Good news regarding the costs of heating your home

Keeping yourself warm might be a relative bargain this winter — unless you use home heating oil.

If you count on electricity or natural gas to handle your heating chores, the average household’s winter heating bill should hold steady this year.

Piedmont Natural Gas, which serves about 5,500 customers here, projects its residential customers could see a reduction in their overall winter heating costs of between 10 and 20 percent compared to last year’s winter gas heating bill.

For the typical residential customer, the reductions could result in savings of $15 to $25 per month during the winter period.

Locally, more people use electricity to heat their homes with 8,000 customers in the City of Gaffney. For customers served by the Gaffney Board of Public Works, electric rates remained unchanged from a year ago.

“While energy bills may be higher due to cooler weather, electric rates have not increased for BPW customers,” Board of Public Works Manager Donnie Hardin said. “The Board has the lowest residential electric rates of any Upstate PMPA (Piedmont Municipal Power Agency) city and the lowest residential rates of any area electric utility.”

BPW customers who use 1,000 kilowatts of electricity a month will pay $88.01. That cost jumps to $147.96 for customers who use 2,000 kilowatts monthly and to $207.91 a month for 3,000 kilowatts.

Hardin said the consumption depends more on how efficiently the furnace is operating rather than the size of the house.

If you have stopped at the gas pump lately, you realize that heating oil customers will pay more this year. The price of heating oil fluctuates much like the price of gasoline.

“Unfortunately, anytime there is an increase in the price per barrel of petroleum, home heating prices will go up,” said Tim Fields, general manager of McCraw Oil Company, the largest home heating oil provider in the area.

But Fields said he doubts the prices will climb as high as two years ago.

Of course, warmerthan normal temperatures over the next few months would go a long way in keeping fuel costs in check. But the National Weather Service is predicting temperatures to be below normal during the winter months.