Top Reasons to Choose Heating Oil: Clean, Abundant, Safe, Efficient—Part Two

In our previous blog, we put the focus on the clean-burning properties of today’s oilheat. This time, we will take a look at three other great benefits that people in the Great Lakes State appreciate about oilheat: safety, efficiency and abundant supply.

Safe Oilheat

Oilheat has a lot going for it, and many people put safety at the top of the list. While there are many reasons why people feel safe at home with oil heat, here are just three points to remember.

Heating oil cannot burn in its liquid state. It takes an advanced high-tech burner to ignite the oil. Before combustion can occur, heating oil must first be vaporized by your oil burner at temperatures above 140°.

Heating oil cannot explode. The fuel that is stored in your tank is very safe. If you drop a lit match into a bucket of heating oil, the flame would go out just as if you dropped the match into water.

Oilheat poses a very low risk of carbon monoxide poisoning. If an oil burner malfunctions (most often due to a lack of maintenance), the safety devices in the unit will typically shut the furnace or boiler off.

Efficient Oilheat

The latest oil heating systems are small, smart and super-efficient and can save you, on average, about 30% on your annual heating costs. There are many different equipment options to fit your budget.

• New oilheat systems have efficiency ratings as high as 95%; this provides oil-heated homes with more warmth for less fuel.
• Fuel savings have reached as high as 48% when outdated boilers have been replaced with new, high-efficiency oil boilers.
• Many new oil boilers use energy-saving controls that greatly reduce fuel usage during mildly cold weather and provide a more even heat with fewer temperature swings.
• High-efficiency oil furnaces feature variable speed motors that use about 80% less electricity than older motors and provide more consistent airflow and temperatures.
• Most heating oil is now considered an ultra-low sulfur fuel. This makes it cleaner burning, much more environmentally friendly and significantly more energy efficient. This has paved the way for the next generation of compact, super-efficient boilers and furnaces.
• New oil heat systems are so reliable that most manufacturers offer long-term warranties; if something ever fails, it’s easy to get replacement parts.
• New oilheating systems are much smaller than older ones. The average boilers and furnaces today are compact yet powerful, and similar in size to a three-drawer filing cabinet.
• Oil packs a wallop of heating energy, providing efficiency and comfort. For every gallon of oil burned, nearly 140,000 Btu’s of heat are produced. That’s the equivalent of about 70,000 60-watt lightbulbs.

Abundant Heating Oil

In the past few years, a driving force for manageable oil prices has been the massive increases in U.S. crude oil production. The U.S. is producing so much oil that we are moving toward being a net exporter of oil, rather than a net importer. This could become a reality within the next 10 years, according to the U.S. Energy Department.

• In 2015, U.S. crude oil production averaged more than 9.4 million barrels per day the highest annual average crude oil production since 1972.
• The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve has a capacity of 727-million barrels; it’s the largest stockpile of government-owned emergency crude oil in the world.
• The majority of the heating oil used in the United States is refined domestically.

Oilheat – the more you know, the happier you’ll be using it! Contact your local heating oil dealer in Michigan to learn how you can use this clean, abundant, safe and efficient fuel to your best advantage!