is oil fired central heating ok or not?

[3andahalfmonkeys]

We have the opportunity to rent a beautiful house for less than we are paying now in a house with damp etc but it has oil fired central heating. Have been told it is really expensive - can anyone enlighten me. thanks

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It is really expensive PIL have it (they are v v rural) and tend to heat their house with the woodburning stove. This means it is blimming freezing everywhere else. I guess it would depend on if it was your sole source of heating the place and how hardy you feel. If you don't mind sticking on an extra jumper or two then it might be okay.

It depends if the property is well insulated and has double glazing. If it is then you will be able to heat your house with oil fired central heating at a reasonable cost. If it is a drafty old barn with no insulation and shoddy windows then you will spend a lot of money trying to heat it with any method.

thank you for your replies. At the minute where we are in the winter we are putting paying approx £120 per month for heating and just can't afford for it to double really.

We don't find it too bad, but the house is very well insulated. We paid under £500 this year to heat a fairly large 4 bed house, even given the bitterly cold weather. Before we extended and doubled the size of the house we paid less than £250 a year. I think boiler efficiency does have a big effect - my experience with friends and neighbours who pay a lot more for their oil heating is that they have ancient boilers.

We find that because we are so aware of what we are spending it costs us less. It is always on our mind that any fuel we use we will have to replace.

However our house is lovely to look at but very drafty, so it costs a fortune. But it would do so anyway whatever method we used.

I used to pay £60 per month to the oil company all year round by DD which covered my costs. If you buy 2000+ litres at a time they should give you a discount on the price.

We pay around £200 per month by d/d - but I like a really warm house (and we live in Scotland) so have the heating on a lot particularly during the winter. Pre kids and when oil prices were lower we paid much less.

I think my SIL finds it ok cost-wise, but she lives in a cold, semi-rural bit of Scotland and up a bit of a hill. Last winter, the oil tanker couldn't make it up there and they had about a week of freezing and wearing an awful lot of jumpers! So your location is important. Are there any reasons why the supplier couldn't get there in certain conditions?