New Fuel Comparison Calculator

Fuel Comparison Calculator

Happy to announce my first version of the fuel calculator. There's not much improvement over many you might find online with a few exceptions.

• Separate inputs for bulk and bagged coal so you can even compare the costs of bulk vs. bagged if you want.
• Separate inputs for natural gas based on either Therm or Mcf as apparently it is billed differently in some areas.
• BTU input for solid fuels.

On the short list to add:

• Explanations for the calculator and the fields.
• Reverse calculations based on current costs, for example if you know it costs you $400 to heat your home with natural gas for one month you'll be able to find out what the cost would be for the other fuels based on the values used in the calculator.

On the longer list to add:

• Heat loss calculations.
• Integrate a control panel option where you'll be able to store long term data such as coal used, coal cost, region of the country, square footage, insulation etc. From this data I will be able to combine it with others and produce average costs for coal in areas, how much people are using based on square footage, insulation and all kids of other statistics.

If you have any suggestions or notice any bugs please let me know. It should only accept sane numbers and throw an error if you make any mistakes. Please try and break it.

Thanks Mr Mayor, you efforts are very much appreciated

If it's breakable I'm sure one of us will step up to the challenge

Whoops, what did I do?

General Error
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Out of memory (Needed 1048544 bytes) [5]

An SQL error occurred while fetching this page. Please contact the Board Administrator if this problem persists.

Please notify the board administrator or webmaster: http://www.nepadigital.com/contact.php


All I did was change coal to 150 and electric to 0.11

Hmm.. never mind..
It worked fine the second time, I was a guest the first time, but logged on, and it worked, then logged off and as a guest it still worked...

General Error
SQL ERROR [ mysqli ]

Out of memory (Needed 1048544 bytes) [5]

That error should not occur because of calculator, might have been a coincidence but I'll check logs. Thanks for letting me know.

Hi Richard, In the "Bagged Coal" section can you add a 50 pound bag (Kimmel's) option?

The Fuel Comparison Calculator is very helpful.

Thanks, PC 12

I'm working on some of the other things I mentioned in my other post. I'll add a "per pound" calculation for odd sizes when that's done. Might be today, tomorrow at the latest. I also somehow manged to upload wrong file and the selection for mcf with natural gas was accidentally removed but that will back too.

Very nice chart and easy to use. I like seeing all the fuels on one page like that. Well Done

Damn I'm good: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe ... or&spell=1

Already number 10.

Richard, Hope I'm not missing something obvious but, the bagged coal catagory is set at 40lb. bags. I get my coal in 50lb. bags, which makes the calculation cost unaccurate for my situation. How do I correct for this?

Good morning all, If you put your price per ton for bagged in the bulk field it will work. A ton is a ton no matter what the package.

Most bags are 40lb pound however I'm going to add a field for any weight which will default to 50. In the meantime if you change the price to reflect your local cost and the BTU per unit under bagged to 600,000 that will give you the correct calculation. The weight is irrelevant, the only reason I'm using them is because it makes sense to someone using the calculator. It would also work under the bulk section except I'm checking values to make sure they are reasonable so as to insure the user doesn't make huge mistake and $6 is too low for ton so it will throw an error.

The calculations are based solely on cost, BTU and efficiency:


Cost/ (BTU * (Efficiency/100)) * 1000000

Crazy4coal, Thanks for the tip, that works for me.

crazy4coal wrote:Good morning all, If you put your price per ton for bagged in the bulk field it will work. A ton is a ton no matter what the package.

Yes you could do that too, if you're paying $6 for a 50lb bag just multiply it by 40.

You should qualify your "electric" as "electric resistance heat". Are you going to add a heat pump choice?