Bubble to save $500? I've lived in a couple places here in North Caroline (not terribly cold) where the monthly heating bill was $400.

Pics or it didn't happen.

dammit!!! Mark always sees through my small schemes...

[EDIT]

Mark edited, so I'm editing (drunk). I could have sworn I wrote a post about some import car commercial where all it showed was some hot chick grinding on the seat of a car to some currently popular tune, but no actual reasons for buying this car were evident. In other words, people would associate the brand name with the good feeling of seeing this hot chick. Therefore, consumer interest is driven by emotion, not facts.

I used the Allegro search as well as google this time.

Prices for gas? No. Just no. If you can't convince people to buy it, why would you raise prices?

Huh? That's what I said .

Oops! I guess I'm still drunk! Well, either that or he edited...

Yes, it creates an unrealistic demand by moving sales from the next two or three years into this one. People can get up to $1500 for putting in energy efficient windows, furnaces, etc.

Obviously nobody will do work on something that still has lots of life time left, but people who have things with one or two years left of life will replace them early (if they have the money to do so.) e.g., Instead of getting the furnace replaced next year, they'll rush to get it done this year. That doesn't increase total demand of new furnaces, it only moves money from next year into this.

So it looks good on paper for the politicians because they can claim their program "created" jobs and so forth. But there's no real net gain if you look at the total sales over several years.

A monthly heating bill of $400 in NC is ridiculous. To heat the entire house I'm currently living in, it cost less than $900 for the entire winter. So using a more realistic number of $1000...

If you gain 10% efficiency, you are saving about $100 per year. If you get 25 years out of your furnace, that's a minimum saving of $2500. If the price of whatever the furnace uses as a fuel source goes up over time, then you'll be saving even more. Now if the difference in cost is really only $500, it shouldn't take government intervention to get people to buy the more efficient furnace.

Ironically, the credit applies to home owners ... who are already likely to buy efficient furnaces. The slumlords are the ones with no incentive to buy efficient furnaces, since their tenants are paying the fuel costs.

The only way government programs like this are effective if there's only a benefit when everybody works together. i.e., If the positive isn't seen until the entire community updates, then there may be good reason to stimulate demand.

Welcome to the club.

I'll have my mortgage paid off complete in ~5 years. That's a somewhat happy thought in my otherwise bleak existence. Keeping up a house is a total pain, but I love the place to death.

Maintaining a house gives you something to do.

The cost of it isn't too bad, especially if you aren't paying a mortgage. But the property taxes and extra / higher utility fees compared to renting is what I find annoying.

Obama is giving you $1500 toward insulation as well!

And things like solar panels carry over to future years. If I were to put $50,000 of solar panels on my house, I'd not have to pay any taxes for the following years until the $15,000 credit was worked off.

So he'll even be putting in overtime after he is out of office.

I think he prefers to leave that part to you

It doesn't really matter what the unit price or usage is. If the total cost goes up, the total savings increases.

            Year 1   Year 2   Year 3
Standard     $1000    $1200   $1400
Efficient     $900    $1080   $1260
------------------------------------
Savings       $100     $120    $140

Obviously you still spend more, but the amount you save relative to what you would have spent with the standard model goes up.

And why do you manually specify a name and bogus source to your quotes?

Here in the lovely UK, we've always had the option of free insulation (loft and wall), paid for by our generous government.

As for solar panels, I've worked out that the money you save would take about 30 years to get back. So while I'm all for sustainable energy and looking after the planet, I'm not forking out £10k up-front to wait until I die before I reap the benefits.