We live in MD, in the DC/Baltimore suburbs although it's pretty rural out here (horse farm across the street, state park south of us). When we built 12 years ago our choices were electric heat pump or oil...there is no gas piped out here. A heat pump heated our townhouse b/f we built and I hated it b/c it took so long to warm up the house and if I wanted a "quick fix" I couldn't stand over the register to warm up quickly! I grew up with natural gas so I am used to HOT air coming out of registers and oil gives me that, as well as the "quick fix" to warm up quickly...and to dry mittens and boots :-) We have a maintenance contract to have them come twice a year...in late summer to service the furnace and late winter to service the A/C. We also have automatic oil delivery and, as far as I know, we still have a "budget plan" with fixed payments throughout the year. Although, since oil has risen so much lately, we actually voluntarily raised our monthly payment so we wouldn't owe a lot at the end of the season. We haven't had an oil delivery lately so I don't know how much it is now...but I'm sure it's quite high...they're forecasting a big jump in home heating oil prices this winter. We're actually considering getting a pellet stove to supplement the heat so we don't use so much oil...but I haven't looked into it too deeply yet to see if it's actually worth it. Besides, the kitchen remodel comes first! When the oil is delivered, the tanker connects to a pipe on the outside of our house that feeds into the 250 gallon tank in our basement. HTH!

The water heater is typically 4500 watts which is a lot but it doesn't run that much. Sure you can improve on it but here are a few numbers to chew on - based on national average electric rates. Standby loss for a modern hot water heater - $30 a year. This is what you could save if you shut it off all the time. So if you travel 50% of the time and shut it off then, you could save $15 a year. The average family uses $500 or so to heat the water with electricity per year. So standby loses are a very small proportion of that. Switching to a heat pump model cuts the usage down to about $200 a year. They cost $1000 so if you can do it, it is not a bad idea. Oil heat and electric heat are pretty close in cost depending on your local rates. So adding the duct from the main furnace won't actually save you any money (unless your electric is really high). I say this all the time. If you live in the North in an old house with no access to NG, you should do one of two things - move or install geothermal. Sure geo might cost $40k ($30k after tax credit) but will recover its cost easily amortized over its life. You live in a very blue state so there may be state programs to help you finance it. I'm going to throw out a guess. Your heating costs are somewhere around $5000 a year. Geo could make that $1500. The interest+principal on a $30k loan for 10 years would make that a break even proposition and all the installed cost would be recouped at resale. Strange how the NE states haven't all figured a way to rip out the oil and electric heat at time of sale and wrap geo into the mortgage....

Stuff Sales Did Not Tell You If you have access to natural gas, it will be the lowest cost per BTU output. These days, high efficiency natural gas furnaces are available that approaches 95% efficiency. However, these require a completely new installation and most do not use the existing chimneys. The furnace intake and exhaust passes through a pair of 4 to 6 inch diameter holes in an outside wall. For basement installations, the favored place for these holes is through the joist header on an outside wall. The location of these tubes may be a problem for existing houses. In snow country, these should be located such that those will not be blocked by snow. These high efficiency furnaces extract so much heat from the exhaust that water vapor condenses out and a drain must be provided for this. Normally, this drain is small diameter tubing routed to a floor drain. The same drain is used for the air cooling coils if installed. If you have another appliance that uses the chimney such as a water heater, a liner will be placed in the chimney. Removal of chimney exhaust from an older furnace causes the chimney to run too cool and condensation from a gas fired water heater will collect on the walls. This acidic condensate may attack the chimney mortar and liner. That the reason for a liner. Another reason is to combat ice build-up in cold climates. Here in Wisconsin, chimneys have frozen shut in winter with disastrous results. This rarely happened with low efficiency furnaces, but resurfaced with high efficiency furnaces. These high efficiency furnaces use an electronic control board that manages a variety of functions, whereas older furnaces had mostly electo-mechacnical controls. The controls for those older furnaces had been developed and used over many years and were reliable, more reliable than the newer electronic control boards. Those older controls were more easily diagnosed and repaired. However, these new control boards offer better control with variable response, and can be paired with thermostats that many offer different heat/cool levels at differing time periods during the day. Codes in my area require a dedicated 20 amp circuit to serve the new high efficiency furnaces. My old furnace got along fine on a 15 amp circuit that was shared with a couple of lights. If you do not have the space or capacity for another circuit in your service entrance box, there will be an added cost for adding a furnace circuit. If you have the capacity in your box, a dedicated circuit may yet be required, but, is a simple addition.

GreenDesigns, I have a few issues with your post, so I'm going to take the liberty of quoting parts of it below, to better respond to them individually. GreenDesigns: "A consumer grade electric range is not a gas range. Its very rare for any range, electric or gas, to have 0 as the clearance needs. RTFM." I read the 'F' manufacturer's installation instructions for my consumer grade GE electric range, as posted on the GE website, and quoted above and here: "Electric ranges require 0" side wall spacing above counter height... ...30 inches between the cooktop and bottom of the cabinet above. 0 inches for sides below the cooktop." GreenDesigns: "Placing tile, or stainless, or stone, directly over a wood studded wall without an insulating air gap, is violating the fire code, if it places that wood stud within the prohibited zone for combustibles." Come to think of it, the studs in that wall are metal. And here I aways thought the builders had just been cheaping out. GreenDesigns: "The reason that I mention an insulating air gap, is because that is how a manufacturer’s “suggested”( but required) backguard works to comply with code. There’s a small gap between it and the wall, so it doesn’t directly conduct heat into the wall assembly." While the 0" spacing mention in the manufacturers installation instructions appear to only require that I not somehow place the range inside the wall cavity, the shape of the range prevents me from placing the cooktop directly in contact with the wall. Space being at such a premium in my kitchen, it's not that I haven't (inadvisedly, as I now see) tried. The gap currently stands at 3/8 of an inch. GreenDesigns: "Plastic is extremely flammable." Well, yes and no. That's kind of like saying "Kitchens have extremely little counterspace." While you will seldom find anyone saying the their kitchen has too much counter space, thoughtfully designed mansions generally have more than improvisationally built tiny homes. As for the flammability of plastics, "Nitrate"-type celluloid filmstock fell out of use due to its nasty tendency to burst spontaneously into flame, while diallyl phthalate is suitable for high-temperature use in applications like jet fighter hydraulic systems. Polycarbonate, the polymer used in the greenhouse sheeting I mentioned, is a self-extinguishing material with a range of UL94 Flammability Ratings from V-0 to V-2, depending on the details of manufacture. Greenhouse sheeting can probably be assumed to be at the more flammable end of that range; but could generally be expected be substantially less flammable than, say, polypropylene or polymethylmethacrylate GreenDesigns: "Enthusiastic ignorance is still ignorance." Well, geez. Was it my vast oversimplification of the Glass-Transition Temperature of polycarbonate as the temperature that it "doesn't start melting until" that made me seem ignorant? Or that I did not fully research all my ideas elsewhere before seeking input and information on them here? GreenDesigns: "Please refrain from giving advice that will catch someone's Kitchen on fire and result in toxic fumes both. Do t guess. Either know the answer and answer. Or don’t answer. Don’t stick in a bunch of dangerous BS." It was not my intention to give advice, or to "answer" as if I were some all-knowing authority. I meant to put forward ideas and hoped to discuss their merits. (Admittedly, when directly challenged to "RTFM," I did answer that by quoting the best authority I could readily find.) GreenDesigns: "Stick with talking pretty colors and decor." It seems I may have to. I was looking forward to have a interesting discussion here. Instead, I mostly got responses saying that the problem could not be solved or that everything I had suggested was wrong, without saying why or giving much other information at all. And, while my problem has been solved, it was not any of the knowledgeable experts who were so quick with those responses who were actually able to help - it was the OP. I don't speak the language of didactic imperative very well, and that seems to be making it rather hard for me to converse. I don't take well to direct insults, either, and that's making it rather hard for me to want to converse with some of you.