Hi,

Looking to buy my first house and it's rural with no gas.

Currently has storage heaters with economy 7 electric and a dual fuel burner in the living room.

I'm worried it will cost a lot in the electric so looking for some alternatives, best mate is a joiner so wood supply is no issue so was thinking if having the burner heat radiators and the hot water, which is fine through winter but not ideal in summer which I thought i could go solar for summer limiting the use of the electric water heater.

Anyone got something like this or have an thoughts or better ideas?

Open to any input in no expert in this!

Thanks

I've probably spent more on a boiler, gas servicing, rads and pipe work than I would have if I'd just installed individual efficient electric heaters...

Wood burner + electric heaters / immersion heater would be ideal. I doubt a proper solar installation would pay for itself.

[Edited on 3/11/13 by joneh]

The guy on 'building the dream' on ch4 keeps on about wood pellet boilers. Maybe worth looking into.
I've got an oil boiler and the price has gone up from 45p to 65p per L in the past 3 years.
You can also get large gas tanks(someone local has one) I wouldn't know about cost on them.

Having ripped out economy 7 a couple of times now you are right to be worried hot in the morning, cold in the evening (when you want it) and not cheap to run so factor replacement into the purchase price.

I have had electric underfloor heating in the kitchen which proved very good, although not that cheap to run and have installed a stovax studio 1 wood burner in the lounge which is fabulous, although very greedy on wood.

A friend had an electric system where economy 7 heated a huge insulated tank which was used to run traditional radiators, this was quite good apparently and you can get wood burners that also contain heat exchangers for central heating, may be worth a look at these and build a hybrid.

Solar has come on a lot, if you can afford it the outlaws have panels on the roof that feed back the grid, it means that there electric bill is zero these days, they plan running the washing machine and dish washer around the sun and have low wattage bulbs and a LCD TV to keep consumption down.

Regards Mark

If I were in your position I'd get an electric car as well and bypass the meter!

I'm in a similar position to you and I'm on the verge of ordering a wood pellet boiler

Dump the electric heaters as soon as you can.

Install a wet radiator system heated by an air source heat pump. Or if you have loads of cash a biomass boiler.

Look up the renewable heat initiative being launched in the spring it will pay you a tariff for using green technology to warm your house

[Edited on 2/11/13 by big-vee-twin]

Looking at installing radiators behind fed by the stove and also heating water tank, then using electric as back up or summer time.

Best mate is a joiner so wood supply should be good

Or if I get the house a little cheaper go for solar which will hear the water for summer use

The kind of wood you want in a wood burner is not the sort a joiner could help out with. Normal soft woods are consumed in seconds in a wood burner, think kindling! 6" think for long logs last half an hour or so in my brother's burner!

you don't want wood, you want coal, much better for burning.

My boss's boss is always going on about oil and how if you get together with alot of people near by and buy in bulk off season it works out cheaper than gas.

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Originally posted by morcus
you don't want wood, you want coal, much better for burning.

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I've always fancied a PERGE log boiler, should appeal to any locoster, very high efficency and no electronics.

Cheers
Davie

I looked into wood pellet boilers recently - very good but my conclusion was that they needed a large space for the storage hopper - eating into valuable car building space!!!

Get a boiler Stove and use that to fee radiators, then its a matter of feeding Trees and coal into it.

Back could be oil fired plumbed into same system.

or Alternates of ground force heating or that but all very dear.


We are rural Scotland and use a 10KW & a 6KW stove to heat about 70% of the house and oil for the rest 1000L per Year is our oil consumption.

We have solar water topped up with OIL and it's only on about 10 mins in summer in the morning to take the chill of the water for a shave etc.

[Edited on 3/1111/13 by mad4x4]

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Originally posted by morcus
you don't want wood, you want coal, much better for burning.

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Originally posted by daviep
Absolute bollocks, coal does produce more heat than wood

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Originally posted by prawnabie

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Originally posted by morcus
you don't want wood, you want coal, much better for burning.

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Originally posted by daviep
Absolute bollocks, coal does produce more heat than wood

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erm?

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Go mad on insulation, use a heat recovery system and some kind of heat storage (heavy wall in front of a south facing glass, underground water tank). An efficient wood burner with a back boiler and heat recovery on the flue is enough to heat a decent sized house that is really well insulated.

Check out this guy, there was a TV documentary on his work HERE

[Edited on 3/11/13 by inkafone]

Very funny prawn and hector

It's a small world mr brocklebank

Our small stove is rated at 4kw burning coal and 5.5 kw burning wood, how can this be ?

You cannot install a system which relies on a joiner mate supplying wood. Unless said mate works continuously in hardwood then he'll just be able to supply kindling. What if he moves away or changes jobs. Or gets cheesed off. Planed pine that I can get hold of from the workshops at work just goes within minutes. You can burn a sack full in a evening. I have had my pot bellied stove so hot that 2x1 planed pine will burn away faster than it can be out in. You need hardwood.

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Originally posted by Irony
You cannot install a system which relies on a joiner mate supplying wood. Unless said mate works continuously in hardwood then he'll just be able to supply kindling. What if he moves away or changes jobs. Or gets cheesed off. Planed pine that I can get hold of from the workshops at work just goes within minutes. You can burn a sack full in a evening. I have had my pot bellied stove so hot that 2x1 planed pine will burn away faster than it can be out in. You need hardwood.

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Originally posted by Irony I have had my pot bellied stove so hot that 2x1 planed pine will burn away faster than it can be out in.

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I am moving house soon that has Oil Fired central heating a a huge wood burner in the living room. I am hoping to beg/scrounge/source as much wood free as possible. I am getting the roof insulated and the cavity walls done.

I am hoping to boost the costly oil fired central heating with the wood burner. The new house has a medium sized oak tree smack in the middle of the garden. This oak tree will soon be too large for the garden and neighbours have complained about its large size. I think this might be my source of wood for a good time to come.

Just remember to get the chimney swept regularly if you're going to run a wood-burner, especially if you're going to burn softwood that fouls up the flues with tarry soot. I only burn hardwood (apart from kindling) and the sweep gets a small bag of soot out every summer - this is in a modern twin-walled flue that keeps very clean, unlike old brick chimneys that can build up pockets of inflammable muck very easily. Our sweep also gives us a certificate when he's finished, which is very useful to keep the insurance companies happy in case of disaster.

IIRC, in Austria the insurance companies demand that the householder gets the chimney swept every month (with a certificate) as they burn softwood almost exclusively - no certificate, no house insurance. (but I may have got hold of the wrong end of the stick, or my memory is failing! )

We live I a rural idle, no mainline gas.

When we moved in it had an oil boiler and a steel tank. Both needed replacing and I looked at a number of the options. I didn't fancy the faff of the wood pellet boiler option so never looked at it in any great detail.

We did compare costs though for replacing the oil boiler and tank with an LPG system and it was much more cost affective (at the time) to go LPG. We ended up with Calorgas and they put the cost of the installation on the bill and you essentially pay for it over the course of the next 2 years with your monthly DD - or you can choose to pay it off in one lump sum if you wish.

Depending on your house location within the bounds of your property you can install the tank underground - It had to be 3m from any boundary and any building. This is what we did. It meant we reclaimed the space where the old oil tank was. Just means we have a plastic manhole cover in the middle of the lawn. Mobile fuel senders on the tank will also notify your supplier that it needs refilling without you needing to worry too much.

Overall I wouldn't say it is much more cheaper than oil to run, but in light of recent rises with the energy companies, we've had a letter from Calorgas to state that they won't be increasing their prices (this time round) - refreshing. A letter from NPower for our electric within the same week stated our bill would go up 15.4%.

We've a couple of log burners too for taking the chill off if necessary - but hardwood is becoming expensive too. £80-£100 per ton bulk bag - and it doesn't last long if you are lighting up nightly.

Rob

Always thought it would be interesting to do the sums on a large lpg tank verse a large oil tank.
- Most of the houses around my parents are on oil, and probably have been for decades.
- But yet the local chicken farm, about 10 years old, runs a large lpg tank and gas heaters.

My parents house is electric underfloor night storage, on economy 7, bolstered for the coldest fort night of the year with a coal fire. The house was designed for it from the out, with the required seriously thick floor, 3 inch cavity walls, etc and at t time when night-rate elec was one of the cheaper forms of energy.


Daniel

Log burner with a heat exchanger plumbed into the (normally oil fired) central heating. Fit with a stainless/Copex flue and burn as many free palletts as you can collect. = free heat

Stuff the gas and electricity companies!

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Originally posted by daviep

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Originally posted by morcus
you don't want wood, you want coal, much better for burning.

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Absolute bollocks, coal does produce more heat than wood but the hassle factor is not worth it. The soot from coal is an oily black mess which ineveitably ends up smeared on walls and carpets

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Not read the above, but my experience of Economy 7 heating is a good one.

Southern electric run a three tariff meter reading system, (i.e. day night rate pluss storage heating rate) this worked out cheaper for us at the time. In a modern well insulated house correctly set up we found the storage heaters cheaper than gas...
If you use the storage heaters on boost or like it hot in the morning/afternoon or it's poorly insulated it could work out expensive. I would suck-it and see..

A lot of the houses on our estate have gas to the house but very few have bothered fitting gas appliances or the meter as it just works out to expensive to add central heating, the electric is just fine.

Dan

[Edited on 6/11/13 by Bluemoon]