[Saltheart]

Oh yeah , forgot the hot air hat water thing. When I switched to hot water , the single driver was not economics , it was in resonse to allergy issues both me and my mother had. Some can argue about filters, and vacuuming the ducts etc but both our big allergy issues disappeared immediately when I put the new heating system in. I believe even with a brand new system , we both would have had issues. I think has a lot to do with pet hair and pet dander. We had dogs or cats or both and really loved them so no pets was not an option. Anyway , I don't know about exact numbers but I also though the most efficient water systems now (2011 vintage) were the most efficient. I could be wrong thoufgh as I am just going by what friends have told me who recently updated their own systems and chose hot water.

Maybe 5/0 or Joe or Dave can explain all that to us too. What's more efficient? I also like to know why?

I also had oil heat when I was in CT. I had a huge 14 room house and it had an old steam boiler. very confortable heat. i did however have to redo the system somewhat. I changed the burner nozzle way down from what it was when I bout it. I think the poor old lady was getting ripped off by the oil company. She had her system maintained by the same people who sold here the oil. She had the system fired at 2.25 GPH when I bought the place. Here oil bill was $1600 in 1983. I replaced the nozzle to 0.8 GPH and also ran a hot water heater in series with the boiler. The nozzle change dropped my annual oil cost to about $650 a year and the hot water change resulted in free hot water in the winter and about $20 a month in the summer. Overall I was happy with it once I adjusted everything. The idea of the smaller nozzle was to do as Joe and dave suggested. I wanted the burner to burn just enough to heat the house on the coldest day.