Getting that oil tank filled twice a year in the North East baby
I would suggest clarifying if fewer people vs more people is proportion of people or total number of people.
It looks like the latter but itd be good for it to be stated.
Finally a truly beautiful and informative graph! Love it
It’s shocking that there are any places left where wood predominates. It’s insane that a lot of those places are deserts.
I’d like to see one for Europe
I think the correlation is when the areas were populated, or with Alaska, also a lot to do with their natural resources.
What does it mean to heat a house with oil?
Curious how this accounts for multiple sources of heating in the same home. I live in New England, and most of my neighbors have wood or pellet stoves as well as oil heat.
I was in a house for a decade that had an old coal shoot, an old buried oil tank, an old woodstove in the basement, …house had been switched to central air electric heat pump, while some neighbors had propane tanks.
A real melting pot of heating options.
It’d be interesting to see resistive heat vs heat pump breakdown for electricity
TIL that oil heat is almost exclusively used PA through ME. From that region and thought plenty of places in US use home heating oil, totally not the case. Interesting.
Heating oil in America is Diesel fuel dyed red. FYI
Interesting that warmer climates are mostly electric heat except Atlanta, Houston, Southern California and a few other spots.
You can see why Texas ran out of electricity in 2021 – too many houses depending on electricity for heat. And most of them don’t have heat pumps so they aren’t very efficient.
I am in the north east but use multiple sources.
Propane-fired high efficiency hot water boiler with cast iron radiators. Nice thing about this is that if the power is out I only need 150w to run the boiler.
Electric baseboard for space heating or supplementing rooms individually. Easy to install and dirt cheap overnight when power prices are very low.
Electric furnace. Supplemental, mainly overnight when electricity is cheap, saves money on propane.
Pellet stove in an out building.
I looked into a heat pump, but even with my existing ducting and air handler couldn’t find a quote under $20k to install.
There is a lot more eletrical heating going on in Texas than I expected and natural guess only around the cites.
That’s a lot of propane and propane accessory users I tell you huwhat
The division between North and South in this map is staggering
Interesting that – regardless of geographic region – natural gas dominates in cities.
Is it just that the infrastructure of laying down natural gas lines is much more efficient than the other energy sources in densely populated areas?
I wonder how many of the wood areas are pellet stoves or just really rural. Looking at Alaska and realizing that a lot of those are remote areas where oil delivery would be expensive, but trees are plentiful and the population is low.
I’d love to see this map for each of the different heating types. I’d imagine there are some areas where there is barely a majority type that would be interesting to see. Most of rural Illinois is on propane but the small towns are on gas and as a result it shows Illinois as being almost entirely natural gas.
Looks like Texas needs Hank Hill more than ever right now
lol a county level scatterplot of “% of households that heat with natural gas or oil” and “% of vote share for Dem candidates” would go off
Huh, I never realized oil heat was mostly a Northeast thing.
Why does electric dominate the South and Cascadia? Seem to be different climates.
Not being on gas or electricity seems crazy to me. Wood is cheap yeah, but the particulates are awful for you, and oil must be ridiculously expensive.
Does geothermal heating not work due to the geography or is it just an underdeveloped country thing?
Great graph, but slightly inaccurate around the Gulf coast. We use mainly solar energy to heat our homes.
No, not solar panels. Literal solar energy. Like, the sun makes it so damn hot here, that even when it gets down in the 40s, we just say, “Eh, throw on some sweatpants. It’ll be 70* tomorrow. I’m not turning on the heater – it smells like burnt dust.”
Hank Hill is down bad with propane in Texas 🙁
When I lived in Hawaii, our house didn’t have a heater so I guess I could have bought a space heater if I really needed it.
It says my area is yellow, but based on the smell, look and air quality we should definitely be green. I stg all my neighbors are using wood to heat their homes.
A little surprised to see less green in the Nashville area. When I was moving here, I was caught pretty off guard at the amount of places I looked at that had woodburning fireplaces.
It needs a correlation map showing how the electricity is generated for those that heat with electric heaters. Hydro, natural gas, coal, nuclear, solar?
TIL that I live in a small area of the US that still uses wood
One season of oil heat was going to cost more than converting to natural gas and the season’s gas bill in 2008 and I’m sure it got worse. It’s insane how many people are still on oil heat.
Kind of hard to believe most of rural Alaska (places where there are no roads!) is heating with oil. I would have bet a large sum of money that it’d be wood for nearly everyone there.
We use a propane’s heater plus a wood stove. The wood stove is for when the cold is constant and the propane is for a variable condition like October or November.
Oil for heat. Learned something new.
Would love to see how much of that electricity is from renewable sources.
In south east Texas my mom would just leave the oven on
We open the oven door after cooking dinner that’s all we got
![How do people in the US heat their homes? [OC]](https://www.europesays.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/334iiuxpo16e1-1920x1024.png)
44 comments
Data: [American Community Survey](https://www.census.gov/acs/www/about/why-we-ask-each-question/heating/) from the US Census Bureau.
Tools: ArcGIS Pro
More information: https://www.maps.com/home-heating-fuels/
Getting that oil tank filled twice a year in the North East baby
I would suggest clarifying if fewer people vs more people is proportion of people or total number of people.
It looks like the latter but itd be good for it to be stated.
Finally a truly beautiful and informative graph! Love it
It’s shocking that there are any places left where wood predominates. It’s insane that a lot of those places are deserts.
I’d like to see one for Europe
I think the correlation is when the areas were populated, or with Alaska, also a lot to do with their natural resources.
What does it mean to heat a house with oil?
Curious how this accounts for multiple sources of heating in the same home. I live in New England, and most of my neighbors have wood or pellet stoves as well as oil heat.
I was in a house for a decade that had an old coal shoot, an old buried oil tank, an old woodstove in the basement, …house had been switched to central air electric heat pump, while some neighbors had propane tanks.
A real melting pot of heating options.
It’d be interesting to see resistive heat vs heat pump breakdown for electricity
TIL that oil heat is almost exclusively used PA through ME. From that region and thought plenty of places in US use home heating oil, totally not the case. Interesting.
Heating oil in America is Diesel fuel dyed red. FYI
Interesting that warmer climates are mostly electric heat except Atlanta, Houston, Southern California and a few other spots.
You can see why Texas ran out of electricity in 2021 – too many houses depending on electricity for heat. And most of them don’t have heat pumps so they aren’t very efficient.
I am in the north east but use multiple sources.
Propane-fired high efficiency hot water boiler with cast iron radiators. Nice thing about this is that if the power is out I only need 150w to run the boiler.
Electric baseboard for space heating or supplementing rooms individually. Easy to install and dirt cheap overnight when power prices are very low.
Electric furnace. Supplemental, mainly overnight when electricity is cheap, saves money on propane.
Pellet stove in an out building.
I looked into a heat pump, but even with my existing ducting and air handler couldn’t find a quote under $20k to install.
There is a lot more eletrical heating going on in Texas than I expected and natural guess only around the cites.
That’s a lot of propane and propane accessory users I tell you huwhat
The division between North and South in this map is staggering
Interesting that – regardless of geographic region – natural gas dominates in cities.
Is it just that the infrastructure of laying down natural gas lines is much more efficient than the other energy sources in densely populated areas?
I wonder how many of the wood areas are pellet stoves or just really rural. Looking at Alaska and realizing that a lot of those are remote areas where oil delivery would be expensive, but trees are plentiful and the population is low.
I’d love to see this map for each of the different heating types. I’d imagine there are some areas where there is barely a majority type that would be interesting to see. Most of rural Illinois is on propane but the small towns are on gas and as a result it shows Illinois as being almost entirely natural gas.
Looks like Texas needs Hank Hill more than ever right now
lol a county level scatterplot of “% of households that heat with natural gas or oil” and “% of vote share for Dem candidates” would go off
Time for heat pumps. r/electrifyeverything
In case anyone is interested, here’s an article (and helpful infographic) looking at the carbon footprint of different residential heat sources: [https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201116-climate-change-how-to-cut-the-carbon-emissions-from-heating](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201116-climate-change-how-to-cut-the-carbon-emissions-from-heating)
Huh, I never realized oil heat was mostly a Northeast thing.
Why does electric dominate the South and Cascadia? Seem to be different climates.
Not being on gas or electricity seems crazy to me. Wood is cheap yeah, but the particulates are awful for you, and oil must be ridiculously expensive.
Does geothermal heating not work due to the geography or is it just an underdeveloped country thing?
Great graph, but slightly inaccurate around the Gulf coast. We use mainly solar energy to heat our homes.
No, not solar panels. Literal solar energy. Like, the sun makes it so damn hot here, that even when it gets down in the 40s, we just say, “Eh, throw on some sweatpants. It’ll be 70* tomorrow. I’m not turning on the heater – it smells like burnt dust.”
Hank Hill is down bad with propane in Texas 🙁
When I lived in Hawaii, our house didn’t have a heater so I guess I could have bought a space heater if I really needed it.
It says my area is yellow, but based on the smell, look and air quality we should definitely be green. I stg all my neighbors are using wood to heat their homes.
A little surprised to see less green in the Nashville area. When I was moving here, I was caught pretty off guard at the amount of places I looked at that had woodburning fireplaces.
It needs a correlation map showing how the electricity is generated for those that heat with electric heaters. Hydro, natural gas, coal, nuclear, solar?
TIL that I live in a small area of the US that still uses wood
One season of oil heat was going to cost more than converting to natural gas and the season’s gas bill in 2008 and I’m sure it got worse. It’s insane how many people are still on oil heat.
Kind of hard to believe most of rural Alaska (places where there are no roads!) is heating with oil. I would have bet a large sum of money that it’d be wood for nearly everyone there.
We use a propane’s heater plus a wood stove. The wood stove is for when the cold is constant and the propane is for a variable condition like October or November.
Oil for heat. Learned something new.
Would love to see how much of that electricity is from renewable sources.
In south east Texas my mom would just leave the oven on
We open the oven door after cooking dinner that’s all we got
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