Heating with Gas vs Oil

Our Park Slope brownstone is heated by Oil.  We have gas for the clothes dryer and the oven.

We buy our Oil from Statewide.  They are very friendly and responsive.  They used to offer contract pricing on oil, but haven't mentioned it for a couple of seasons.  Maybe they got burned on options.  It's a big gamble for both sides.

At the moment I am not really sure if our price is fixed or floating.  They don't put a price per gallon on their invoices but I calculated that we are currently paying $2.81/gallon of heating oil. It was only $1.19/gallon when we bought the house only 4-1/2 years ago.  There are 138,690 BTUs in a gallon of oil.  And there are 100,000 BTUs in a Therm. Soo... we are paying about $2.02/Therm with oil.

We get our Natural Gas from Keyspan Energy.  The total delivery and supply charge excluding tax is $1.68/Therm.

So at the moment Gas is definitely a better deal than Oil.  Plus I understand that gas burners are more efficient than oil burners so that tilts the equation even further in the favor of gas.

If this trend continues then at some point there will be a switch to gas in our future.  If so I'll also be happy to reclaim the space taken up by our 275 gallon oil tank in the basement.  A new burner, gas or oil is not an insubstantial expense tho.  So mostly likely we'll be sticking with oil for the time being...

There an article in the Daily News that showed the price trend over the last couple of years.