We had an oil fired furnace and had the tank filled in Oct. 2005. Nearly $600! Time for a change.
Our house is a 2 story, 3 bedroom built in '79 with all new windows in 2000 It is about 2000 sf.
We decided on a Waterfurnace unit with the heat/cool coil where our old A/C coil was mounted (let us use the original ductwork and the oil furnace for a backup) The closed loop system uses water and propylene glycol in the ground loop. It is a 4 ton dual capacity system. We didn't have room for the trench type installation on our lot (takes about 3000' of pipe) and had to go with 4 180 ft. wells with loops of poly pipe grouted in. It was an incredible mess, luckily in the winter - saw the same thing on that Dirty Jobs show - the drillers end up covered in mud.
The pipes are all connected and brought into a corner of the basement near the floor where they go through a couple little circulating pumps and through the Heat pump. The output of the heat pump is one of the new freons, and circulates through the heat exchanger in the furnace plenum, just like the A/C did (cold in summer, hot in winter) An added benefit is a desuperheater circuit that takes excess heat from the heat pump and cycles it through the water heater. The water heater meter doesn't even run in the winter time.
The system is quiet. We set the thermostat to heat and leave it about October 15th.
Cost was about $13K, with the largest expense being the well drilling and ground loop installation.
5yr average fuel oil purchase was 763 gal. (something over $2K/year now)
Electricity cost projected for 2007 will be 1563 vs. $1029 in 2005, or $534 extra to run the heat pump.
Savings this year are about $1500 over oil at $2.90. Who knows where it will end up.
Steady state payback is about 8 years assumming no maintenance on either system. A friend has a similar system over 10 years old with no maintenance. The oil burner used to take about $100/year average maintenance, but that was when I was working and somehow it knew when I was out of the country
. I'll probably not have an issue with the oil system. It ran a total of about 2 hours this year.
2006 operating costs were $1312 (less 2005 electric of 1079)=