With home heating oil soaring in price, more and more people in Grey and Bruce counties are looking to find an alternative to keep warm.
Union Gas is reporting an increase in calls from people wanting to switch to Natural Gas.
In the Grey-Bruce area, the first three months of the year resulted in double the number of conversions compared with the same quarter a year ago.
Company reps admit the number of conversions is small at 42 compared with 21 a year ago, but they add a lot of people are inquiring who can’t get Natural gas because they are not close to an existing line.
And January to March is not the big season for people ordering a new furnace.
Now that Oil is hovering at around $120 a barrel…. the price difference between heating with oil .. and heating with gas is signficant.
According to Union Gas Media Relations officer, Andrea Stass … a 2 thousand square foot home should cost about $11 hundred a year to heat on Natural gas.
Stass says if you have an old conventional oil furnace that vents into a chimney… it would likely cost 25 hundred dollars, so a switch to gas would save about 14 hundred dollars a year.
Stass admits the price of natural gas usually goes up when home heating rises.. but usually not by the same percentage.
