Mainers find alternatives to heating with oil

PARIS – Mark Bancroft is already counting his savings from a European-made wood pellet furnace he’s buying to replace the oil furnace in his home.

Bancroft burns about 1,100 gallons of heating oil a year, which would cost him about $5,000 at today’s record-high prices. With pellets, he expects to use about 8 tons at $250 a ton this coming winter, giving him a savings of $3,000 a year.

As heating oil approaches $5 a gallon, consumers in the oil-reliant Northeast are looking at pellets, heat pumps, firewood and even geothermal systems to soften the blow of high oil prices – which have almost doubled in the past year and gone up nearly fivefold since 2003.

Bancroft plans to have his new furnace installed this summer. Even at a cost of more than $12,000, he thinks it will pay for itself within five years. Besides saving money, the construction company owner likes the idea of using a homegrown heat source – wood – rather than oil.

“How great is it if we make a move toward this type of heating that can boost the economy instead of sending money to foreign lands for oil?” he said.

About 8 million households in the U.S. use heating oil as their primary heating source, according to the federal Energy Information Administration.

Nowhere is the pain of skyrocketing oil prices more acute than in the Northeast, which accounts for more than three-quarters of the nation’s heating oil sales. And no state relies more on heating oil than Maine, where it’s used in 80 percent of homes.

Oil used to be a cheap heating source, with prices around $1 a gallon as recently as five years ago. But as prices rise to unprecedented levels, homeowners are angry and scared.

There are risks, of course, to giving heating oil the boot. Oil prices could drop or wood pellet prices could grow. Questions remain about whether there are enough certified technicians to install and service other types of furnaces.

Here in western Maine, former ski mogul Les Otten is banking on European wood pellet furnaces with his Maine Energy Systems Inc., which he launched with two other investors. Otten once headed American Skiing Co. and was later a part-owner of the Boston Red Sox.

Otten already has 300 orders even though he hasn’t taken delivery of his first shipment – they’re not due to arrive by container ship until later this month. To fuel those furnaces, he’s arranging for a fleet of trucks to make home deliveries of pellets made at plants in Maine, New Hampshire and Quebec.

Otten, who has a pellet furnace in his home in Greenwood, said it works much like existing forced-water heat systems, except the burner is fueled with wood pellets rather than oil or natural gas.

And instead of heating oil deliveries, trucks will deliver pellets, which are pumped into a bin in his basement that can hold 4 tons. They are then carried automatically from the bin to the furnace, where they are burned to heat water that is used to heat the house.

Otten’s goal is to convert 10 percent of Maine homeowners – more than 40,000 homes – who now heat with oil in the next five to seven years and expand throughout New England and into New York.

“With 80 percent of Maine homes relying on oil for heat, people are spending billions a year on heating oil,” Otten said on a recent day as he showed off his furnace. “That’s why you have to use the word ‘crisis’ when you think about this stuff.”

For a smaller investment, pellet stoves – which are cleaner and more efficient than traditional wood stoves – are flying out the door at the Finest Hearth & Home shop in Yarmouth. There, sales are five times higher this year than last year, said assistant manager Mike Jaques.

It can cost $4,000 or more to buy and install a pellet stove, but homeowners can make their money back in two or three years if oil prices stay where they are now, Jaques said. And they’re willing to carry bags of pellets from their basement or garage and load the stoves by hand.