Mary,

Here's the average electric rates across the US. I live in SE coastal CT. There's no natural gas available in my town so the choices are electric or oil...there are a few (stress on 'few') homes heated/cooled with geothermal. Since CT has the highest electricity costs in the nation...I believe you'd be hard pressed to find anybody here that prefers to heat with electricity. That leaves us with oil...

/tricia

Here is a link that might be useful: Electricity rates across the US

Ow - yes the NE is the highest electric! Good website. Have you ever compared oil to electric and tried to figure out where the even point would be? I.e. what I'm trying to ask is - how high would your heating oil prices have to go to be the same as electric?

I dug in my pile and pulled out the electric bill.
It says in a little box that a new supplier would have to offer me a price lower than 31.48 or 6.4 cents per KWH for me to save money.
This total bill was 53.64

On the second page they have it broken down like this
Customer charge 4.25
Distribution Charge 17.92
Transmission charge 2.26
generation charge 29.22
all equaling 53.64

53.4 minus the 31.48 = 22.16 so I'm not sure where in that list of 4 costs the actual KWH cost is divided out vs. these "charges". Or maybe in comparing fuel type costs it doesn't matter just take the costs and all the charges and figure out what's cheapest that way?

The only accurate method is to compare your fuel costs per Btu and do the conversions yourself. If you google btu I believe you'll learn all you need to do the calculations.
You'll find how many Btu are in a cubic foot of gas, a gallon of propane, a gallon of fuel oil or kerosene, pound of wood pellets, etc. Many utility companies actually charge gas customers by the "therm" which is defined as 100,000 btu quantity. Here in the northeast they change the heat content of the natural gas and bill you accordingly by simply charging by the therm -- this lets them sell off the "hotter" parts of the gas to use in propane generation and make more money .....

Off the top of my head, I recall 3.41 Btu in a Kilowatt (a 1500 watt heater puts out around 5000 Btu -- that's how I remember it). Once you know your typical btu consumption you can then compare alternate fuel sources.

Of course, in doing your comparisons you also have to adjust for the efficiencies of the various heating appliances. Electric heat isn't vented to the outside so, practically speaking, it has a 100% efficiency (all the heat it generates stays in your house).

Another nice thing about electric is that you can have a thermostat in every room. So if you never go in the spare bedroom, you can keep it chilly; you can keep your bedroom cool for sleeping; and you can keep the living room warm for couch-sitting.

Old post but I'm going to bump it back up as it's something I've been thinking about lately. As the OP asked, at what point does it make sense to switch to electricity if fossil fuel prices continue to rise at a rate much higher than electric rates. Here's a table I found, not sure how accurate it is but the guy seems to know what he's talking about.

Here is a link that might be useful: WHEN SHOULD I SWITCH FROM PROPANE/OIL TO ELECTRIC HEAT?

Granted, when I lived in town (electric baseboard ... with not so hot insulation) yes, I could turn heat down in unused rooms.

But here on the farm, with oil-fired furnace and a bunch of heating pipes, there are moveable baffles in the pipes that allow me to adjust the proportion of heat that goes to different rooms.

Some years ago, when I sold corn-fired space heating stoves, we used to say that they provided the cheapest heat around, with the exception of wood that you cut yourself.

That was prior to recent increases in corn prices.

You (or someone) has to be there to clear a piece of residue from the firepot a bit oftener than once per day or it blocks the forced air feeding the fire, resulting in the fire going out.

Can you imagine heating a fair-sized house from a small firepot about 5" square?

I hope that the folks buying those big houses have an idea figured out how the are going to afford the heat, as fuel supplies dwindle and prices double - or go even higher.

Good wishes for finding all of the hot air that you need ... at not too high a price!

ole joyful

Marys 1000,

Did you notice that when you add the generation charge and the transmission charge they come to the figure that your company said a competitor would have to beat in order to me more effective. They are pretty well the non-administrative parts of the bill.

I didn't mention that, with regard to the corn-fired heaters, a number of people in this area around the Great Lakes found that they could heat most of a fair-sized house (from one space-heater location) for about 150 - 200 bus. of corn. Multiply that by the price that you'd pay local suppliers, and probably the best source would be a local farmer, to find approximately what your heating cost would be for a year, using one of them.

Good wishes for finding the heat that you need, as easily and as cheaply as possible.

ole joyful