Are solar power panels worth it in an oil fuelled house?

[fruitstick]

We are potentially moving to a house with no gas and an oil fired Rayburn. I'm a city girl and not entirely sure how everything works but am pretty sure we are moving into the least fuel efficient house in the country!

Would it be worth having solar panels installed to heat the water so we can turn the stove off in the summer? (there is a separate electric oven and hob).

Or would we be better off with electricity generating panels? If so, how much are they and are they worth it?

TBH before I made any large investment in something like this, I would be considering serious insulating first!

I have an oil fired boiler, but the house is as well insulated as I can currently manage - I have got through 2000lt of oil in 11 months. We wear an extra jumper most days!

I've got permission to have double glazed wooden windows put in, so hopefully will be warmer next winter.

Good luck!

Thanks Marmaduke.

The loft has been converted into bedrooms so I'm not sure how you would go about insulating the place. Will look into how we would manage double glazing though.

I worry about our heating bills and I'm not used to being cold!

If the loft is converted, there must be some fairly substatial insulating between roff and interior walls I'm sure?

Our place is qite a big 5 bed barn/oast with large double hight areas, some rooms being the full depth of the barn (10m) and others just plain huge (dd's bedroom is round and 6m diameter with a high ceiling).

I am fairly frugal with the oil although the boiler is only 5 yrs old so quite effective, a neighbour with a smaller house uses twice as much oil as us but her house is sweltering (to me).

My oil is coming monday, it is £300 cheaper than when I filled the tank last Feb! It is not as snug or cheap to run as our old 3 bed semi, but it hasn't done us any harm.

We have had secondary DG (was here already) on some windows, it makes a bit of difeerence. The handmade wooden ones are pricey, but am hoping to make the house cosier - I am a SAHM with a preschooler and moslty do not have the heating on between 7.30am and 4pm. DS and I are outdoors mostly anyway.

With panels you can get some financial help towards installing (I think) but they have to be at the correct angle to qualify iirc.

Fruitstick, we live in an oil heated house, with a loft conversion.
When it was ocnverted, there wasn't that much insulation out in, less than would be recommended now.

WE are quite minimal with our heating, as you can actually see how much you have left, so it makes you think a lot more.

WE have looked at solar panles, but it is too expensive for us at th emoment, even with a grant. WE had soemoen come round to look at cavity walls, but we have them all done already.

Having oil isn't as bad as we first thought though.

We've looked into this - we live in a large detached (but modern-ish) house with no gas and oil heating/water.
The general consensus going on what I've read is that solar power (electric) panels are just not worth the cost of installing.
However, we have a big south facing roof and are seriously considering having solar water panels installed (the neighbours have some and their's work well) with the idea that they will preheat the water in winter (and the boiler will then get it up to the right temperature) and hopefully in summer the boiler will have very little work to do.
Another alternative we have looked at (more for when our oil boiler finally dies) is a wood-fired boiler (pellet or log boiler) but the full system (solar water panels plus log boiler) will cost £30000 to install! and the hassle of getting logs/pellets is something to consider (pellets cost the same as oil due I think to the transport costs). Personally I would love our own wind turbine but the house attached ones are not efficient enough and not sure we have a suitable site for a stand-alone one. ..but then we have an electric Aga, so would be nice to power this from a renewable energy source.

As Marmaduke said, the most important thing is to insulate as much as possible (we have cavity wall insulation, masses of loft insulation and are happy to wear jumpers in the house. We get through about 2200 litres of oil a year (previous owners used double that, but they were elderly and at home all day). We have an open fireplace in the living room and collect bits of wood (we have a friend who does woodwork as a hobby so we have all his offcuts, and at the moment we are burning some dodgy parquet flooring which we couldn't recycle in any other way (reclaimation yard didn't want it)). We use the open fire during weekend afternoons to keep us going before the heating turns on.
Oh and hot water bottles, and really fluffy warm bathrobes (recommend John Lewis ones, sooo warm).

Lucky you lot that can have cavity wall insulation we have solid walls with no dpc (although slowly adding one to eradicate damp - my house sounds better with every new bit of info doesn't it?) so all we have is some compressed polystrene and some tanking gunk between the brick and the plasterboard we have very deep insulation in the lofts though.

Like Millarkie (do I recognise you from the AP threads?) we have a fire (dual fuel stove/woodburner thingy) which was the only form of heating when this was converted 30 yrs ago! When it is going well it is hard to stay in the room with it! We collect everything from fallen twigs (kindling) to larger bits of tree that have come down on our fields and at MILs house - make DH feel all 'hunter gatherer' .

Millarkie forgot to mention bedsocks, very important

WE do't have a fire, which is a pain really, I htink it would make a difference.

WE are south facing which keeps it warmer I htink, big double glass doors at back.

Hot water bottles are great, and furry slippers!

I'm lol as after checking this thread I've just looked at our room thermometer and it's 15 degrees in here. Kids still not wearing jumpers, and I don't feel cold yet. My home office on the other hand is 9 degrees and nasty-cold.
(Yes marmaduke I hang out on the AP threads, I need to have AP's with antifreeze in their veins )

(My best AP was a Finn, she was very hardy )

solar water heating is better value than trying to create power

agree bronze. I can remember reading an article on some folks that had installed a wind turbine in an area without enough average windspeed to do so, it cost more in power than it created.

A ground source heat pump condensor can be usful, but, a little like the aforemention wood pellet burner, the set up costs are huge - plus there are not many rads which will work successfuly with a GSHP (due to lower tep of water unless topped up with other heating source), Jaga make the only ones I know of.

Thanks for that, I feel a little less worried about it now. I'm pretty sure we have solid walls so cavity insulation not an option.

I'll dig out the bedsocks!