Those Fear-of-Freezing Blues

The heating oil run-up spurs sales of wood and woollies, and budget worries

Our Lady of Pity, a Roman Catholic church in North Cambridge, Mass., had never before seemed so aptly named. Looking ahead to the coming winter, the priests were stunned to discover that their heating-oil bill for 1979 will make even the $12,000 they paid last year look like a bargain. To cut costs, they plan to close off the 1,100-seat main sanctuary during the cold months and hold services in the church chapel and chapel hall, which together can accommodate only 500 worshipers. Explains one priest: "It is simply a question of 45 gal. an hour to heat the big church against 6 gal. for the chapel."

People throughout the nation's Northern states are already gloomily pondering similar tradeoffs. Just about now, the owners of the 16 million houses, apartments and mobile homes--more than one-fifth of the U.S.'s housing--that use oil heat are getting their first big fuel deliveries. They are discovering with a dismaying jolt that the great '79 fuel crunch has moved from the gas station to the furnace room. Since January the average price of heating oil has jumped from less than 56-c- per gal. to more than 80-c-, an increase well in excess of 40%. The country's total heating-oil bill, about $10 billion last year, will rise by $4.3 billion.

This is a burdensome new "tax" that will worsen the already deepening recession by reducing the amount of cash Americans have for spending on all sorts of nonessentials, ranging from new cars and skiing holidays to Christmas presents and charitable contributions. A typical fuel bill for an oil-heated home, about $650 last year, is expected to climb to between $ 1,060 and $ 1,200 this year. In 1978 the average American worker had to labor for 19 hr. every month of the heating season to pay his fuel-oil bill; this winter he will have to work a walloping 34 hr. per month.

Homeowners are using both simple and desperate means to cut oil consumption, everything from buying flannel pajamas and woolen sweaters to closing off rooms .and even whole floors for the duration. In Agawam, Mass., Ernest Bleeck, 73, a retired sales manager, and his wife Mary, 66, spent $2,000 to build a greenhouse on the sunny kitchen side of their two-story frame house. In addition, they have placed several water-filled, 55-gal. barrels among their geraniums and lettuce plants where the sun will warm the water; then the warmth can flow into the house through the kitchen windows. The Bleecks hope to reduce the 1,500 gal. of oil that they usually burn every year by as much as 20%. Says Mary Bleeck: "If we have sun, we can practically live in the kitchen."

Others are switching from oil to cheaper natural gas or firewood, though both of these are also rising in price. In Maine, where a huge pile of wood on the lawn or the front porch has become a ubiquitous symbol of Yankee-style energy independence, the cost of a cord (128 cu. ft.) of wood has risen in the past year from $80 to $150. In Nevada, so many would-be Bunyans are buying the $3.50 permits that allow people to cut wood in the remote areas of federal lands where timber can still be found that the Bureau of Land Management's Reno office is considering opening hitherto closed-off forest areas to them. In Idaho, the highways that snake out of the mountains are jammed every weekend with pickup trucks and station wagons swaying under the weight of freshly cut logs. Ted Cooper, chief forester for the Hoff Lumber Co. of Boise, complains that the amateur lumberjacking has become so intense that "the forests are cleaned out of any dead wood within 200 feet of all roads."

Wood-burning-stove sales are also climbing, and not just in the sticks. Once favorites of rural folk, the stoves are now appearing in the living rooms of $150,000 suburban ranch houses--when they can be bought at all. For the first time, the Sears catalogue lists a complete wood-burning furnace for home use. Sales of insulation and weather stripping are surging, as are those of new oil-fired boilers and furnaces that promise greater efficiency. A particularly hot seller is the Blueray furnace, which generally retails for a hefty $1,400 but operates at almost 90% efficiency, compared with 70% for a conventional model that costs $800. Many people are paying up to $700 to have their existing oil-heating systems overhauled and fitted with more fuel-efficient burner guns.

Also in demand are automatic vent dampers, which cost $200 or more but save much heat by blocking off chimney flues when the burners are not firing. Because warm air is held inside the furnace, when the burners turn on again they do not have to reheat the furnace so much before it can begin heating the house. Other fuel-saving gizmos that are selling well: timers that at night shut off hot-water heaters (the second biggest energy consumer, after furnaces, in the typical home); setback thermostats that automatically drop temperatures to as low as 45DEG F when everybody is sleeping, then rewarm the house in time for breakfast; reduced-flow shower nozzles, which use as little as 2 gal. of water a minute, vs. 8 gal. for conventional nozzles.

Even fans are being promoted for a winter application: recirculating air down from ceilings, where temperatures can be as much as 30DEG higher than at floor level. The Casco Bank & Trust Co. of Portland, Me., is luring depositors by offering some energy-saving devices as bonuses for new accounts. Bank officials concede that only a year ago this come-on would have seemed "crazy."

The fuel price pinch has created a new breed of specialists: the energy auditors. For $75 to $200, they make house calls in which they may use infra-red scanners to uncover sources of heat loss, like drafts under doors and windows, and through electrical outlets on outside walls. Formed only last January, the Eneraudit Co. of Cranston, R.I., has already signed up more than 100 fuel-oil dealers to sell the company's audit services to customers.

Thoroughgoing weatherization of a house can chop its energy consumption by anything from 10% to 40%, making the investment pay off in only a few years' time. Even so, the conservation gains are not likely to be enough to offset the latest price increases. For poverty-line people and the elderly, the situation can be desperate. In Morrisville, Vt., a welfare mother of four made headlines by ripping up the front stoop of her mobile home to use as firewood because oil costs had risen beyond her reach.

Congress so far has done nothing to ease this new burden by approving either Jimmy Carter's request for $400 million for special low-income assistance in paying fuel bills or his proposed windfall-profits tax, which budgets some $1.2 billion in additional help. As a result, states are moving on their own. Massachusetts, Maine and Rhode Island are all looking into setting aside funds to provide heating money to the needy. In Virginia, Winchester Memorial Hospital's emergency-room staff is studying the treatment for hypothermia, caused when severe cold, combined with poor nutrition, makes body temperature drop, a potentially fatal problem for the aged.

There may be no outright fuel shortages this winter. Since April the Administration has been pressing petroleum companies to build up stocks, and now they have stored 217 million bbl., vs. 207 million bbl. at this time last year. As a result, Energy Secretary Charles Duncan last week said that the Government will stop its three-month-old program of paying $5-per-bbl. subsidies for imports of foreign heating oil refined in the Caribbean. This was an ill-conceived scheme that enraged Europeans, who charged that Washington was forcing up the price of heating fuel worldwide.

The fear now is that bureaucratic meddling may create distribution bottlenecks and local shortages later in the winter. New York state officials, for example, are concerned that in order to maintain their inventories at levels mandated by the Energy Department, oil companies are holding back shipments to jobbers, distributors and other middlemen, something the oil firms deny.

As in the gasoline squeeze, angry consumers are putting most of then- heat on the retailers, in this case the heating-oil sales and delivery companies. With prices and interest rates climbing, refiners are tightening up on credit terms, forcing the retailers to demand quicker payment from homeowners. But many of their customers are starting the new heating season with unpaid charges from last year.

With resentments rising, the Department of Energy last week opened hearings into the familiar but unsubstantiated charges of heating-oil profiteering by refiners, even as a group of 15 Senators, led by New York Republican Jacob Javits and New Jersey Democrat Harrison Williams, was urging Duncan to reinstate heating-oil price controls. The restrictions were lifted in 1976, but can be reimposed by Executive order at any time; the Administration's resistance to such controls could weaken as the 1980 election campaign heats up.

Freezing prices would only create shortages for everyone, because demand for the fuel would once again surge and the Government would wind up having to allocate supplies, just as with gasoline last summer. Washington would be wiser to quit looking for scapegoats and start enacting production-boosting programs that will bring more fuel of all sorts--solar, hydroelectric, synthetic and nuclear--to market, and at an affordable cost.

That becomes more urgent with every boost in OPEC prices, and the increases now occur with taunting frequency. Since last December the cartel has increased prices by 61%. Now Nigeria, Algeria and Libya appear to be preparing to raise their price of oil by as much as $5 per bbl. If they do, the $23.50 "ceiling" that OPEC set only last June will be shattered, and the cost of all petroleum products, including heating oil, will move up yet another notch.

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