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.
Edited by dougwalkabout (10/24/08 03:00 PM)