The Great Winter of 2026-2027

Hello and welcome to my first published project!

I often run the numbers to find cheaper ways to operate, and I made this site so I can keep track of them. Will i be right or not? We will see! I will be updating this site every night at 11:00 PM Eastern with the latest data from the day to see if I am correct and by how much.

I am in Coventry, Rhode Island, in a place that has oil heat. Oil costs are on the rise, and it is unknown when or if they will fall. My rough math says instead of using oil, it will be cheaper to use electric—by a lot.

I called the oil company to get a K-factor or last year's usage. They had data from 2024-2025 showing 504 gallons used. The oil price as of writing this on September 23, 2026, is $5.599/gal, totaling $2,821.89 if we assume the price of oil remains static (this includes a bulk oil discount). It is unknown what temperature the thermostat was set to. They also could not give me a K-factor.

Each day, I will record the high and low temperatures. I will use this to get the average and then calculate the Heating Degree Days (HDD) 65-((high+low)/2) = HDD. From this we can get an actual K-factor.

A K-Factor below 3 is considered terrible, above 6.5 is efficient.

The plan is to get four DeLonghi ComfortTemp Full Room Radiant Heaters (EW7707CM-6A) to heat the place. The estimated square footage is 1,200, so I may need more heaters. I have Tapo P125M smart plugs to monitor the electricity usage to get more accurate data.

The oil burner is 85.8% effecient so that means one gallon of oil is equal to about 34.8kWh. This will be used to see how many gallons would have been used.

I will also be taping the windows to seal them and wrapping them in shrink film plastic so the trapped air acts like insulation, this would have been done either way so the cost of this part will not be in the equation.

I secured a rate on an electric contract, so I will be tracking the savings from that as well! I locked in a rate of $0.118/kWh before the regular rate goes up to $0.17023/kWh on October 1, 2026.

The heaters will be set at 72 degrees, the default comfort temp setting on the device.

The aim is to never actually buy oil, i will be keeping track of the oil price day to day so i can calculate how much we would have purchased to compare the price of what we spent on eletricty.

All costs will include taxes and any other fees, it will be what was actually spent.

Wish me luck and let's see how it goes!