Peak Gas

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_gas

when will the gas bubble burst so to speak

never??!?!?!?!

Maybe there's not enough information available to make a prediction anyone can state with confidence. Seems like a very specialized area of study.

I think you're kind of overthinking your heating choices at this point

I think you are right but its kind of my nature to overthink everything so I'm just being me.

still - surely this forum contains bright and innovate minds who can chime in!! debate! discourse!

We tax Sanpaku as a resource pretty heavily already.

There's a lot of uncertainty about peak gas, and it mostly revolves around mathematical models of the long tail of decline curves in tight gas (shale & coal bed methane), and just when production from a given well would fall enough to become uneconomic. I haven't followed this story recently, but as one might expect, the models used by natural gas E & Ps justifying their high lease costs to shareholders, and the models used by resource neomalthusians gave wildly different outcomes. So we may have 100 years or 30 years of natural gas, and peak may come as late as the 2040s or as soon as the early 2020s in North America.

if only marty mcfly was real we coudl get some answers

thats not too bad - it would give us enough time top be all solar and wind power by 2025 and not care about gas anymore- then in a few more years, the singularity happens

you buy a gas boiler - you take otu a loan - 13 year pay off - by th time yo upay it off and are ready for savings - gas is as expensive as oil and teh solar guys are mooning you and laughing

If you can stand the upfront cost: geothermal heat pump geothermal heat pump geothermal heat pump geothermal heat pump geothermal heat pump.

http://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/blogs/dept/musings/are-affordable-ground-source-heat-pumps-horizon

i know nothing about geothermal heat pumps aside from the article i just read, linked above, in attempt to mitigate my ignorance. they sound pretty impractical as presented.

Yep, nothing comparable to geothermal heat pumps.

There's a good discussion in pages 146-153 of David JC MacKay's Sustainable Energy – without the hot air, which should be required reading for every child in school, much less anyone who pretends that a single technology like solar can solve the problems.

i've heard clean coal technology is a necessary component, along with solar, tbf.

(srsly, thanks for the link sanpaku, that looks great)

then there's taht apartment that BLW up in NYC...

insulation - then air source heat pump or pellet stove - win

If you go with an air source look at the more efficient ductless heat pump systems and see if they can be adapted to your living space. You may not need a backup with those. I was prepared to go that direction, but my wife was too worried about noise issues. She's pretty noise sensitive, so we backed off to a single-unit, ducted system and now must swallow the higher costs of an electric strip backup.

I have looked at ductless - they are cheap to buy but how hard to install yourself I wonder - I am no tmechanically skilled

http://www.amazon.com/Pioneer-Conditioner-Dehumidification-Ventilation-Installation/dp/B0095VAEOC/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1394656628&sr=8-3&keywords=ductless+heat+pump

I wonder if you can just install the part that goes outside in your basement instead - thus saving the hole thorugh the house issue