What it costs to heat an Oklahoma home with electric or gas

Electric heat is 100% efficient, but what they don't tell you about that 100% efficiency is it can actually cost you more than an 80% gas furnace of an equivalent size. The math doesn't lie. I'm Tucker Yarbro with Yarbro and Sons Heating, Cooling, and Plumbing. We've been in business since 1988 serving the Oklahoma City metro area. We've done tens of thousands of HVAC and plumbing installs and keeping your home comfortable is what [music] we do. Let's get into it. So, whenever I say electric heat is 100% efficient and it costs more than an 80% gas equivalent, here's what I mean. What I'm looking at is efficiency on the AFUE scale, which is the annual fuel utilization efficiency scale saying how much heat are we actually getting per dollar that we put into a system. So, like if we think of efficiency ratings again like dollars and cents. There's 100 pennies in $1, right? So, if we put $1 into our electric heater, because electric heat strips are 100% efficient, they will in turn give your home 100% or 100 pennies of heat. On an 80% gas furnace, same deal. 80 cents of heat, 20% gets off-gassed into the atmosphere. A 97% gas furnace, it gives you 97 pennies of heat. So, whenever we're looking at the AFUE rating, it's easy to think, well, electric is obviously more efficient. It's going to be way better and that's what we should roll with and that's why, you know, gas furnaces and propane furnaces, they're the devil and you shouldn't have them in your home. Well, that's not not not entirely the case, guys. You might be bringing the pitchforks out a little too early because your wallet has a say in the matter. And also, too, like I won't get into it, but like power plant efficiency, like unless you're like true off-grid green energy, like power plants aren't 80% efficient. They lose a ton to heat and off-gassing. So, that's that's a video for another person. I'm not the guy to talk about that, but that is the truth. So, whenever we look at how efficient something is and where your dollar actually goes, that's what I'm looking for is I want to know, okay, how many dollars of heat do we get out versus how much heat does it actually produce? And that's where the game really starts to change. And we're looking at this from a pure gas heat and a pure electric heat. We've got some dark horses that we'll talk about at the end when it comes to heat pump and dual fuel stuff, which is the most efficient setup. So, let's get into it. So, the gas heat {slash} electric heat gotcha moments. Here's what it looks like. Whenever you buy an electric air handler, you get heat strips. Note, you probably shouldn't just have electric heat to heat your home. But, if you do, here's kind of why I think you might have it and what you could do about it. Is in a lot of homes, if you're buying a kind of a a medium-sized home in a cookie-cutter community, kind of a bedroom community that was built by a mass builder, a lot of times they put the cheapest equipment into the home that they possibly can because cheaper equipment means they can make more margin. They're not the ones who are going to be footing the bill for the utilities, correct? So, whenever it comes time to sell the house, they need the price to look as enticing as possible, and running gas lines all over the house and getting gas service to the house adds costs that maybe they don't want to have to factor in when they sell the home. So, instead of doing that, they just go with a total electric system, which if they have a heat pump in place, that's perfectly fine. However, most of the time, you and I both know this, if you've paid that electric bill, you know this, that's not the case of what happens in a lot of these bedroom communities. And so, the the gotcha moment is because the one who built the house, the person who built the house isn't going to be the one paying the bills, well, they're not too concerned about how much that utility bill is after the fact. They were just concerned about how much it cost to install that system. And on the onset, because they didn't have to run gas line everywhere and a flue vent out the attic or out the ceiling, well, or I guess roof. They didn't have to run a flue out the roof. The ceiling is below the unit if it's in an attic, you know. Not just a hat rack, my friends. So, whenever it comes time to install, if you're not having to deal with a flue and not having to deal with the gas line, well, you're not going to have to have the extra cost added to do that. But, what happens to you, the homeowner, is unfortunately, it increases your utility bill. And what we're going to look at is basically the total I'm I'm going to reference my notes here because what I want to make sure of is that we get the math correct here. All right. So, we're going to get a little bit nerdy. We're going to get a little bit deep in the weeds here, which is we're going to look at how much heat does a home in Oklahoma require every winter. And a home in Oklahoma requires about 500 therms of heat. It's just a measurement of heat. It's a total like kind of uh view of how many BTUs we've produced, which is the British thermal unit, which is how we rate how much heat a heater is capable of putting out. And with a Oklahoma home requiring 500 therms of heat every winter, what it looks like is if you have 100% efficiency electric heat strips, remember they are 100% efficient, and on paper 100% efficiency means that you should probably go that direction. But, the reality is is because of the amperage and the wattage that they're going to be pulling in order to make heat, it is going to just rack that electric bill up. And in Oklahoma, gas and propane are often a lot cheaper than your electric bill is. So, to create So, [clears throat] to create 500 therms of electric heat, it would cost the average Oklahoman $1,890 per winter to heat their home, which is kind of a crazy number when you compare to an 80% gas furnace of the equivalent therm requirement of 500 therm requirement, it is going to cost $635. So, we're talking about a third of the cost of an electric heater versus an 80% gas furnace. And the numbers work out even better whenever you look at a 97% gas furnace. A 97% gas furnace is only going to cost $525 to heat that home during the wintertime. So, whenever you look at how much heat is required for a house, how much it costs to run your electric heat strips, and how little it costs to heat your home via gas, the math gets really favorable in leaning towards gas. And that's where the efficiency rating of the AFUE rating aren't all that matters because, you know, an electric isn't rated in AFUE, but it's an equivalency, right? We're looking at dollars in versus dollars of heat out. How can we help our homeowners who have total electric? Maybe they don't have gas service on their house and they're not in a spot where they can get propane or gas to the place. Well, here's what you can do. The dark horses that I mentioned at the beginning of the the video, which is a heat pump. A heat pump is able to run your air conditioner in reverse. It's a crazy concept. Thermodynamics is cool, but basically we're able to run your air conditioner in reverse and make your cooling coil, your evaporator coil, set outside now and your condenser coil or the warmer coil set inside. The problem and the drawback that people have with a heat pump is it's not like this warm toasty air. It's kind of like this lukewarmish air and to our, you know, our our human skin, well, it doesn't feel super warm because we're setting it like 97° and so if you put your hand up to a vent and you feel that air coming out and it's only blowing at 80°. There's a non-zero chance that it might actually feel kind of cool to you, but you go to the thermostat and the thermostat shows that it's keeping up and it's nice and warm and it's actually reaching set point. But yeah, when you go feel it, it doesn't feel that way. That sensible heat, a lot of times somebody who's used to a gas appliance or a propane appliance, they like that warm toasty air and that warm toasty air on a heat pump isn't going to happen unless the heat strips are there and they're firing. And on a heat pump we'll always have electric backup heat because eventually it'll get so cold that, well, we probably should switch over to running our electric heat strips so that we can pump more heat faster into the home. So on a heat pump, it's going to be able to run A lot of these heat pumps nowadays are rated to run down to 0° Fahrenheit. Now, I wouldn't say run them down to 0° Fahrenheit. My switch point is probably around like 15° Fahrenheit. And then you switch over to your electric heat strips. But that is kind of where electric can make sense and how you can win on the electric um the electric game, if you will. So, heat pump moves heat, it doesn't make heat. So it's just like an air conditioner. Like whenever a gas furnace is firing, it is actively making heat because we are burning gas or propane. On electric side, it is making heat because it is heating up those heat strips and it is drawing power in and that power is then getting used to heat the home. On a heat pump, all it's doing, just like your air conditioner does, is it's running refrigerant through the lines, it's moving heat from one area into another area. When your air conditioner is running, it's moving heat from inside your house through the transportation vehicle of cold refrigerant outside and off-gassing it outside. Not really off-gassing it, but blowing air across it and cooling it. You get the picture. And then in the wintertime, during heat pump season, you flip that and now what's happening is via the vehicle of cold refrigerant, again, we are moving heat inside. And it's hard to kind of wrap your head around until we reach like absolute zero on the Kelvin scale, there's still heat outside to be pulled. Now, heat pumps, again, like I said, really only rated to run down to 0° uh Fahrenheit and then at that point you need to switch over, but the reason why you don't get that warm toasty air and maybe it's not as uh you know, vibing, the the vibes feel, you know, I I I like the warm toasty air. It kind of makes you feel like, "Okay, winter's here. We made some things happen. It's time to flip the heater on." Well, whenever you have a heat pump, you don't really get that and there's, you know, get over it. You know what I'm saying? If you only have the option of electric heat versus heat pump, buy a heat pump because a heat pump is going to be way more efficient than running your electric heat strips all the time, like we talked about. Let's see. It is $1,890 per winter in Oklahoma to run the electric heat strips in your house all winter long. That is absolutely insane, especially given that you have other options. And so whenever we look at the balancing point of where like you could have a heat pump versus gas furnace running, that is like the ideal of ideals. If you can have what we call a dual fuel setup, that's our other dark horse. So we had the heat pump and now we got the dual fuel setup. And dual fuel setup is where we have a heat pump and a gas furnace because, holy cow, at that point we have reached comfort nirvana. I know you never thought we'd get there after hundreds of videos, thousands of hours of watch time, you never thought we would reach comfort Nirvana, but yet here we are. The dual fuel heat pump setup. What this is is we have a heat pump, we got a gas furnace. Whenever we are running, here's what I say, is if you're running that heat pump, just keep running it. You know, if it's 50° outside and you want to keep your house at a nice and warm 68° outstanding. Your heat pump will do that all day long. It'll be cheaper than running your gas furnace, but then come the cold night. You know, whenever you your your wife comes and she tries to put her cold toes on your back, you know, or the dogs are trying to curl up next to you because it's way too cold. On that cold night, instead of having to flip over to expensive heat strips, you're able to switch over to nice, warm, toasty gas-fired heat. Now, on a dual fuel setup, we're probably going to have to have a 90% furnace, which means we're going to have to have PVC venting, which means we probably don't want to put it in an attic. That's a video for another time. But, you can have this setup. This is the most efficient way to heat and cool your home. It is also the most expensive. I'm not even going to beat around the bush on that. It's the most expensive way to heat and cool your home. But, if you are in your forever home, if you're thinking this is the place that we are going to live forever, and we want to make sure that we have the best, we want the Cadillac of Cadillacs, the Maserati of Maseratis, a dual fuel heat pump setup is going to be the way that you can do that because heating your home with a 80% or a 90% gas furnace, if that's your only option, that is going to be the most efficient conventional way to heat your home. Electric heat strips on a conventional home should be thrown out with the bathwater. We should not even consider trying to heat our home exclusively on heat strips. You're going to be literally be wasting a thousands of dollars. And one of the things I want to make sure of is that you don't throw good money after bad, and that is bad money. So, if you're curious what it costs to replace your system with maybe a dual fuel setup, you can click the link below or you can scan the QR code here, and you can find out what it costs to replace your home's maybe crappy total electric system with a brand new dual fuel heat pump setup in less than a couple minutes. We just need your name, your number, address, and boom, you got a price. No gimmicks, no guess around. You can see what it costs to do it straight from Yarborough and Sons. Guys, beyond that, do something nice for somebody. Might change your life. I'm out. >> Yarborough [singing] and Sons, Yarborough and Sons, [music] these are the folks you should [singing] know. No need [music] to sweat, no need to fret. Call 485-347-000. [singing] [music]