Would you buy a new house without central heating?

[oricella]

i.e. a really well insulated one, with a good log burning stove that will heat up the place brilliantly (and with thermostatic remote control); possibly some electric heaters as a back up and solar hot water & electricity?

The only thing missing would be ability to set a thermostatic timer to have the house at a certain temperature at a certain time; but instead you would have a generally warm house and very low bills

Would it put you off buying or would you jump at the opportunity?

I still can't work out how the woodburner is going to get the fuel? Does it literally rely on you popping through every 30 mins to put a log on, or is it the sort with wood pellets from a feeder?

A wood burner will burn any type of wood and most will burn any fuel so the harder the wood the slower it burns which in turn means that you have to fill it up less often. I used old pallets as my free fuel source which i get crushed in a rock crusher at a local quarry in 7 tonne loads, its completely free bar the 20 pound crushing fee so my entire yearly usage is only 40 pounds for two 7 tonne loads. My heating is run entirely from the wood burner (max 21kw) which runs 12 radiator/convectors and is boosted by 3 seperate solar tube systems. The wood burner and solar tubes produce so much energy I had to install a second copper cylinder to hold the warm water.
In the summer months all my water is heated with the solar tubes to a minimum of 55 celcius but normally 60-55 celcius. The wood burner paid for itself in nine months and the solar tubes paid for themselves in 18 months so are a great investment and are relatively maintenace free and neither needs a mains electricty supply to operate as I generate 80% of my electrity via a wind turbine which is stored in recycled car batteries for use when there is no wind. I hope to be able to generate all my electricty this year once I have upgraded my wind turbine which me leave me totally self sufficent in heat and electric.

I have a friend who will only buy houses without central heating, she hates being too warm. Her houses are very comfortable but she only heats the rooms she uses.

I wouldn't rule it out as I also dislike being too hot, but would want a lot of info on how the system worked.

Lots more comments - great!

I'm concluding that we wouldn't be mad to go Central Heating free, but that, when/if we sell, we would need to give good evidence that the house works and that we are not slaves to the stove (and show buyers the amazingly low energy bills of course )

From what I understand the house will be so airtight that heat losses are minimal - so all heat lost from appliances, laptops and bouncy toddlers will contribute to keeping the house warm. We also have designed to have maximum solar gain.

When the stove is needed it probably won't need too much attention as so little heat is lost; we've actually found one that is supposed to go on a slow burn for up to 10 hours - so if we put on the last log at bedtime, the house would still be cosy in the morning. We're specifically not going for a backboiler to heat the hot water as this, so we've been told, is where the hard work is when feeding the stove

We're also in an area where trees outnumber people (lots of forestry around) so supply shouldn't be a major issue

ecobatty thanks for your point on the ufh - the time lag is one of our main concerns that it wouldn't really be suitable, so maybe we should save ourself that money and upgrade the veluxes one step further

conculainey interesting stuff; would like to hear more about the recycled car batteries. Although with feed-in tarrifs it's possibly more efficient to sell electricity when we have too much and buy from the grid when we need more

frenchfancy - we'll certainly be building for ourselves and it's a bit annoying to have to think about sellin when we haven't even built the place yet, but life is uncertain, our families are far away and I thought I'd put some thought into it anyway. Quite possibly 5 years down the line energy prices are so hight that a house like ours will be in high demand..

withmanytots good to hear your experience - it's stories like yours that convince me it can be done!

Be aware if you are building the house to be 'so airtight' that unless you are using materials that are naturally humidity regulating you will have serious issues with damp accumulating in patches - and will need to install mechanical ventilation, thus negating much of the benefit.

The good news is that there are loads of natural, breathable and humidity regulating insulators and building materials around, but builders often hate to use them and push the easier-to-use non-breathable ones. So if you are having anyone else do some of the work for you, make sure you specify every single material to be used very carefully.

You won't regret it, the environment in a house built that way feels so fantastic that it's impossible to contemplate going back to a conventional build once you have lived in one.

This may sound like either the maddest or the most disgusting idea ever or both at once but...

a friend is trying to persuade us to install a new kind of composting loo that turns your waste into burnable bricks to power your stove. I know nothing more about it, but that would reduce your fuel bills even more

Oricella, I live in N.I and the option to sell the electricity is not available plus most of the grid connected wind turbines will not operate when the grid fails making them a bit pointless imo. My wind turbine generates 24 volts d,c which is stored in a load of car batteries which I recycled from a scrap yard, this has the advantage over mains voltage turbines in that I can have electricity from the batteries when there is no wind, all my lighting is 12volt low energy led lighting which runs from the batteries and I have a 1kw invertor connected to the batteries which will run my t.v/fridge/hifi etc but it will not run a kettle or washing machine. I hope to install a second low voltage turbine this year with more batteries and a much larger invertor.My turbine is home made and started life as a generator from a ww2 sunderland flying boat LOL, It is very reliable and I loads of wind living close to the sea. My intention is to have my mains electrity disconnected completely later this year and be completely independant of all suppliers.

wow - conculainy - going off grid altogether! Love the sound of your turbine

ecobatty - we're taking mechanical ventilation as a given; haven't found a happy medium yet where the house can breathe enough by itself to get the humid air out without getting cold air in; I know MVHR will use electricity, but should be a lot less than heating the place + it can be bypassed when the weather allows us to open the windows. I did see a house during construction where the MVHR wasn't in and the place was dripping with water - they had to bring in big dehumidifiers to get round that (but they were building through winter)

cat64 - I don't believe the house will be cold in the morning; heat losses are low so it will only be marginally cooler than at bedtime & apparently our stove would still be giving off some heat overnight We do worry about the being away - but we could probably run a portable electric heater on a timer and have the neighbours keep an eye on it (not really different from what we do now); TBH I'd worry less than about our current house - it's got CH, but is old and we've had two occassions of burst pipes - despite running the CH while we were away

grendelsmum - I haven't come across that one yet (do you have a link?), but have worked with some projects where communal toilets discharge in a massive chamber, where it ferments to produce biogass which can be used for cooking. Your friend sounds perfectly reasonable and non-disgusting to me Don't think I'll go down that road though - think if I posted a thread saying "would you buy a house with a composting toilet" there would be a lot more no's! (and water isn't a big issue where we are anyway)

I love this thread :)

Conculainy your turbine set up sounds amazing.

I'm also very interseted in the pallet crushing as fuel source? Where does one get free/cheap pallets from? By crushing does that mean crushing them into log type things?

A lot of people have mentioned feeding stoves a lot and getting up to cold houses. We do not have gas in our village and we don't have oil etc in our house, we run on solid fuel. You don't have to keep feeding a stove, a good stove with a thermostat to control burning speed can be filled with fuel and ignored. The whole point when you are using them as a mian heat source is that you have them on pretty much 24/7 on a slow burn so that they work their way through the fuel slowly but get maximum energy release from it. You can stick fuel on it in the morning and go to work and it will still be burning when you get home. Ditto at night. When you are burning like this you are not having to constantly clean it out and light a new fire. The burning is efficient so you are not left with lots of mess, just fine ash. You usually have a little lever to make the grate shake up and down so once a day you just give it a shake, the ash falls into the pan below and you empty that into your ash bucket. It is more work that a boiler that runs on gas but it isn't as much as you might think.

Going on holiday inthe winter is different of course and yes, you do come back to a cold house (although I assume an uber insulated house would be less cold). Because you cna't just leave your heating on timer you ahve to take care. When we have been away for a couple of days in the winter we have turned the water off and left a couple of heaters with thermostats on frost setting in bathroom/kitchen. For longer holidays we would just drain the system. Doesn't take long, isn't really any fuss unless you go on several holidays every winter and only takes 5 mins to light the fire when you get home and you'll have warmtha gain very soon.

Indith, I get all my pallets free of charge and on some occasions I get paid to take them away, I go around all the local industrial sites within a 2 mile radius and collect the pallets (non-returnable type)once every 2 weeks in a large trailer and once I have a lorry load I take them to a local quarry were they are crushed into odd shaped and very rough pieces of boiler sized wood. The wood still contains all the nails but that is not a problem as they are left in the ashpan and are recycled as scrap once a year.
Recyling pallets is ideal for me as they are not allowed to be put into land fill and it costs factory owners a lot of money to have them collected and recycled (usually into wood pellets for burning), I can get the wood free of charge which saves the factory owners a bit of money and also means that no energy is wasted in changing the pallets into wood pellets,It really is a win win situation as regards recycling, the enviroment and free energy which is also green as wood burners are a clean scource of heating.

Yes our old house was that sort f set up.
We now have central heating and gas fire, I hate it, we're moving soon and will be looking for a house with stoves and good insulation even if we have to rip out the CH and install stoves.

We really don't need the amount the level heating that most people seem to think they do. If you dress appropriately and have warm bedding it really shouldn't be a problem.

Another home made device I have installed (x2) is a simple air and heat recycling unit which is cheap to make and costs nothing to run. I have 2 white plastic sewer pipes running from my upstairs bedroom ceilings with an old computer cooling fan installed at the top which runs on 12 volts d.c, this fan draws the warm air that has risen in the house back down to ground level so the heat has not got a chance to escape the building. It works very well and each unit cost under 20 pounds to make,as a result there is an even heat in all the rooms with no hot spots unless you are very close to the stove.

I would We have CH but I use the open fires a lot more and as its fairly open plan with both lit the whole house is warm x

We have mechanical ventilation but never ever turn it on.

We have lime renders on the bathroom walls, thick wet plaster on stone in the main rooms (with lime paint on top), and thick hemp and cotton insulation in the ceilings and haven't had any issues with humidity (though we do not live somewhere very humid, to be fair).

Freezing pipes while you are away is not as big a problem as you might think.

We went away for the 1st week in December, and it took about 4 days for the house to cool down to 5 degrees where the frost protection cut in. As we all know, it was pretty exceptional this year to be below freezing for so long. Even during this time, a little bit of sunshine on one of the days was enough to warm the house during the day. If it is just the odd frosty night forecast it wouldn't be a problem.

Over New Year, I don't think it dropped below 7 over 4 days away.

It was cold when we got back, but each time we left the fire all made up and ready to light the moment we walked back in.

It would definitely put me off.