What It Will Cost to Heat Your Home

Buffalo, N.Y., gets cold during the winter. Really cold. Just ask any Bills fan who has attended a home football game. The average low temperature during the months of January and February is 16 degrees Fahrenheit. Boston, at the same latitude, posts average lows of 23 degrees during that time.

Yet the typical Buffalo family will spend $333 less to heat a home this year than families in Boston do. In fact, Buffalo residents will likely spend less this winter than those in Washington, D.C., who right now are complaining about the oppressive heat in the Potomac River Valley.

Why? The need for heat depends on temperature, of course. But local prices, inventories, refining capacity and choice of heat also play a role. Eight-eight percent of Buffalonians use natural gas; this is the most efficient and least volatile energy source available. Only 2% of residents use more expensive heating oil, compared with 36% of Bostonians.

Other spots feeling the heat include Minneapolis, Boston, New York and Philadelphia. All rely heavily on natural gas and heating oil, which are up 7% and 38%, respectively, this year, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

Behind the Numbers

The department supplied, for this story, 12-month projections for the local costs of heating oil, electricity, propane and natural gas, the four most popular heat sources in America. To determine our list, we examined the country's 40 largest U.S. Census-designated metro areas, singled out 20 based on size and geographical representation, then calculated how much an average family of four with a 2,100-square-foot house would spend each month to heat its home.

Energy demand figures came from 10 years of National Weather Service data on what are called "heating degree days." The index measures daily temperature and power demand and points to how much colder the outside temperature is than a room temperature of 65 degrees Fahrenheit. This makes a difference, because it takes more energy to heat a home on a five-degree day than on a 45-degree one. The colder the day, the more British thermal units (BTU) of heat are required.

As you might expect Minneapolis, Buffalo and Detroit had the coldest climates of the cities we measured. But heating bills in those cities don't necessarily reflect that.

That's because not all heating sources are created equally. On a dollars per BTU level, natural gas is more efficient than electricity, heating oil or propane. Midwesterners are much more likely to heat their homes with natural gas. As a result, in Chicago, where 90% of homeowners use natural gas, the average monthly heating bill is less than in Baltimore, a far warmer spot where only 46% of homeowners rely on natural gas. Like their neighbors in Washington, D.C., Baltimore residents rely heavily for their heating needs on electricity, a less efficient energy source on a dollar for dollar level.

So why don't all cities switch to natural gas? Installing new heating systems can cost thousands of dollars, for one. Also, prices for heating products vary regionally. In Boston, 1,000 cubic feet of natural gas costs $17.60, compared with $13.02 in Minneapolis. At those prices, if all Bostonians switched to natural gas, they'd save $622 a year on average, which, while good, doesn't seem enough to motivate large-scale change.

Of course, if oil drops to $60 a barrel, as some analysts are projecting, Bostonians will look pretty smart for not throwing out their oil heaters.