It was a warm late afternoon when we went to the dog park—low 40s°F. It felt like early spring, or late fall... still parka weather if you weren't moving around much. It's Christmas Eve, of course, and everyone I know has an opinion about the not-so-white Christmas... you hear grumbling about global warming, and about skiing. Personally, I'm enjoying the warmish spell. I grew up in New Jersey, and this feels like home.
My parents still live in the house I grew up in, and recently added new storm windows and doors, making the house considerably less drafty. This week they're replacing the furnace. I think of it as the "new" furnace, as it was put in after I'd mostly left home, but it's still 24 years old.
They're switching to natural gas from fuel oil, which had to be delivered by truck periodically and stored in a 500 gallon tank in the corner of the basement. I don't know anyone who heats with fuel oil here in Minneapolis, but all three of the houses I've lived in in the Northeast had the big tanks.
How we heat our homes varies regionally in the United States. Natural gas has the majority of the market, but electricity is much more dominant in regions that don't require many heating days: while the cost per BTU is significantly higher, the equipment costs are much lower. Fuel oil has a dominant place in the Northeast. I'm curious why this is; the answer is suggested by this thread: when the switch from coal happened after World War II, it was relatively cheap to run gas lines in the Midwest, with its glacial till soil, vs. New England's rocky outcrops. Still in all but urban areas, most people who use gas have propane tanks outside. Fuel oil was cheaper than gas until fairly recently. I'm sure there's a bigger story there somewhere...
This PDF from the census gives some sense of regional variation 1970-1990. I have the data for a proportional state-by-state map with 2005-2009 data, and some other data for 1940-2000. What I'd really like to see is state-by-state and region-by-region (and maybe city vs rural) the trend from 1900-2000. Coal was clearly king for some period up to the end of World War II. Was this true in rural areas too? I assume having any kind of heat was a luxury for a lot of the South and Southwest.
What is the overall track for heating with wood, that seductive but highly polluting option? In Vermont, where I lived for seven years, a lot of people heated with wood, or heavily supplemented with wood, or with coal or pellets. All of these are non-automatic: no furnace that turns on a pump when the thermostat gets low. The difference is hard to understand if you haven't lived with it; it means a different kind of attention to your environment, day and night.
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