I feel dumb but I want to ask. I have done some research but all I did was further confuse myself. My current house has an older natural gas furnace. It also has brand new electric baseboards throughout the house. I have used both but have never really broke it down to see cost difference. So here is my question which will heat my house cheaper?

From what I've read it seems like natural gas is cheaper even though its using electric and natural gas. But my baseboards are supposed to be efficient as well. I'm trying to cut all costs in my life and this is one of them. Thanks for any help you can give me!

around here it is cheaper on NG with a furnace. But our electric coop is overpriced. YMMV.

Unless your baseboard heaters are hydronic they are not efficient.

Nope just electric coil or whatever you call it. Yeah that's kind of what I understood that natural gas is cheaper even if my furnace is from the 80's. Hmm, just trying to make my cash flow as efficient as possible.

Electric heat: Chemical energy converted to heat energy converted to mechanical energy converted to electrical energy converted to heat energy.

Gas heat: Chemical energy converted to heat energy.

The amount of electricity used by your furnace is a fraction of what the baseboards use.  Go look at your breaker panel - you probably have 4-6 240V 20A breakers for your baseboards and a single 15 amp breaker for your furnace.

The only advantage to electric baseboard is that you can control rooms individually.  But that won't make up for the overall inefficiency.

I have 2 20 amp fuses for furnace. But yeah I understand what your saying. I guess the only way ill save money is make my house cold. Dang. That's pretty much what I figured though. Thank you guys.

We run all electric heat (some baseboards and some forced air units). We are also on the duel fuel program. Gives us more than 50%  off the cost of electricity for the heaters in exchange they flip them off during high demand times. We heated a drafty 130 year old farm house last month for $123. Really depends on your area and the prices.
 

there is no difference at all between a regular electric heater and a so called hydronic heater efficiency wise. they are both close to 100% efficient. Put in one kW-hr of electricity and get out about 3400 BTUs of heat. the only thing that the liquid filled heaters have going for them is a small amount of thermal mass that may (or may not) give you some residual heat retention in a small area while it is off. The effect is dubious though. It is a lot like the claims of people selling IR heaters claiming it heats people and not the air. While it is sort of true, it is also true that it heats walls and floors and ceilings too, and not just people. In fact, it also heats the air, if more indirectly.

You really have to run the numbers. There are still places where you can buy electricity for 5 cents a kw-hr.

That is roughly equivalent to natural gas at $1.25/therm with a furnace that is 80% efficient.

Crunch the numbers and see for yourself but unless you have very high NG prices and very low electricity prices you will probably find that NG is cheaper.

There is also the issue of being able to heat just parts of your house that need to be heated rather than the whole thing which is much easier with the electric heat and is a tough thing to quantify.

In this context "hydronic" means a boiler circulating hot water through piping in the baseboard heaters.

In that context it would be somewhat less efficient than base board heaters due to the loss of heat from the boiler and the piping. Using electricity to run a boiler is not going to make the system any more efficient. It just allows for more places where energy losses can and do occur.

In most areas, heating an entire house with a gas furnace will cost less than heating the same amount of square footage with electric baseboard heaters.

However, electric baseboard heaters give you the ability to only heat rooms that you're actually using. So, if you only need to heat one or two rooms, it could be cheaper to do with baseboard heaters than with the gas furnace.

Note that both approaches depend on utility power to operate, which means that you could be without heat during a power failure. For this reason, unvented gas heaters and fireplace inserts make a lot of sense - they don't require any electricity to operate.

While what you state is true, electric boilers are almost vanishingly rare in residential heating applications. I believe the commenter was thinking they might be a gas boiler involved and not a gas furnace.

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they are 100% efficient, just not cheap because of high amp draw.

I would agree. I have never seen an electric boiler in a residence, although I have seen an electric water heater used for making hot water to pump through radiators in a house that was used to heat it.

I am not the one arguing that hydronic electric heat is more efficient than regular electric heaters. I was pointing out the guy who suggested it was more efficient was just dead wrong.

it has little to do with the "amp draw" and all to do with the cost of electric energy versus the cost of an equivalent amount of BTUs in chemical form.

From a strictly electric standpoint, electric resistive heat, whether in baseboards or heat strips in an air handler are 100% efficient at converting electricity into heat. An electrically powered heat pump (air or ground source) is effectively around 400% efficient at converting the electricity it uses into heat since it is moving existing heat energy around. Thus a heat pump will cost you around 75% less to operate than resistive heat.

Comparing to fuel based heating like gas or oil requires doing the math to figure the cost per BTU of heat produced. Generally speaking straight resistive heating is the *Least* economical heating you can use.

Electric resistive heat = 3,413 BTU per KWh
Electric heat pump = approx. 13,500 BTU per KWh
#2 fuel oil = 140,000 BTU per gallon
nat gas = 1,000 BTU per cubic foot

So you have to work in the costs for the particular fuels in your area and normalize to the cost per BTU to compare.

Living in FL, could a person rig a decent solar-electrical setup to run those baseboards, or would that still be too much $$?

Take a look at: http://www.iedu.com/Solar/Panels for some info on passive solar air heater panels.

you also need to figure in the relative efficiency of the furnaces that burn the chemical fuels.

one thing about heat pumps is that they often are not well suited to places that have colder weather for much of the winter as they are far more efficient in warmer temperatures than in colder ones. in fact, many include large electric heating elements to provide supplemental heat when the heat pump can't suck enough heat out of the air on its own.

it is a non-trivial exercise to determine what might be the most cost effective option sometimes.

extra insulation and improving the weather tightness of your structure often is where you ought to put your money rather than worrying about what kind of heat to use. however, there is a point you reach of diminishing returns that is also not so easy to determine.

No. converting solar to electricity just to waste it running electric heaters makes little sense.

It is far better to use the solar heat more directly. there are various ways to do this.

Baseboard electric is 100% efficient.
What is the rated efficiency of the propane furnace and how often does it come on?
What does electricity and propane cost?



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Well, *technically* an hydronic system powered by an electric boiler would also be 100% efficient because the heat losses from the piping, etc. are still being captured by the house.

But the main issue here is that we keep using the term "efficiency" when we should be talking about "effectiveness".  For instance heat pumps, from an engineering standpoint, are not even close to 100% efficient.  However, their coefficient of performance - the ratio of heat produced to work or energy input - is 3 to 4.  In these terms the COP of electric baseboard heat is 1.0, and for combustion sources .75-.95.

And then there's the OP's original question regarding cost.  As pointed about above this gets more complex because market cost, operating methods, and physiology factor in.  For instance, one can turn down baseboard heaters in unoccupied rooms, but will that happen?  Smart thermostats can cut energy consumption substantially; using advanced controls on boilers can cut it even more.  And here's where the difference between hydronic baseboard and electric baseboard is really pronounced.  Electric baseboard heat is either on or off; the heating element is either at ambient or maximum temp.  This tends to lead to temperature swings where the room heats up quickly, generally overshoots the thermostat setpoint, then cools down, undershooting that point as well.  So people tend to set the thermostat higher so that the low swing is more comfortable.  Hydronic systems, on the other hand, have a lot of thermal mass and that moderates the temperature swings.  The room temp doesn't drop as low before the thermostat kicks on.  So hydronic systems tend to be more *effective* because people tend to keep their thermostats setpoints lower than in electric baseboard (or hot air for that matter.)  It's a behavioral factor, not a technical one.

Burner efficiency needs to be factored in for any older burners, but for recent ones the efficiencies are high enough not to matter unless the comparison is coming out really close.

Heat pumps are suited for just about all climates. If you have more than a couple weeks worth of below 32F days per year where an air source unit needs to us backup resistive heat you need to use a ground source (geothermal) heat pump rather than an air source unit. A ground source unit costs more to install, but that's a one time cost and the efficiency continues for many years. If you go ground source, *DO NOT* let anyone talk you into a drilled vertical well type installation and skip any dealers who only do that type of installation. The drilled vertical is obsolete installation technology that is very expensive relative to the newer trenched vertical coil installation. Dealers who have invested in expensive drill rigs will still push that method, but trenched coil has been proven to perform just as well and at a fraction of the installation cost.

Determining what heating energy source will be most economical on a strictly operating basis is relatively trivial. It gets more complicated when you start to factor in the cost of replacing equipment and what the payback period will be. If you'll be dead before the payback it might not make sense unless you have heirs who will remain in the place and realize the savings.

Adding / improving insulation, windows, etc. is nearly always the best first step unless the current heating system is so bad that it's really chewing through money. A good energy audit with IR imaging can greatly help in determining the best points to attack first for insulation, windows and other heat loss areas.

It has everything to do with "amp draw", but lets not get into that.  Nothing I said is incorrect, I was just trying to clarify the term "efficient" a little bit.

Okay thats what I was thinking anyway. A passive system would be best, imho, but not always doable with existing structure.

has anyone pointed out that you live in FL?

Sorry I moved to Florida for a little while and haven't changed it back. I live in Iowa so heat is a big cost.

OP- do this:

Read your meters.

Run the house on the electric for one week.

Read your meters.

Run the house on gas for the next week

Read your meters.

Do some math. Get the cost per unit from your gas and your electric bills. Do some more math. Assuming both weeks had similar heating requirements, you should now have your pragmatic answer.