Slash Your Heating Bills with Alternative Fuels

The vast majority of people heat their homes with fuel oil, natural gas, or electricity. Demand for all three fuels is on the rise and the supply is not keeping pace. Naturally, this means prices are going up.

Some homeowners are responding to the trend toward higher heating prices by lowering the thermostat and improving their home's insulation. But, these measures only work to a point and eventually you end up shivering through the winter months in a home that is freezing cold.

There are alternate fuels for heating your home. Depending on where you live, they may be significantly cheaper than what you are using right now.

Alternate Home Heating Fuels

• Corn
• Fuel Pellets
• Wood
• Waste Oil/Plant Oil

Corn

Corn is one of the cheapest and most abundant crops in North America. You may not realize it, but a bushel of corn provides the same amount of energy as five gallons of propane and 3.4 gallons of fuel oil.

Fuel corn can be made from low grade corn that is not of a high enough quality to be sold for food. Corn heating units use a hopper filled with corn to slowly feed fuel into the combustion chamber. The heat is distributed through the house using a forced air blower system.

Some corn heating units can also burn other pelletized fuels in the event that corn prices rise beyond affordable levels.

Fuel Pellets

Fuel pellet furnaces operate in much the same fashion as a corn fueled furnace. The difference being that the fuel pellets are manufactured from a wide range of biomass sources. Often they are made from sawdust, but can be made from other plant based materials like switchgrass. Corn can also be processed into pellet fuel.

Wood

Good old fashioned wood burning furnaces can be an excellent alternative for home heating, but forget about the drafty fireplace.

Wood furnaces are available which can be connected to a forced air heating system to distribute the heat throughout the house.

A drawback of wood furnaces is the need to tend the fire manually. Unlike corn and fuel pellet systems, there is no hopper to feed the fuel into the combustion chamber.

Dense wood burns longer and than lighter wood so choosing the right wood will have a major impact on the amount of tending required during the day to keep the fire fed.

Waste Oil/Plant Oil

If you currently have an oil burning furnace, it may be possible to have it modified to burn waste oil or other plant oil.

Waste oil is simply used vegetable oil that is collected from restaurants and filtered. Plant oil is vegetable oil that hasn't been used for cooking first.

Biodiesel is a new form of fuel that consists of a mixture of fuel oil and vegetable oil. This oil is being used in trucks and cars, but it can be used to fuel a home as well. B20 is biodiesel with a 20 percent vegetable oil content. B100 is 100 percent vegetable oil.

B20 can be used in an unmodified oil furnace, but changes will need to be made to use B100. It must also be noted that vegetable oils thicken when the get cold (a bigger issue with B100 than B20) and you may need to install tank heaters to keep the oil fluid.

Are Alternate Fuels Right For You?

With the exception of biodiesel fuels, all of these heating solutions will require daily or weekly maintenance. Since they cannot run for long periods of time unattended, they may not work as a primary heating source for some people.

However, it is possible to use backup systems like baseboard heaters or gas furnaces for longer unattended periods and alternate fuels for times when you are in the house more regularly.

Ultimately your lifestyle and location will have a big impact on the heating system you choose.