COST TO RUN ELECTRIC FURNACE V.S. NATURAL GAS FURNACE

Don't know how to calculate the area of your garden or circumference of a pond? Ask your question here.
Forum rules
Dear convert-me.com forum visitors,

Our forum has been available for many years. In September 2014 we decided to switch it to read-only mode. Month after month we saw less posts with questions and answers from real people and more spam posts. We were spending more and more resources cleaning the spam until there were less them 1 legitimate message per 100 spam posts. Then we decided it's time to stop.

All the posts in the forum will be available and searchable. We understand there are a lot of useful information and we aren't going to remove anything. As for the new questions, you can always ask them on convert-me.com FaceBook page

Thank you for being with us and sorry for any inconveniences this could caused.

COST TO RUN ELECTRIC FURNACE V.S. NATURAL GAS FURNACE

Postby moonbeambill » Thu Dec 22, 2005 11:22 am

Please help me compute cost to run a 110,000 BTU furnace for one minute so that I can compar this to running a 15,000 watt electric heater. The marginal cost for natural gas is $ 1.79/Therm and the marginal cost for the electricty is $ 0.17806. THANKS FOR YOUR HELP MOON :P
moonbeambill
 
Posts: 1
Joined: Thu Dec 22, 2005 11:09 am

Re: COST TO RUN ELECTRIC FURNACE V.S. NATURAL GAS FURNACE

Postby Guest » Thu Dec 22, 2005 8:00 pm

moonbeambill wrote:Please help me compute cost to run a 110,000 BTU furnace for one minute so that I can compar this to running a 15,000 watt electric heater. The marginal cost for natural gas is $ 1.79/Therm and the marginal cost for the electricty is $ 0.17806. THANKS FOR YOUR HELP MOON :P


You really need to look at equal amounts of heat, as both presumably have thermostats and cycle on and off to maintain set temperature.

A therm is 100,000 BTU, so your furnace consumes 1.1 therm/hour, and costs $1.97 per hour running continuously (remember it actually cycles).

1 BTU/hr = 0.293071 W, so 110,000 BTU/hr = 32.2378 kW (your electric heater produces less than half the heat, and would run more than twice as much). The cost of consuming 32.2 kW-h is $5.74, not the way to go.

Probably better to look at both as a cost per megajoule.
1 therm = 105.506 MJ, so gas is $1.79/therm x 1 therm/105,506 MJ = $0.016966/MJ

1 kWh = 3.6 MJ, so electricity $0.17806/kWh x 1 kWh/3.6 MJ = $0.04946/MJ.

It would never offset the difference but some of the gas heat goes up the chimney, and the efficiency of the furnace needs to be considered. The electric heat is all delivered to the premises.
Guest
 


More info

  • List of all units you can convert online
  • Metric conversion
  • Convert pounds to gallons
  • Convert grams to cups
  • Grams to milliliters
  • Imperial vs US Customary
  • History of measurement
  • Return to Calculating things



    Our Privacy Policy       Cooking Measures Converter       Metric conversions

    cron