I debated whether this is a Long Term Preps topic or not, but I guess it's just a shootin' the breeze topic.

With winter approaching and oil prices at half--half--their peak prices from just this summer, I was wondering if there were any folks that made changes to their heating plans and now regret it. Doing things like signing heating oil contracts that lock in a certain price or buying a new wood-burning stove. I know that the sales of wood-burning stoves was going through the roof earlier in the year, but I imagine that oil prices and recession fears have really cut into sales lately.

I don't know how much lower crude prices will help people who use heating oil. The biggest price driver for gasoline/diesel/heating oil seems to be refining capacity rather than crude prices.

I haven't made any recent changes; my wood stove with natural gas furnace is a reasonably effective combination. I am watching the pellet stove market closely. It seems that the commercial pellets are in short supply and sometimes not even available. When they make one that can handle chipped wood, which I can make myself, then I'll make the investment.

There's a big up-front cost to installing a wood or pellet stove. They payoff is long-term, unless there's an outage on the grid of course, in which case it's priceless. I'm not sure how many people have that kind of cash available. The used market, however, should start to boom.

Nope.

Still am - as planned, and prepared - using wood.

At the fire hall, we opted to NOT lock-in a price, and decided that we'd cut back and even alter the structure of the station to avoid high oil costs. Glad that decision was made.

Speaking of winter heating, I just read that the US is banning the import of untreated firewood from Canada. All firewood must be heated to 160 degrees for 75 minutes to kill infestations of invasive insects species that may be present in the wood.

No - Insulation is always a money saver.

Don't know either, but I've been watching the HHO price at my usual source daily and it seems to be dropping in lock-step with crude prices.

I tanked up at the end of August when the price dropped a bit and felt smug when the price went up in September as expected. Now I'm almost tempted to turn up the thermostat in order to use up enough fuel to make room for the 150 gal minumum order!

As far as I know, refining capacity is normal right now after the hurricanes and the demand for gasoline is also decreasing, so I don't think there's any lack of refining capacity for heating oil. Oil supply is ample, too, so I think the big driver of heating prices is simply crude oil prices for the moment.

~2/g for propane right now for our soon to be back-up source of heat.

Primary source of heat wood stove.

I'd still love to have a pellet / multi-fuel as primary with a 5 day capacity hopper, and 12v back-up to run it, and a propane for backup/additional heat, and my wood stove in the garage to heat it and back-up for the house. Someday

Funny how different standards are from one area to another.

I think the code minimum here in OK when I built my house 6 years ago was R-19 walls and R-36(?) ceilings. We opted for spray-in insulation in the exterior walls (>R-30) and R-49 in the ceilings (very inexpensive upgrade).