Holy heating bill!

[adsm08]

Ouch that would hurt. Luckily I kept my forced air as a back up for situations like that or the couple days a year it gets below 10*f. Luckily those conditions dont happen too often in the lowland puget sound area. It also has a coil heater to prevent that from happening.

That's good.

My unit is older. It has the coil heater, but it seems to be a bit wonky. We put a control board in it last year because the little diagnostic flashy thinger said to, but it still doesn't seem to work right.

 

[Eddo Rogue]

Im on propane, 300 gal tank. Its about $800 bucks to fill it from 20% back up to 80%
My appliances combined burn a couple thousand btu's, the heater alone burns 45,000 btu's.
If I run the heater, I fill it once a month. Without using the heater, I fill it once a year.
I run electric plug in heater and wood burning fireplace.
The dish heaters from HF work fantastic!

 

[sgtsandman]

Heat pumps have issues below a certain temperature as well but I can’t remember for sure what that temp was. In any case, if it gets to that point, the emergency/backup heat kicks in and that is when your electric bill can go through the roof.

Basically, it gets too cold for the system to be able to efficiently pull the heat out of the air.

 

[85_Ranger4x4]

La Nina is back too... yay.

 

[Snoranger]

La Nina is back too... yay.

Who’s she?

 

[85_Ranger4x4]

Who’s she?

Somebody my propane tank hates.

 

[racsan]

yeah, I get the feeling its going to be a hard winter. Been preparing for it, hope it aint but you just never know.

 

[Dirtman]

I bought an electric blanket. Winter, come at me bro!

 

[Eddo Rogue]

I bought an electric blanket. Winter, come at me bro!

Those are great for farting in, ultimate dutch ovens!

 

[Will]

I actually want to invest in a clean burning wall mounted propane heater just for power outages. Than once the ranger is back together dual alternator, dual batt, 5000 watt converter. For small electrical needs, and cheaper than a dedicated generator that gets ran every 4-5 years.

Make sure you get one that you have to cut a hole in the wall to exhaust it. I have one by Empire in my man-cave barn. If you do one of the ones without an external exhaust, it exhausts into the house and that is a lot of water vapor. Rusts all of your stuff.

I like your Ranger/generator plan. I'm doing the same thing to replace the generator in my schoolbus camper. I bought a huge 300amp alternator (weighs 35# and won't fit well on a Ranger) and a 10,000watt inverter. I got the idea looking at the new inverter generators. They built what we are doing. You don't have to run the motor at 3600rpm to make 60hz so they only spin the motor fast enough to make the power they need. A lot more pleasant to be around.