Coalpail.com Forum

Oil prices are $3.70 a gallon. I was going to fill up on oil for the spring/summer, but now will have to figure out how to pressurize my boiler room to get a good draft to prevent fire outages. I put in a vent this past summer, but it didn't help enough. I am considering adding a fan to blow fresh air into the boiler room. I want to get a controller to dump the heat when it hits the high limit to prevent the fire from going out too. Any recommendations on micro controller units to buy? I'll have to search the forum since this was discussed in the past.

Are boiler sales picking up?

Thanks!

There is alot more interest in coal-fired boilers now, but I don't know if sales are picking up.

Wow - Oil prices still at about $3.70 per gallon in July!

Yeah my area runs the gamut from $3.43 to $3.79 a gallon.

I'm contemplating yanking the oil burner unit out & starting a fire in there. Or maybe I could jam a stoker in there? Hmmmmmmm ........ The wheels are turnin ......

Just paid $537 for 155 gallons to fill up the oil tanks. Wasn't about to take the chance on prices after 8/2. Glad I upgraded the Mark III to the to the Harman SF250, I'll take delivery in October. I need to give strong thought to plumbing it into my existing oil burner hot water systems. I plan to park the Mark III and possibly use it for a planned addition or maybe use it to somehow heat the driveway and clear the snow and ice - then I would the neighborhood's cat meow!

I buy from the low price guy once a year. Oil is less than $97.00 a barrel and heating oil is still rising. My guy just went to $3.84, but the guy in the nice shiny trucks is $4.19. Chrome is not free The folks out in the country that do not burn wood or coal are going to be sorry I hope our house prices in the country do not reflect on the fact we cannot burn Natural Gas, as it does not reach us. Not everyone has our ambition to use other heat sources.

'BOHICA' from our friends in the middle east! I wished they would make a long term arrangement with the makers of KY, and that would be OK until KY goes over a hundred dollars a barrel. NG may be fine for those who have it available in their areas, but out in the country we already have a seasonal KY buyers plan for #2, a super concentrated plan for Propane users, and the folks with solid fuels....well, they don't have to sit down to pee unless they want to.
Order up more wood and more coal for the NEXT season or two, and buckle up the six point harness, this is continuing to be a bumpy ride.

NG was becoming economical in PA, so recently I read that they are going to cut production to get the price back up.

stoker-man wrote:NG was becoming economical in PA, so recently I read that they are going to cut production to get the price back up.

We complain whenever the "Oil Cartel" does that, and we call them evil. Then if they don't back down we do something like sending our ships over to threaten them a bit until all is good again. Perhaps they are just being good capitalists after all, and we should let them alone to decide the price of their own products? Sort of like Ron Paul might have said....

I did not touch this years 7500lb purchase. I am getting good at stacking the bags in the new "Coal Barn" built in 2010. I think I can get 20000lbs in it before it gets into my "scrapping business". It is a viscous cycle, the scrap pays for the coal, and coal gets in the way of the scrap. I need another barn. People, realize my barns are only 8 x 22. I do not have the resources or space to do more, but I am making it happen with what I have.I am doing the "American Dream" on a slightly smaller scale than others, but keep the faith

stoker-man wrote:There is alot more interest in coal-fired boilers now, but I don't know if sales are picking up.

there just capping wells and waiting in my area ....... you will see a big price jump on NG when they get the compression plants set up for it then it will be ship it off over seas, I know one of the drillers in this area is pulling out and going back to TX oil is up and there going to drill for oil now......

daluds wrote:Oil prices are $3.70 a gallon. I was going to fill up on oil for the spring/summer, but now will have to figure out how to pressurize my boiler room to get a good draft to prevent fire outages. I put in a vent this past summer, but it didn't help enough. I am considering adding a fan to blow fresh air into the boiler room.

http://tjernlund.com/rooftop_draft_inducers.htm

In the long run oil prices are irrelevant. Since oil is a finite resource, EROEI will some day (soon perhaps) be all that matters.

EROEI = Energy returned on energy invested

In the 1930's and earlier it cost roughly one barrel of oil "equivalent" energy input to yield 100 barrels of oil output. Today we are at about 1 barrel of oil energy "equivalent" invested to yield a return of 7 or 8 barrels of oil. The trend has been on a massively downward slope for decades. On top of this we (on a worldwide scale) are currently discovering only one barrel of oil as new "reserves" to replace somewhere around 4 barrels of oil being actually consumed, and this gap is continually widening to the detrimental side.

In every generational period of roughly 35 years the peoples of the world will collectively consume more crude oil than had all of the previous generations of mankind combined. Analysts are beginning to realize that with India and China becoming major players in the oil consumption arena, the world will soon need to discover the equivalent of a new Saudi Arabia every 4 years. Place your bets (wisely).

Are you sure the loss of return on investment isn't because the environmental movement has forced drillers to drill in places where there is no oil?

Quite sure, because the downward trends have been seen for decades, and started well before the current political and environmental movements gained sufficient momentum to also become a hindrance. Plus the phenomenon is being seen worldwide, not just here in the USA, and much of the remaining world (such as China, Russia, India, etc...) does not share in (or care at all about) our environmental concerns.

Peak world oil discovery occurred in 1964. Peak consumption has yet to be seen. Peak production output has also yet to be seen.

As for the USA, peak discovery occurred in 1930, and peak of production output occurred in 1970. Current USA oil output is roughly 50% less than 1970. This was all mainly before we began to politicise and environmentalize oil drilling.