Heat Your House, Dummy!

What boiler, Candace?

Excluding, of course, the content-spinners of the internet like the ones that infest Seekyt.com, the average penny-grubber will attempt to make published content look semi-legitimate by "researching" the question at hand. Doing so should mean looking at authoritative content and consulting "experts" on a topic. Some, though, are so incompetent that they can't even figure out who the authorities are. Take, for instance, eHow.com's Candace Horgan, whose professors as she collected that BA in English apparently didn't teach her how to research consumer queries like "Is It More Expensive to Heat With Gas or Oil?"¹ Her ignorance, however, didn't slow Candace down at all...

Anyone who actually knows something about the question could explain that both natural gas and heating oil are commodities whose prices change according to the law of supply and demand (neither of which words ever appears in Candace's post). Where it becomes obvious that Horgan is lying through her teeth is when she says,

"Consulting the industry experts is no help, as they usually tout their own product more than explain the differences."

Perhaps Candace is confused: she apparently thinks furnace salesmen are "industry experts"... She also gets it wrong – or just half-right – when she talks about the energy content of the two fuels: "Home heating oil, also called No. 2 fuel oil, became popular as an alternative to using coal to heat the home early in the last century. It has an energy content of 139kBTU (kilo British Thermal Units) [sic] per gallon and is safer to store than natural gas. Natural gas, made mostly of methane, is piped into the home from gas lines and is easy to meter. It has an energy content of 100kBTU. Propane can also be used in gas heating systems."

First, Candace's "expert" for this information is something called "the Von Wentzel Family Site"; shouldn't she have consulted a real authority? someone like the U.S. Energy Information Agency? If she had consulted the latter, she might have noticed that she didn't cite a unit of volume for natural gas: the real value is about 1028 BTU per cubic foot. Maybe the concept of "units of volume" fried a circuit in her brain.

We also laughed uproariously at Horgan's claim (a neat copy-reword-paste job from Mr. von Wentzel's little site) that heating oil "is safer to store than natural gas"; a statement that is immediately negated by the following sentence: "Natural gas, made mostly of methane, is piped into the home from gas lines..." which leads one to wonder just where the average homeowner stores all that natural gas (storage of propane, FWIW, is only slightly more "dangerous" than storage of heating oil). Oh, and by the way, Candace? Natural gas isn't "made mostly of" methane, it "consists mainly of" methane: look up the difference some time.

And Horgan's claim that "boilers that use heating oil need more frequent maintenance to operate efficiently"? Not grounded in truth, not to mention that most modern furnaces are forced-air varieties rather than hot water or steam, hence no boiler. For what little it's worth, gas-fired boilers require the same maintenance...

Candace also thinks it's important that, being piped from distribution lines, natural gas is "easy to meter": apparently she's never "metered" gasoline as she filled her car's tank...

No, this is utter rubbish written by someone who 1) didn't understand the question and 2) didn't understand the answer. Some poor schmuck out there is trying to figure out whether to install gas or oil as a heating source in a new house or dump an existing oil furnace in favor of a gas-powered system. Our Dumbass of the Day was, frankly, no help at all.

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was    ehow.com/way_5128703_expensive-heat-gas-oil.html

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