

[Geekyfanboy]

Well I can't speak for the rest of the US but in SoCal we have what is called "central air" and it's an electrical unit that is attached to your house or apartment and you have ducts as Billybob said running through out your house and you can blow hot or cold (AC) air into them. Everything built in the 80's and beyond pretty much have this system.

[billybob476]

As an example as well, my father in law's house was built in the 30's and has the boiler/radiator system. He had central A/C put in which cost him a bundle because the installers had to rip out a bunch of holes in the walls to snake though flexible ducting to the entire house.

My grandmother's house had electric baseboard heaters in each room connected to individual thermostats. No furnace. Not as common as the furnace but still seen around enough since as I said, electricity is comparatively inexpensive.

She just had a window A/C unit in her bedroom.

[moyer777]

We live in such a moderate climate that many have electric baseboard heaters here.  Wood stoves are popular, but then there are the hassles of cutting wood.  Pellet Stoves are a good source of heat, but then Natural Gas is less expensive and heats better.  But, the power costs have gone up so much, that heating pumps and stuff like that make more sense now.  Like Kenny said, if you have a home that is older than the 80's they don't have such an elaborate system.  I think our house was built in 1965, sharing my birth year.  :)  When doing remodeling we have encountered some pretty interesting ways of building a house.  Very old school.  It has been challenging trying to bring things up to code at times.