Around here the corn burning stoves went into houses like crazy. Corn seems to burn well, much less work than wood, little mess left for cleaning out. Takes small amount of corn to keep the WHOLE house warm. I was rather surpised at how enthusiastic the new owners are over corn stoves. Transportation may not be the whole cost, but tractors are fueled with gas and oil, to work the soil and bring in the crops. Tractors are not especially efficient in fuel usage, cost a bunch to produce those crops. Costs that farmer has to pass to buyers so farmer can at least pay his bills. Hay is supposed to be costing more, I know the truck to go get it runs on fuel that has more than doubled in cost since last year. Much equipment is diesel powered, even costlier than gas. Diesel has always been cheaper to produce, now they just WON'T produce it, keeping cost high. Bush and his Oil friends are making plenty of money. Keeping cost of doing business for truckers very high. Consumers pay that extra. I don't know if Ethanol is going to be cost effective as a fuel. We have a local plant being built 5 miles away, 60 new jobs in a very hard hit job market area. Everyone is excited, but for corn fuel to be useful, it can't cost more to produce than it costs to sell. At least the farmers can sell their product, so many were just losing money planting corn. Prices just never got where you could turn a profit. I buy our grain, mixed at a local mill. No commercial bagged food for the animals so I am not seeing those costs. We use quite a bit of corn in the horse feed, prices seem to be staying higher than other years. I think the oats come from Canada. Not sure why they are not local, we do have oat production. Dry dog food prices are higher, even on the junky stuff. Again, I would point at mostly fuel prices to raise a crop, then transportation to get products to market.

As in my post below, start with a HRU on your A/C. By electric heat do you mean a heat pump or is it straight electric heat as a backup for gas? The size of your house is a problem you won't be able to overcome. We GC'd our retirement home here in cent fl, kept it to about 2000 sq ft. and also used radiant barrier roof sheathing. We have a 6/12 pitch roof to maximize convection cooling of attic. How many of you live in that house? Two washers and dryers? We have two portable gens for power failures. A 8000 watt that will run the house and a small 1000 watt stashed away with a small 'window shaker' to utilize for sleeping at night. The size of your house no doubt dictates a very large stationary genset. The whole house propane units are obscenely costly to run...you don't realize how cheap you can buy electricity until you have to make it yourself. How often does it run automatically in 'maintenance mode'? That can consume a heap of gas. We incorporated any ideas we could think of in the planning to minimize solar heating...garage on west side of house, minimal west windows and doors, low-e glass, 24 inch overhangs plus 6" gutters, and a 10' ceiling to let the warmer air stratify above our heads. When we started the planning of our new house about a year and a half ago, we had no idea of the wild runup in energy costs. If we had we probably would have opted to build even smaller. As it is, we ended up with a house that runs about $120 monthly electric bill. We are out in the country and this includes our water pumping expense. We keep the air at 78 and all lighting is CF. Large windows and sliding doors help minimize the need for turning on the lights. Would have loved to had a gas range but even when we built we were concerned about the cost of propane so went all electric.

Good point MMELKO, I live ina na area where everyone commutes by train so had not thought of the drive. I think that may become a big factor if gas goes over about 3.50 or even a little over 3, I think that is where people start to change their habits (avoiding unessessary shopping trips) and at 4 per gallon they start car pooling and the like. Money is not tight but I know when gas prices were in the 3s last summer I really cut back on unecessary drives. As for home heating, it really depends, yes if you cannot afford the heat on a 1300 sq ft starter home with 8 foot ceilings, then yes you need to rethink your purchase. However, if the issue is a 25 ft or 14 ft vaulted ceilings on a 4500-6500 sq ft house, that can cost an extra 500 per month (over a house of the same size with ordinary ceilings). If I allocate a certain amount to my housing costs and include monthly utilities, for that 500 I can buy $75k more house. I may end up buying the vaulted ceiling one but I will buy it knowing that I am more at the mercy of oil and gas costs than in another house of similar size

I wish people would get their heads out of wherever they are and realize big cars do NOT have to be gas hogs! My old GF had a Buick LeSabre - 33 MPG. Her Park Avenue gets 25-30 MPG. Her daughter's LeSabre 27-30 MPG. A friend had a Caprice, 30-35 MPG. Granted, it's not like a friends Metro at 45 mpg or another's Aspire at 40 mpg, but then again I'd much rather take a trip in the Caprice, Park Ave or LeSabre than in the Geo. I've gotten 27 mpg more than once with my van. Granted, it's not all the time but considering it's a shoebox on wheels, that's pretty darn good in my humble opinion. I'm not a little person and with bad hips and other joints, I do not fit in those pretzel-makers anymore. It's was hideously painful driving my sisters Saturn on a 75 mile trip. I had to stop and get out after 50 miles it was so uncomfortable. I can go hundreds of miles without issue in my van, even in my mini pickup when I had that. To me the sad part was the work on the hydrogen vehicles is essentially dead. That made a lot more sense to me than electric cars. And this hype over hybrids is a lot of hype too when you look at the energy expended to build them and the whole picture. Granted they're in their infancy and that should improve, but if people would just plain quit with the unnecessary driving, many could drive motorhomes since the amount of gas saved making a trip to the store 3 times a day, cruising to the mall, run out to eat every meal instead of making something at home and the myriad of other reasons. But obviously with the devastation of the economy, people have decided to cut back at least some on the driving. It's sad to say, but in a way it's good in that now if people would LEARN from it, we'd be better off for the future. I don't like the guy's statement, but he's in business so I understand it. Let's face it, realtors like economic turmoil. More houses to sell. Body shops love ice, snow and hail. Roofers and contractors love tornados and hail. Building supply material providers love hurricanes. The "competition" loves seeing recalls on their competitors' items, etc. You can't tell me Toyota and others aren't smiling over GM and Chrysler's dilemmas. I would venture to say Ford is holding back a Mona Lisa look too.