Oilheat 101

Choosing the Right Energy Source

Consumers hear a lot of conflicting information about home heating fuels, including marketing messages from natural gas utilities that urge customers to convert to gas heat.

On these pages, you will find in-depth accurate information about Oilheat. We think you will see that staying with Oilheat is the best choice. You'll learn here that:

Oilheat has a great track record on price
Oilheat companies are local businesses that deliver excellent customer service
Oilheat customers enjoy freedom of choice and are not forced to buy from a utility
Oilheat is safer than natural gas
Modern Oilheat boilers and furnaces deliver great efficiency
Staying with Oilheat is more cost-effective than converting to natural gas

Oilheat Is the Smart Choice for Value

Oilheat delivers an excellent value that makes it the ideal choice for heating a home or business. Utilities like National Grid aggressively promote natural gas as a more affordable fuel, but they omit many important facts. For instance:

Upon converting to natural gas, you become completely dependent on the utility, with few if any options of finding a less expensive supplier elsewhere. When they raise their prices, you're stuck.
The true cost of heating with oil has been lower than the cost of heating with gas year after year in many states. Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania and other states have all seen lower heating costs with oil for most of the last 20 years. Natural gas gained a price advantage in some locales a few years ago, but energy prices tend to track each other closely, and natural gas prices can rise at any time.
Natural gas utilities assess additional monthly fees that Oilheat companies do not charge, such as a basic monthly charge, delivery charges, supply charges, cost adjustment charges, distribution charges, taxes, franchise fees, administration charges and more.
The U.S. natural gas industry is working aggressively to expand the use of natural gas in transportation and electricity generation. Gas producers are also seeking federal approval to ship more gas abroad in the form of liquefied natural gas (LNG). As demand for natural gas use grows in the transportation, electricity and export sectors, there will be upward pressure on natural gas prices.
Oilheat customers enjoy freedom of choice. Should a customer ever become disenchanted with the Oilheat company they use, they can easily find another independent provider. Each Oilheat company operates with its own approach and priorities, and every customer can find a company to suit their tastes and needs.

Oilheat is Remarkably Safe

Safety is one of the best reasons to choose Oilheat. The fuel is very similar to diesel and very different from gasoline or natural gas. In fact, Oilheat is not even flammable at room temperature. That's right: It will not burn at the touch of a flame unless it has been preheated to 140 degrees. While natural gas is the cause of numerous explosions every year, including home explosions, Oilheat stores safely in a durable tank and poses no threat of explosion. Customers who value safety first have long preferred Oilheat.

Local Companies Offering Great Service

Oilheat companies tend to be greatly appreciated by customers, because they take customer service very seriously. They know that any customer can switch providers, and the best way to guard their interests and hold onto their customers is to serve them effectively every day and treat them well. In a world where customer service is a dying art, it is refreshing to work with a company that works to retain your business.

Oilheat companies are often small, local businesses, and many are run by the families that founded them. They are your neighbors. They know the communities they serve, and they often know their customers personally. Most Oilheat companies are generous supporters of local charities, churches, teams and organizations.

Oilheat Integrates Renewable Energy

Oilheat is not just a limited resource. Many companies blend oil with renewable biofuel to create a blend known as Bioheat®. The biofuel component of Bioheat is remarkably flexible. Producers can draw on sources as diverse as soybeans, used cooking oil and algae to create fuel that can be blended with heating oil and used in any oil burner without equipment modifications. Bioheat is not an experimental fuel; the world's leading standards-setting authority, ASTM, approved Bioheat for use in all Oilheat systems in 2008.

As Bioheat use expands, customers are using less petroleum and supporting America's growing alternative energy industry.

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Oilheat Is Aggressively Pro-Environment

Oilheat companies have turned up the heat on state and federal regulators to require cleaner heating fuels. The Oilheat industry made a commitment in 2009 to seek higher fuel-quality standards from state governments because they believed that customers care about reducing air pollution. The industry has begun a transition towards blends of ultra-low sulfur heating oil, which contains less than 1% the sulfur content of traditional heating oil, and renewable biofuel. As biofuel blending increases, Oilheat might well become the cleanest burning fuel for home heating. Customers who want to safeguard the environment should stay with Oilheat as the industry transitions to a future of clean, green fuels.

Natural gas utilities talk a lot about cleanliness, but they neglect to address the enormous problem of methane emissions. Natural gas is 95% methane, which is a greenhouse gas with 72 times the Global Warming Potential of carbon dioxide. Emissions from natural gas drilling are so high that a recent Cornell University study said the cumulative effect of extracting and burning natural gas could aggravate global warming more than using coal. Also, gas utilities routinely tolerate pipeline leaks that are not deemed to pose an immediate threat of fire or explosion. This means that methane from natural gas is leaking into the atmosphere constantly from thousands of unrepaired utility line leaks.

High-Efficiency Equipment Reduces Energy Demand

Oilheat customers use much less energy than before, thanks to enormous improvements in equipment efficiency. The introduction of flame-retention oil burners, triple-pass boiler designs and microprocessor-based burner controls has driven average annual Oilheat use to less than 800 gallons. Equipment efficiency continues to improve, and many customers can reduce consumption by 30% by upgrading to a high-efficiency Oilheat system.

It Costs Less to Upgrade Than to Convert

Converting an Oilheat system to natural gas can cost well in excess of $10,000 with no guarantee of a reduction in heating costs. In addition to installing a new boiler or furnace, a homeowner might need to reline the chimney; install a gas line; install an excess flow valve to protect against fire or explosion; plumb and wire the new system; and remove or abandon an oil tank.

Upgrading to a high-efficiency Oilheat system costs less and ensures that the customer uses less energy in the future.