Nice price on electricity. I pay at least twice that. Here are some numbers for you, based on your figures: A kilowatt of electricity is about 3,413 BTUs, and is $0.0636, which works out to be 53,660 BTUs per dollar. Electricity is 100% efficient, meaning that there are no combustion losses that go up the chimney at your house. Propane has about 92,000 BTUs per gallon, and is $2.50 gallon, which works out to be about 36,800 BTUs per dollar. Your existing water heater is prolly on the order of 60% efficient, which means that 40% of the BTUs out of a gallon of propane end up going up the chimney, and not in your house. As such, you are getting about 22,000 BTUs per dollar out of it. If you went with a new water heater, such as the Polaris which is 95% efficient, you would be getting about 34,900 BTUs per dollar after combustion losses. Based on your posted information, electricity would be about 65% the cost of propane for heating with a 95% efficiency water heater, and 41% of the cost of propane using your existing water heater. An electric water heater won't work because they donÂt produce enough BTUs to keep up with the demand on the house. But an electric boiler might, depending on the model and how manu BTUs your house requires to keep it warm on the coldest day of the year. An electric boiler will require a lot of electricity, though, prolly on the order of 100 amps. A 200 amp electric service to your house would be the minimum needed to run the electric boiler. You still need to address the ducting losses through your attic. If yours are anything like mine were, that is half the problem right there.

Are you still working on this? I have questions about more than the fridge. This is an awkward layout and there is enough space there that I think you must have better options. Have you looked at moving the dining room entry to the right? Shifting an opening is not a huge ordeal, even if that is a load bearing wall (not sure if it is but someone mentioned the possibility in an earlier post). I'll try to post something mocked up best my crude skills allow here. As I have it, I think that would be a 36" fridge and there is a pinch point. I'm not sure of the depth there, but with a counter depth, an 18" DW or some other tweaks with proper measurements, I think you could improve the function of the space. On the dining room side, any crown would remain or be replaced above the opening and a good contractor should be able to adjust the baseboards. Keep working the plan until you get the kinks out. I lived with two horrible kitchens (we're talking 2 burners and they aren't flat or heat that well, dying ovens, DW tiled in and praying it wouldn't die -- even though it was so loud I hated to run it) for ten years between the two of them until I was able to do my kitchen. I learned a lot along the way and had time to explore outside the box ideas, come back and go off in different directions. All that exploration really paid off in the end, and I plan to use it long enough to make up for any delays. Anyway, here's one rough idea in case you hadn't though of it.

We are just looking at re-doing our bathroom as well. Your dilemma of close quarters to the toilet sounds like ours. As well, we have a slab home so we can't just move the drain anywhere we want. Are you limited to 30 inches on the other end of the tub as well? Our current tub is a regular (very old) cast iron porcelain coated tub that is 30 x 59 3/4 inches. We can possibly afford a wider tub on the other end where there is no sink or toilet. So we are really interested in the Neptune Wind corner bathtub. It has options of air or whirlpool and I believe heated air. I saw another thread on hear about this tub and the person had it for a while and said it was the most comfortable tub out of literally 100 that she tried. I don't remember whose post that was. The word corner tub likely makes you think it won't fit, but check the link I provided. It is sometimes referred to as an offset corner tub. I saw it in a showroom and it is elegant looking. I should add that the photo with the link doesn't show the tub in an alcove but there are pics of it online in a 60 inch opening and that is what we will do if we get this tub. Here is a link that might be useful: Neptune Wind bath tub This post was edited by silken on Sun, Feb 1, 15 at 21:55

This is something not to wait on fixing. One are all of the gas appliances is not venting properly when the door is closed. These gas fired appliances you have, require a certain amount of fresh air to draft naturally. The moment the fresh air is cut off/reduced in that closet, those units will not draft properly. Either a plumber or HVAC contractor should be called to determine the requirements for those combined units. Sometimes a specifically designed power vent can be used to aid in venting. We had a similar situation on a indoor pool whereas the pool equipment, house boiler and hot water heater shared the same space indoors in the basement and the same chimney. In order to properly vent ALL the of the gas fired units, a certain roof top power vent was installed. Also, a dedicated duct was installed to bring fresh air to the room. When pool heaters especially do not vent properly for a period of time, soot can be produced on the heater exchanger and further deplete venting. The heater should be checked for this before any fix. A solution may be a simple as making the door louvered. But, do hire someone to determine the needs. CO2 is deadly.