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When it comes to keeping your southern Maine home warm and cozy through a down east winter, heating oil is a safe and efficient way to heat your home. This is especially the case with our long, raw winter seasons. Other fuels just don’t provide the same heating energy!
If you’re new to the northeast, or perhaps you’ve just purchased your first home (congratulations!), you may have a few questions about what exactly heating oil is, or why you need it. Here are answers to some of the questions we get most often from both new and existing customers alike:
Heating oil is a refined form of crude oil that comes from deep wells both on land and offshore. Most heating oil today is #2 heating oil, and ALL the heating oil in Maine is ultra-low sulfur heating oil.
Ultra-low sulfur heating oil is cleaner—and cleaner-burning—than “regular” heating oil.
Heating oil has a higher BTU output per gallon. That means it will warm up your home faster than other types of fuels such as electric home heating, for example.
Higher BTUs also means you’ll use your heating oil supply at a slower pace, on average, than, say, propane. That means you will pay less to heat your house with heating oil, even if the per-gallon cost of propane itself is less.
Heating systems and equipment that run on oil are generally less expensive to purchase and tend to last longer as well. For example, a heating oil-fired furnace can last 28 years, while a heating oil-fired boiler can last 25 years. New heating oil systems also now burn fuel 99.9% cleanly, according to studies conducted at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven Laboratory. This means heating oil is exceptionally better for the environment than it used to be even as recently as thirty years ago.
Heating oil is an incredibly safe fuel. It doesn’t ignite at room temperature and is nonflammable in liquid form. To burn, it must be heated to 114° and vaporized via combustion process.
If it’s stored properly, heating oil is safe for the environment, too.
The oil used in homes today is dramatically different than the oil burned in the past. Thanks in part to the transition to ultra-low sulfur heating oil, particulate emissions have been reduced significantly from the already low levels of the past few decades.
So just how much cleaner is it? Traditional heating oil has a sulfur content of up to 4,000 parts per million. In contrast, ultra-low sulfur heating oil has a sulfur content of just 15 parts per million. And because it’s so clean-burning, ultra-low sulfur heating oil improves the efficiency of your heating system—saving you money by helping your system last longer and reducing breakdowns.
If you heat your home with oil, you need a heating oil company you can count on for reliable delivery service. PitStop Propane and Fuels has been providing reliable heating oil delivery to customers in southern Maine for more than 30 years. We provide convenient automatic delivery service that helps you avoid runouts while eliminating the hassles of having to check your tank gauge. We also offer wireless tank monitoring too for both propane and heating oil fuels!
Contact us today to learn more and become a customer. We’d love to show you the difference we can make.