Heating a big house

wood burner, oil burner, corn burner, jew burner

Do like the Norwegians do. Close every goddamn door and buy a cheap radiator for the room you spend the most time in.

Get yourself an AGA, run it in oil and run your hearing off it.

If you want to invest heavily look at underground heat sourcing. I forget what it's called.

>>1070168
Find and seal all the drafts, this will be easiest and most effective because most heat loss is through drafts and air movement

then think about insulation

then think about alternative heating

dont be a fucking idiot and spend money on heating but not improving the insulation

>>1070179
Yes, like I mentioned I have done all that and more. I'm now crunching watts and heating cost/hour and seeing if space heaters are cheaper per month than gas.

I have a feeling that in the progressive year of 2016 there is some kind of magical appliance that runs super efficiently and can heat a room all day long.

>>1070205
heating is not a magic

it has been done to death and there is no mystery about it

and no there is no 2016 magic that does it better

you can either burn stuff (wood fire), or heat from the grid (gas, electricity, etc)

if you burn gas $400 you are not going to magically get 200% efficiency by suddenly switching to other stuff, except maybe if there is a difference in price (electricity vs gas)

>seal gaps in doors
>put plastic and curtains over windows
>only head your main living area, kitchen, and occupied bedroom(s)
>seal off all other rooms
>put a heated blanked on each occupied bed
>install a heat lamp in the bathrooms

The trick is to heat as little area as possible, that's literally the only way to accomplish this without remodeling.

>>1070168
gas is usually cheaper than electric.
a wood burner can bring the heating cost down, but it raises the home insurance, and has to be fed.

we are in a big 1900's farmhouse and we keep the thermostat at15C for the winter. and use electric blankets on the beds and a quartz heater in the family room. everybody gets sweatshirts and longies for xmas.

I live in a huge ass house, just as big as yours, and I pay at most $300/mo for gas and electric combined in the winter, and I'm in Michigan. Chances are, your hot water heater is a large part of your gas bill. Insulate the pipes, insulation is less than $1/6 feet, it's the best return on investment I've had, it brought my bills down at least $15/month. Check into insulating your attic, if the insulation is only at a bare minimum, the savings from adding insulation will completely shit on any savings from a slightly more efficient furnace. These 2 things would bring your bill down a FUCKLOAD more than any new appliances would, unless your furnace, dryer, water heater, or stove are more than about 9 years old.

>>1070219
Im going to do that, I was already considering it. I was also told to check if the water heater had both top and bottom elements working, as if one is broken, the remaining one is working around the clock...

>>1070212
Yup, warm food, tea, and layers

Get a nice sweater to wear inside your house.

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Switch from gas to coal. I did that, my family has never looked back - we reduced the heating cost three times.

>>1070250
coal smoke is literally cancer
especially if you burn cheap low-grade stuff
unless you live in middle of nowhere, you should be put to death (based Edward I)

>>1070627
A furnace like >>1070250
in pic-related will give you electronically controlled stechiometric combustion. So yeah, definitely cancer. Go suck on some more shale gas industry cock and go frack yourself I guess.

>>1070209
>This

It pretty much costs what it costs to heat 3.6k sq ft.

>>1070168
build a tent inside a tent inside a room in your house and cook stew all day

>>1070225
>water heater elements
If your water heater has a top and bottom element its an electric and doesn't use gas.
Additionally if one element was completely dead you would definitely notice as your water would not get very hot.
More likely is build-up on the element(s) which can be remedied by replacing them, an easy but slightly time consuming task since you have to drain the heater.

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>>1070168
buy dry wood now
buy wet wood now to store and dry for next winter because wet wood is much cheaper

design your own efficient wood stove , make sure to use the burned air heat in an efficient way before it poors out of your house and keep the doors open, also make sure you dont seal your house off because the fire will consume a lot off air.

the key to an efficent wood stove is how much air you can heat up so pic related.

Things to keep in mind when building
> pre heated air to improve combustion
> wood burning is green
> radiation heat
> iron tubes that act as a hot air blower when heated (hot air rises, cold gets sucked in)
> use of heat from waste air/smoke

>>1070168
you live in the country so plant some hybrid poplar.

Shouldn't have bought a crappy mcmansion OP.

Radiant solar heating isn't cheap but it's extremely efficient and feels better than anything forced air can provide
>>1070176
Geothermal

>>1071294
solar energy, winter... way more expensive then just getting a wood stove when you live in the countryside......

geothermal is great but also quite expensive

>>1071298
>way more expensive then just getting a wood stove when you live in the countryside.
Not longterm, especially if you only put the radiant in a few occupied rooms. Granted, retrofitting can be an absolute bitch.

>>1070168

I don't heat my home at all. I wear a USB heated jacket. I plug it into my PC when I am sitting down at it or use a fuckoff huge power bank to keep it powered when walking about.

I don't know what the energy costs are like in your area, but if you don't mind higher start up costs then a heat pump or geothermal can really bring your running cost down.

>Hans! Two more jews in the oven
>heating problem solved

>>1070168
seal and insulate your house mang

You can throw stupid money at brilliant equipment and you're still gonna be cold when you burn out your oversized units trying to keep up with your drafty ass house pouring the heat out a million cracks and walls with no insulation.

You're looking for a cheap easy solution to an old difficult problem biting you in the ass, dude.

>>1071298
>geothermal is great but also quite expensive
The savings aren't that great compared to the initial costs. Over here in a nondescript cold (partly north of the polar circle) country a geothermal system costs 15-20k€. If you shave off a hundred from your heating during the winter it's going to save you at best a thousand a year. Payback time is suddenly 15-20 years. And if you pay it with a loan you have to calculate the interest also! No compressor on the machinery will last that long either so you will have to do some expensive maintenance also.

I'd recommend to fix the cheap places where you can stop heat from leaking out and such first and then maybe install a heat pump that takes the heat off air instead of the earth (which is actually solar heating not heat from magma). I don't know what these pumps are called in English but somebody prolly does. Basically a backwards AC. They won't work when it's really cold but supposedly do up to - 10°C

>>1073234
>I don't know what these pumps are called in English but somebody prolly does.
"Heat pump" exactly like you said. They do work well, but got a bad name in the 'States in the 70's from lots of crappy ass units rushed to market during the first US energy crisis.

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>>1070209
But mah candle flower pot heater!

If money isn't an object convert all your heating to baseboard fed off a boiler. You can have each room with its own thermostat and program em so you only heat what and where you want. If you don't want baseboards you can zone off radiant in floor heat too. Make sure to add in a hot water storage tank so you're not short cycling your boiler heating one room at a time.

Big plus to the boiler system is you can then add in a wood boiler or solar(really any) system with relative ease down the line and just pipe it into the storage tank and wire up the appropriate controllers and valves.

Even with a 1400ft house built in the 1940s and minimal insulation anywhere I only run about 60-80 a month for gas. Worse winter days get around 10-15 degrees F, a week or so a year of low negatives.