For all of my pre-country life (50 years), I lived in homes heated by natural gas. It was just as the ads say: clean, easy & relatively inexpensive. The gas supplier also sold the furnaces & provided maintenance service. We never gave heating a second thought, really.

When we moved here, we had a rude awakening. I don’t expect that many rural areas have the infrastructure in place for natural gas. This one certainly doesn’t. That leaves us with the choices of electric heat, oil or wood (and perhaps solar or other alternative not yet investigated.) Your choice will depend on varying factors.

For us, in this drafty old farmhouse, heating is an expensive issue. We have a combination oil/wood furnace. The theory is that we would use wood most of the time, and the oil burner would kick in if the thermostat dropped below a certain point when we didn’t want get out of a warm bed (for example, at 4 a.m.) and go down into a cold, dark cellar.

Heating exclusively with oil is prohibitively expensive for us because of the heat-holding inefficiency of our house. We have also renovated part of the barn for use as a home office, and heat that with electric baseboard heaters. The power bills nearly bankrupt us each winter.

So we have burned wood for most of the last six years. And that’s another blog post altogether.

Be prepared if you are moving to the country for the first time for some hard decisions about your heating.

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