OT - Kerosene....an Expensive Fuel

The post about converting from wood to LP and the comments about the cost of kerosene brought back some memories.
In our early married life, my wife and I lived in the Mid-Hudson Valley here in New York.
We lived in a 10' X 50" mobile home heated with a "pot burner" style forced air furnace.
We had one 55 gal. drum mounted on "stilts" alongside the mobile home.
Our kerosene oil supplier came by once a week in the winter to fill our barrel.
Hard to believe.....but......even harder to believe.....we paid about $.15 a gallon.
Talk about inflation!!
Making less than $5,000 a year, I guess we were "poor" but we could afford a "standing rib" roast and filet of sole not infrequently.

I forgot to mention that this was in the mid 1960s.

Yes indead. Back then from what I have read kerosene basically was a waste
product from the distillation process. Todays crackers and the equipment
refiners use can tear the crude molecules apart so well that there is almost no
kero left over. that is why it is so expensive. Now there are other things too
but this is what I have read.

back in 1968 when i got married the first house we rented, for $75 a month, had a kero pot burner with a single grate in the living room.Life was cheap then,i remember we lived on $20 per week food money!

Last I looked at COOP about three years ago, it was around $4.50 a gallon. Don't know what it is today.

Marilyn and I live in the house I grew up in. This house has never had a furnace, just heating stoves of some sort. Here in Iowa fuel oil was the cheapest heat in the 50’s and 60’s. Propane was more expensive and electric heat was almost non existent. .15 per gallon was about right. When I was growing up we heated with an oil burner upstairs and a wood stove in the basement. Dad had a young son (me) who would saw and split wood by hand and carry it to the basement for free so the wood burner was kept pretty hot. The cook stove in the kitchen was kept hot too as long as the young son could haul in the cobs, once again for free. That was in the days of no insulation and drafty old windows. Some time in the late 60’s the cook stove went into storage along with the wood burner and another oil stove went in the basement. Fuel oil was still a little cheaper than propane at that time because fuel oil had more BTU’s per pound of fuel so they claimed. Oil burners are sooty and messy so they went out the door and were replaced with the vented propane heaters we have now. Now there is NO MORE OILY SOOT! Did I say it loud enough? LOL The gas heaters can be controlled easily with a thermostat. The pilot light is clean. We had a thermostat on one of the oil burners once but the pilot was fueled by a lower flow of fuel, with a small sooty flame burning in the pot when the thermostat shut it down. I can still hear the oil burner ticking and banging as it expanded and contracted when the thermostat turned the flame up or down.

Wood heat wasn’t used much around here for whole heat because of a lack of trees so most farmers used coal or fuel oil but today almost everyone uses propane. I do have an ambitious young neighbor who heats with wood but I question if he is saving money because of the distance he has to go to get good wood. I do give him credit for working hard to try to save a few bucks though.

Local fuel station has kerosene available at the pump, $5.00/gallon.

Kerosene a waste product? Jet fuel is a tightly-spec'ed form of kerosene and a major output stream at many refineries. Even in the mid 60's there were plenty of commercial and military jets in service (and very thirsty for fuel I might add).
Info on jet fuel

Just bought some for the local Amish today at $3.50 a gallon......

When we first got married in 73 we rented for a year, the house had a Jungers oil burner, and they worked best with Kero. I
don't know what it cost but I remember the start up procedure using alcohol. My dad talked about how Kerosene and power -
fuel for tractors was very cheap, and gas was always over 20 cents, back in the 30's.

"That was in the days of no insulation and drafty old windows."

And there was no duct work, so the same free labor would crawl
under the old farm house and thaw the pipes with a propane torch
when they froze. Be careful not to catch the cob webs on fire! BTDT

Not taking about now. Many years ago like Ww11

Yep, it used to be the cheapest fuel there
was. As a young boy I worked at a service
station after school. Kerosene was 9 cents
a gallon & I used a hand crank pump to
fill up the cans & jars. Glass container's
weren't legal even then but folks brought
what they had and as long as they weren't
a stranger they got filled. Gas was 21
cents a gallon if there was a price war &
23 cents otherwise.

Good thing the "cheap kerosene" burning
turbine car didn't pan out.

Think how much it takes to fuel up the big jets. My step grandson is with a B 52 crew, flew back from Guam non stop to Louisana not too long ago. Mid air refueled over Hawaii, he said they took on over 50 tons. Isn't jet fuel almost the same as kerosene?

i've been using it in my garage heater this winter. (Mrs. dont like the smell of diesel) locally its been 3.99 / gal.

I just got done watching a show on History Channel called, The Men who built America, and how John D Rockefeller built Standard Oil company and selling
Kerosene was his 1st product that made him so rich.
very interesting show .

While they can not sell kerosene as jet fuel they can sell jet fuel as kerosene. Jet fuel is just cleaner and certified kerosene.

While it is still wintering outside it might be a good time to read up on petroleum history. Please let me suggest that we read or reread ?The Prize? by
Danial Yergin. It?s subtitle is ? The Epic Quest For Oil, Money,and Power. Then we will be better equipped to follow the money about kerosene and other
fractions of petroleum that are so much a.part of tractor and farm life past and present. Consumers around the world were looking for a fuel to light their
home in the evening in the early years of the startup of the petroleum industry. Supply and and demand sort of runs in and out of the rest of the story. Anyway,something to think about. It?s been a long winter here too! John

Kind of the same here. When we got married back in 66 our weekly grocery bill was $15.oo and carried home 2-3 bags of groceries.
Geezze, my barley pops cost that now!!! Sobering thought, isn't it.
Loren

Yup, in the 1960's and early 70's $5,000 per year was a pretty decent living, and you could get by on $3500. Wife's first job out of college was $1.65 per hour. She paid rent, a car payment, groceries, and still put money in the bank every paycheck. Those days are long gone.

Wasn't too long back my wife and I got by on $40 a week for groceries, diapers and gas to get to the store. Early 1980's. But we din't have to have the latest cell phone, TV came via antenna and eating out was a treat.

Yep, minimum wage went from 1.40 to 1.6 in 1968. It was the closest to what we call a "living wage" today than we have ever been. BEFORE taxes that's 64 bucks a week or 3,328 a year. So yea
5,000 a year was pretty good money!

Kinda makes me laugh. Folks back then who ran major companies made less than 100K a year.

Another funny thing. The 90% tax rate? back in the mid to late 50's? That was only for those making as in a paycheck 1 million a year (wasn't many of those). In reality? On average the rich were paying about 15%.

Yea Kerosene has gotten real high. No place close here has it bulk anymore.

Rick

Jet A-1 kerosene $1.64 a liter and 100LL $1.94 per liter .
Prices today in Kincardine .

We had to go to LP gas in 2016, been on Nat. gas up until then. N. gas company closed the line that we were on saying it was getting to old {installed 1937} Have 4 lines running through our farm but they wouldn't hook us to either of those. Natural gas co. paid good to switch over to LP. though. I miss the Natural Gas cause it was always there, didn't have to check nothing.

50 tons, 100,000 pounds at 6.8#/gallon is 14,705.88 gallons. That's a pretty good sized fuel stop.

I thought my old semi-tractor burned a lot of fuel, 903 Cummins wasn't known for being fuel efficient. First 125 gallon tank got me all the way to the third load of freight for the day, stopped at the same truck stop about 100 miles from home, 50 gallons of fuel and a large coffee to go. Was a time or two I couldn't make it to that station in winter.

Saw a shelf full of 2-1/2 gallon jugs of K-1 kero at Farm & Fleet yesterday, $19.99 each, $8/gallon. I can by it 5 miles from home but it's cheaper 20-22 miles from home, but not enough cheaper to justify. Think $5/gallon close to home. Best thing I did was insulate the shop, heater runs 20-30 minutes to warm shop up to 50 and it's warm all day, heater used to run 50% of the time without insulation, burns a gallon an hour. I used diesel in the heater for a couple years when kero was high priced but hate the fumes.

100LL at our local airport is 3.99 a gallon. We are about 15 min flying time from Louisville, ky, and their gas is about 6.00. We get a lot of business from
there.