I'm investigating the most efficient way to heat my new 2000 sq home in New Hampshire and am having some difficulty working out the math based on the numbers I have found.
I've found that wood is incredibly cheap...even if I buy it late in the season when the prices have gone up. I'm looking at $350 a cord for mixed hardwood, which I found can produce 22.1 mBTU.
I've also found an 89% efficient insert, increasing the cost savings per month to $116 for wood over oil. These savings are HUGE. If my numbers are right I'm jumping on the wood burning wagon immediately.
--Edit--
Going further down this rabbit hole, I've update the image with new specs for the heat pump, and I'm also wondering if those are correct. What I'm seeing is that a SEER 16 heat pump is 4.689 times more efficient than standard electrical heating, which means that a 48k btu 4 ton system can give me 16000 btus per kWh vs the standard 3412 btu/kWh of electric resistance heating.
Does that calculation make sense? Are heat pumps and wood inserts really that much better than oil? Can I really save 178 dollars a month by going with a 16 SEER heat pump?