I’ll send $5,313 to Saudi Arabia this winter. I’ll receive $720 back in ExxonMobil dividends.

There is an inequity there and it bugs me.

I am pugnaciously–perhaps pathologically–parsimonious so I decided to do something about it.

Let’s start with the facts. That $5,313 check I will write won’t all go to Saudi Arabia. Some of it will go to Hugo Chavez. Some will go to the shipping companies and the refineries and the distributors. Some will end up in the pockets of speculators who drove the market to nearly $150/barrel. And some will stick locally because I do, after all, buy my oil from a local fellow who has taken care of us, winter and summer, for 30 years.

As an aside, I’m hoping the foreign oil speculators discover what the holders of junk mortgages already know.

We have already done (some of) the things one is supposed to do when one lives in a leaky old farmhouse on the 45th parallel. We have storm windows. We have insulated. We have turned down the thermostat so far that even the neighbor’s cat is cold and he has a fur coat. We burn as much firewood as one can put through a Vermont Castings Vigilant. We still burned more than 1,200 gallons of dead dinosaurs last year and the Old Farmer’s Almanac says this year is going to be colder.

I’m an engineer so I made a spreadsheet before I did anything else.

We already knew that our current oil burner needs to be history. It is 30 years old, inefficient, and not likely to heal itself. I could simply swap it out for a new “mid-efficiency” oil burner, but the bottom line isn’t much better. Propane or LP Gas is not enough better to pay for the conversion, especially since its pricing here is so volatile.

OK, then. We’ll look at the good choices from best to worst.

I would have loved to install a ground water heat pump but there are a few kinks to work out. Kink #1: no one in this area sells and services them yet and I don’t have time to dig the ground loop myself. Kink #2: It does draw a lot of increasingly expensive juice and losing our heat each time we have an ice storm is a serious worry. Saving 80% is a real boon, though, so we’ll hang on to that idea.

To burn corn pellets requires a pellet furnace or stove and the ability to handle bulk fuel. It also means taking the food out of the mouths of the cows I eat, so I simply won’t consider that one.

An air heat pump works a lot better in Florida than in Vermont. The worry about the increasing cost of drawing power from the grid and of losing our heat with each ice storm remains.

Wood Pellets are a pretty good choice. The furnaces and some stoves are automated so they keep running (or stopping) when we stop paying attention or leave the building, just like a regular heating system. And the operating cost looks like it’s pretty good.

I grew up in a house heated with coal. That was before the advent of “clean coal” and it wasn’t. Coal is harder to find here, more expensive, and harder to use than pellets. That’s out.

There is no natural gas in northern Vermont. Yeah, yeah, Vermont has lots of cows but I haven’t managed to get the pipeline hooked up from Jack’s barn down the road.

Solid wood remains a good choice. No electricity needed. Local harvesting. Reasonable cost. Unfortunately, it is still less efficient than other wood burning equipment and it is much more work for the homeowner.

Plugging in electric radiant heaters has all of the other grid-based disadvantages plus relatively high cost. That’s out, too.

Next time, I’ll tell you more than you ever wanted to know about buying a pellet stove in 2008.