Looking ahead to a harsh winter

A while back, I'd posted about rising costs in home heating oil and how this was going to become a major concern for consumers sooner than later. At the time, most of the oil-related focus in the news was about prices at the gas pumps. Now that summer's well on its way, more and more articles are starting to pop up about this coming winter and the effect the ongoing spike in prices will have on those who heat with oil or natural gas -- particularly those in the Northeastern US and in parts of Canada. One option being tossed around in Maine (where 80% of homes are heated by oil) is to add a surcharge to the already ridiculously high heating oil prices and to have this surcharge fund energy efficiency programs. This might be useful to some homeowners, but people who rent their homes and who pay for their own heating oil but have no control over renovating their buildings or changing their heating systems would end up choosing between heat and food this winter to subsidize a program that wouldn't necessarily help them at all. It would basically penalize those who are most in need.

Charting rising fuel prices in Canada and how it's hitting home

National Resources Canada has been charting the increasing cost of gas, diesel, propane and furnace oil across Canada. I checked out some averages for my province and got a bad case of the shakes. It seems that for all the rolling around on my bike I do, that I'm still in for a possible short-term wallop soon, thanks to the current situation with oil.

In June of last year, furnace oil was around $0.90 per litre. By January, it was hovering at around $0.97. That meant, in January, that a half tank of oil (which lasts me roughly a little less than two months in the dead of winter with the thermostat between 10 and 12 C / 50-53.6 F) cost around $485 or so, with taxes. Right now, furnace oil is selling at around $1.33 per litre -- a 28% increase. So, if last winter it cost roughly $970 to heat my apartment (not factoring in the bit of oil left over from the previous year or the increase in my electricity bill from using a space heater when company was over or on colder nights), that means that a repeat of the same weather, a similar thermostat setting, etc. this year would cost around $1242 at today's prices, give or take a handful of bucks. And the price of furnace oil is still spiking. It's gone up 7% just in the past month.

I'd hoped to hang on to my apartment until late fall to be able to squeeze whatever I can out of my garden, but it's starting to look a little dire. If it's going up an average of 7% a month, that means a half tank of oil will cost double what it did in January by this October. Looks like it's time to start looking for new digs. I had a feeling last winter that this was coming, but hadn't realized that the increase in cost would be so drastic so quickly.