I believe a high percentage of the maritime population still burn wood. At least outside the towns and cities. We burn it in a wood add on furnace. Cost is now two hiundred a cord if you buy it cut and split and delivered as we do.

If you have the time to work at it somehow yourself you can reduce the price substantially. We burn about 4.5 cords a winter to heat about 2000-2200 square feet. The oil furnace is not used unless we have to go away.

Oil costs about a thousand dollars for 200 gallons in the last few years. If your wood heating unit is reasonably efficient it takes about two cords to equal 200 gallons of heating oil.

Wood heating tends to be more constant in nature and about half price or less. It may even be cheaper or no costlier to heat electrically over an oil furnace system today.

The last house I built has an interesting heating arrangement. You pay 3k up front. This gets you a computorized heat storage unit including installation with all sensors for the on board computor etc. It recharges every night and all of the weekends with 1/2 price electricity if needed. discharging only on demand. During the cheap charging times the rest of the house is also on 1/2 price hydro. I also incorporated a larger water heater that is blocked from heating except in cheap times.

You also can get the 1/2 price power if the electrical system network is in other additional periods of low draw. The hydro controls the time of cheaper electricity to the dwellings so equiped with radio signals. They do not push or advertise this program but it made sense to me. This may well be the cheapest overall solution to space heating.

We use totally hidden from the roadside solar panels to heat the attached 1000 square foot garage at our own house. There is two hundred square feet of exposure surface with them' They feed the radiant heat in the garage floor. It takes about three days of no sun to make a substantial drop of temperature out there as the garage is so well insulated. Perhaps dropping from 90 degrees to 60 degrees. We actually could detour some of that heat to other uses if we wished. Things are just not tight enough to consider it. I poured the floor a little thicker than normal over a good insulating base as an increased storage medium. That system has been running thirty years now. We build few slab on grade houses up here or I would have used it more.