Pros and cons of oil or natural gas heating

Instant Water Heaters can be a pain! I had a new one, of supposedly good brand, in Germany. The damn thing took to deciding it was over-heated in the middle of showers. Stop shower, get out, restart the burner, return to shower. This was a gas one, maybe electric works better. I personally would prefer gas heat over oil, any day. I've lived with both, and oil simply stinks. The new gas furnaces for hot-water heating systems are the size of a kitchen cupboard (common in England). I'm amazed by this , and of course, very efficient. I'm used to forced-air heating (midwest).

Which one is least polluting? Gas, I imagine.

Do you have a gas stove now? Do you want one?

I found that the oil system I had when I lived on Long Island needed an auxillary holding tank for hot water or the shower temperture varied too much when the rest of the house was calling for heat. Although, after installing that you could shower 'till the cows come home.

Questions for your question: 1. Where are you located? (Baltimore maybe?) 2. Do you have natural gas in the street or is the gas you speak of propane? 3. Do you have much land? With the right combination of answers, you might also be a candidate for a ground-source heat pump.

Gas produces somewhat less CO2. If you're furnace is in good shape, there's no other pollution effects. Check out your costs for gas and oil. Right now, in my area, fuel oil is slightly cheaper heat than gas. Long-term trends only look to increase the gap: gas is going up much faster than oil.

I don't have any direct experience with oil heat -- as far as I know, it's completely illegal here, and at the very least I've never actually seen it up close -- but just this morning I was having a conversation with a friend of mine who mentioned that she hated having oil-heated water because when the oil ran out, usually just a couple of days short of refill day, her building had no hot water. Using natural gas, unless you're in a community where NG is tanked, means you get to hook up to a larger infrastructure. Though at least around here, the companies that provide tanked gas respond very quickly -- in a couple of hours -- to refill requests. I don't know if oil delivery provides the same level of service. In my current home, the old steam radiators have been converted to a modern, NG hot water system. They're utterly silent and never get hot enough to cause injury. I don't know if similar systems are available with oil, but I sure like this one.

To answer the questions, we do have natural gas already coming into the house and use it for our stove and dryer. So getting gas to the house is not an issue. We have a typical in-city (Baltimore) 1920s suburban plot of land. About 50 x 150 feet, so not a lot of land, though I'm not sure where that figures into the equation. And mss, I was wondering about the hot water situation myself. Not so much in the winter, but in the summer - they claim it's efficient, but it seems strange to have to run the furnace in the summer just for hot water. There's also the issue of THE TANK. It's huge, and inside the house. I've heard horror stories of what happens when they inevitably rust through, so even if we stick with oil, we're getting a new oil tank, as this one is from the 1950s at the newest, more likely the 1940s. But then, we live dangerously. The hot water heater has a 1974 manufacture date. We've got to get rid of this system. Money is literally gooing up the chimney...

I'd wholeheartedly recommend gas over oil. Oil tanks can be a huge hangup if you ever sell your place, and paying for proper removal can be a royal pain in the ass. Have you checked with your local gas utility for incentive programs for switching, or possibly something from the state? Water heaters that date from the Ford Administration need to be removed as soon as possible too! (As a side note, what kind of sun and wind exposure do you have? Any trees? How are your windows?)