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Comment by zip1234 | Hacker News Reader

Isn't propane expensive? Distributing it alone is costly as it has to be trucked to someone's house.

Pretty much every rural community will have one if not multiple propane providers. It generally is more expensive than natural gas, but the difference isn't astronomical. Heating with fuel oil is, by comparison, much more expensive.

Don’t know where you live, but here in NC propane is around $3.32 per gallon[0], equivalent to $3.60 per therm. My last natgas bill was $1.38/therm, almost a third the cost. In fact, propane is much closer in cost (per BTU equivalent) to fuel oil than natural gas.

[0] https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=W...

Damn, I just got my propane tank refilled - it's a tiny 125 gallon one, mostly backup for our wood stove. We paid something like $2.40, and that's only because we didn't get a bulk discount most people get when they fill up the larger tanks sized for primary heat for a full season.

I suspect you're not on the east coast, average propane cost across the whole east coast was $3.41 recently: https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_pri_wfr_a_EPLLPA_PRS_dpgal_...

For natural gas, is that only some itemized procurement price, or full price as delivered?

In the SF Bay Area, our last PG&E bill split across Jan/Feb was effectively $3.05/therm. The actual pricing in our bill reflects tiered pricing, with different tier thresholds in each month. The first tier covers up to 2 therms/day in Jan and 1.48 therms/day in Feb. The price tiers were $2.68..$3.06/therm in Jan and $2.75..$3.14/therm in Feb.

The bill also described $1.37/therm and $1.44/therm procurement prices for Jan and Feb, respectively.

Full price as delivered, not including the flat $10 "basic facilities fee."

Propane is a bit more expensive then traditional electric heat depending on the year.

It used to be much cheaper so a lot of old houses that aren't near a natural gas line were built with propane heat. You might save $200-1000 a year by switching to a heatpump but that means 10+ years to offset a ~$10000 install cost for a large unit professionally installed with a new 220 circuit run for it etc so most people just keep paying for propane or maybe use small electric space heaters.

And if you are somewhere you need to worry about pipes freezing in power outage a while you are away or temps bellow the heatpumps minimum -15f range a propane stove is a nice option. Relatively cheap to install and they can be setup to run on a thermostat with no grid power.

If i was building a new house i'd go heatpump + a propane stove for back up heat and a dual fuel induction/propane range.

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