tl;dr: I have a gas heater that's not working right now, and my landlord suggested switching to electric. Should I switch, or should I focus on getting the existing gas heater to work?
Back story: My apartment building in NYC has no central heating. Instead, there's a big 14,000 BTU direct-vent counterflow gas furnace. I've never used it, because the apartment was renovated earlier this year, and the contractors didn't connect it when they were done.
I've been pestering the landlord to have it connected so I could use it, which they finally did. Then we discovered the gas had been turned off, and National Grid couldn't explain why. National Grid came by to turn on the gas and everything looked good, but then it shut itself off, after which I discovered a gas leak in the indoor pipes (which the gas company guy hadn't noticed), and now the gas has been turned off again until a plumber can come by and fix it.
On the whole, the situation seems a bit messy, and I have to admit that, as someone from Europe who's never used gas for anything, I'm also a little unsettled by it. There's the leak, which filled my apartment with gas, and when it was turned on the heater produced enough CO to trip my smoke detector (and CO is scary stuff), and the whole thing is lit by an actual flame that needs to be ignited by physically removing a front panel and then pumping an ignitor button inside it, and it seems that in NY it's common for buildings to explode all of the time. The whole unit I feels a bit scary and explodey, and to someone used to modern electrical systems, this thing is like something from the previous century. It might be perfectly safe, and I'll probably get used to it, but at this stage I'm still quite paranoid.
Since I'm surviving on space heaters at the moment, my landlord suggested today that I cancel gas and let him buy me some electrical heaters. I was initially assuming he meant installing a bunch of wall-mounted baseboard heaters, or maybe a big heat pump, or maybe a full upgrade to a forced-air solution, but what he actually meant was to go on Amazon and buy a little $30 1500W infrared space heater that's rated for providing supplemental heat to a room 3 times smaller than my 700 sq.ft. apartment. I don't want to fill my apartment up with space heaters. At the same time, I can't imagine my landlord is looking to spend a lot of money on this. It's possible I can talk him into investing in some baseboard heaters, but is it even a good option? By all accounts, electrical heating seems more expensive than gas in New York. I'm not even sure that the wiring has enough amps to drive a lot of heating. I have one 240V circuit, the rest is 120V (15-20A), which puts a limit on how much it can drive.
One reason in favour of electric, however, is that the apartment only uses gas for heating, not for the kitchen or hot water, all of which is electrical. Which means that for maybe 8 months of the year, I'm paying National Grid for the gas even though I'm not using any. Turning the gas on/off twice a year isn't really a viable option, since it requires that someone physically comes to my building to lock/unlock the meter, which I don't even have direct access to (I have to call whoever lives in the basement of the building and make sure they're around).
Any suggestions? Stick with gas, or get electrical heaters? What kind of heating solution could I get?
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