 Almost all farms use heat in one form or another, hot water for cleaning a milking parlor, hot air for drying grain, or heat for a greenhouse. So, taking a look at heating fuel options is a real opportunity for farmers to save on operating costs. It can also be a way to make your farm or ranch operation more renewable, depending on which heating fuel you select. In this video, we will take a look at some simplified methods that you can use to compare different heating options and gain a sense of the relative costs involved in one type of fuel versus another. Now, the first thing to keep in mind is that different sources of energy are sold in different units. Electricity is billed based on kilowatt hours. Heating oil and propane are typically sold by the gallon. Natural gas could be sold by the cubic foot or by the therm. And biomass is often sold by the cord or by the ton. Not only that, the efficiency with which each fuel is used tends to vary. And calculating all that out can be a bit involved. Well, thankfully, there's a simpler method, such as using this handy tool called an energy selector. Now, this one is from Penn State Extension, but your local extension office may have a similar device available. This tool automates the process of calculating the energy cost of different fuels, taking into account the different units in which it is sold, the different energy content of each fuel, and the typical efficiency with which it is used. Note that the energy selector has four windows on each side of the card. Each window corresponds to a different heating fuel. In this case, we have fuel, oil, propane, natural gas, and electricity on one side, and coal, corn, wood pellets, and firewood on the other side. Inside the energy selector is a slider that can be moved up or down to change the energy prices that show up in the windows. So, how do you use this device? First, look up the current costs of the fuels you are considering. Checking your own utility bills is probably the easiest place to find this information, but there are some good online sources of energy costs as well. For the purpose of this example, let's say that you are a greenhouse grower who needs to provide winter heat to the greenhouse, and the three heating options you are considering are electricity, propane, and wood pellets. Electricity is about 10 cents a kilowatt hour, propane is $3.20 per gallon, and wood pellets cost $200 per ton. Once you have your prices, you can slide the inner card until the arrow on one side of the windows points to the price for that fuel. So, let's use electricity as our reference for now, and slide the inner card until the electricity window points to 10.00. Now, the prices shown in all of the other windows give the equivalent cost of those other heating fuels. That's the cost you would have to pay to get the same amount of useful heat per dollar. The energy selector now shows that the equivalent cost for propane is about $2.30 per gallon. Thus, if propane were available for less than $2.30 per gallon, it would be cheaper to use than electricity. But the actual price of propane for the greenhouse grower is $3.20 per gallon. That's much more. In fact, propane would be about 40% more expensive to use than electricity in this example. Now let's take a look at the other fuel that the greenhouse grower is considering, wood pellets. When you flip over the energy selector, you see that the equivalent price of wood pellets is $390 per ton. However, the actual price of $200 per ton is much lower than the equivalent price. So at these prices, wood pellets are a 49% savings. Does that mean that the grower should choose wood pellets to heat the greenhouse? Maybe so. However, there are other things that need to be considered, such as the cost of installing the heating equipment, the total amount of heat that is used per year, and the overall maintenance requirements of the system. We'll take a look at those issues in another video. If you don't have a physical energy selector available, there is an online version of the energy selector that will also provide you with equivalent prices for heating fuels. You can find it on the farmanswers.org website that is maintained by the USDA Beginning Farmer and Rancher Development Program.