Economy
Here we go again …
Still pumping it out … 60s era Vulcan oil heater. Image here
#5 Home heating in Tasmania has been somewhat of a saga over the years.
Pre-1960’s it was mostly wood with a bit of coal, plus relatively minor use of kero, town gas and electricity.
Then came the oil heater boom, and by the mid-1970’s built-in oil burning heaters were the major source of home heating. Quite a few were also using kerosene by this time, and LPG had become a small but significant source as well. Hobart’s town gas production had also shifted from coal to oil in the 1960’s. Diesel-fired central heating had also started to become popular in new homes.
Then came the oil shock and heating oil consumption plunged 60% in the space of a single year, never to return. Oil heaters were ripped out by the thousands, and a new boom industry quickly emerged – the making and installing of wood heaters. At one point, there were 3 manufacturers operating in Tasmania in addition to imports, and firewood was sufficiently scarce that some commercial wood yards resumed selling coal to the public for a time. Almost immediately, wood was back as the main form of household heating.
Then in the 1990’s concerns about air pollution grew. Meanwhile cheaper electricity, the falling price of heat pumps and an aggressive marketing campaign by the HEC / Aurora saw many switch to electric heating. Tasmania is probably the only place to have ever had billboards simply quoting a price in cents / kWh as a form of marketing (6.064c from memory).
Thousands were installed each year, to the point that Tasmania became the largest market in the country for some types of electric heating, and quite a few electricians were kept busy installing them. Electricity’s market share is reported to have reached 68% by the late 00’s.
Now we have electricity prices soaring combined with a reasonable marketing effort from Tas Gas. No prizes for guessing the likely outcome of this, at least in areas serviced by the gas network. And for those without gas, there’s always wood.
Meanwhile there’s another alternative too – wood pellets. The pellets themselves are presently imported from New Zealand (a somewhat absurd situation when you think about it) but no doubt local production would be viable if demand increased sufficiently.
Such is the saga of heating in Tasmania over the years. It’s a somewhat unique situation – most Tasmanian houses over 20 years old have had at least 2 different heating types installed since construction, and I’ve personally seen 3 changes in the space of 5 or so years at some properties.
In Victoria, people just install gas and leave it. There’s plenty of homes in Vic with 40 year old heaters still in use. The average Tasmanian has had 3 or 4 different systems in that time, all of them replaced not due to wearing out but because fuel prices changed radically. Here we go again…