Heating and hot water in rural nowhere - best fuel?

[FlingonTheValiant]

We're about to sign on a house in a tiny village, up a hill, a long way from the gas grid. It doesn't have central heating. At the moment it has one wood burning stove in the sitting room, and a weird and tiny wood burning cooker in the kitchen (which is going to be completely replaced). It has an emersion heater for hot water.

I'm trying to work out what is going to be the most fuel and cost efficient way to provide heating and hot water.

The front of the house is south facing, so there's basically no chance of getting planning permission for solar panels.

So I think the options are oil, electricity, and solid fuel. I'm worried that oil is very expensive.

Would an aga-type-thing be useful, would it heat the room above as well as the kitchen? Would a wood burning stove in the sitting room do the same? Does anyone use a back boiler for their hot water?

The house is long and thin, one room deep. It has double glazing, but not much insulation, we need to get up into the roof space to sort it. Currently the two wood burning heat sources are back to back at one end of the house, so they're not really sharing the warmth.

I'm just not sure what to do TIA for any suggestions!

LPG (gas in canisters) also an option. We have a Stanley that does hot water/heating/cooking and runs on oil - it's a take on a Rayburn but has bigger ovens. Keeps my 4 bed 1835 house toasty. We have a controller that means we can run it flat out in winter and then just do hot water and cooking in summer. The controller also clicks the heating/hot water on and off at times of our choosing. We also have a woodburner in one sitting room and an open fire in the other.

I currently live in a rental abroad with mains gas and the bills seem much the same as they did with oil in UK.

You do not need planning permission for solar panels unless the house is listed or you are in a conservation area - so it would definitely be worth checking with the council.

I would not go for oil, we have oil and it is horrifyingly expensive.

We also have a wood burning stove which heats very efficiently.

Take a look at Esse if you want a wood-burning cooker too.

We have solid fuel. House sounds similar to yours, long and thin! Kitchen and bathroom are in single story extension leading to dining room an dstraight through to living room with the bedrooms above those rooms. The stove is in the dining room so heats the downstairs of the house pretty well. We have a thermostat fitted to the hot water tank so that when teh tank reaches the set temperature the heating comes on. It is very efficient and pretty cheap to run. We have just had our rather lethal old stove replaced with one of these. It uses next to no fuel and is just superb. I can talk for a very long time about all the glorious details if you like

We have a multifuel stove that heats the living room but also powers the radiators throughout the house and does the hot water. The stove we have is called the Stratford Eco boiler, but it doesn't look much bigger than a regular wood burning stove. It is brilliant and very cheap to run, we mostly burn wood.
We currently have to use the immersion for hot water in the summer months, but are looking into the possibility of solar panels/air source heat pump.

Indith and Isthreetoomany - I'll have a look for that one then as you both say it's efficient and pretty cheap! I'd love (genuinely) to hear the details of how it works with the water tank and radiators.

Is it expensive to rely on the immersion in the summer?

GeorgeElliot - thanks for recommending Esse, I'm off to look at them now. We're moving to France, so I'm not sure if they have different rules about panels, I'm sure we were told we'd need permission.

Scaryteacher, your Stanley sounds lovely. And I had forgotten about LPG, thanks!

Thanks for all your help everyone :)

Argh! I wrote a huge long post then this stupid old machine decided to restart. Being pestered by small children now so will have to try again later.

Have you looked into ground source heat exchange pump?

I did look into them. But they're expensive, and a survey that was done on them suggested that the vast majority aren't working efficiently. I'm hoping that it's a technology that will improve, so I'm going to wait and see what they're like in 5-10 years.

Right then, shall try again although probably a little more brief than my previous effort!

Most systems are basic although you can get some very fancy pants ones. In ours water goes from the stove, round a coil in the tank to heat teh water and back to the stove. We have a thermostat fitted to teh return pipe so that when the tank reaches a set temp the heating clicks on. When the tank cools again the heating turns off. This means that the tank never gets too hot and boils over (imagine a giant kettle in your airing cupboard!). All systems have this safety feature. In addition there is an overflow pipe leading out of the tank to act as a dump so that if the system fails and the tank gets too hot cold water can be dumped into it and the excess goes out of the pipe.

What this means in practical terms is that during the winter the fire can be on 24/7 and when kept stocked up with fuel and turned down low the heating clicks on and off through the day (and night) keeping the house at a nice, consistant temperature. During the day you can increase the air to the fire a bit to raise the temperature and durning teh night turn it as low as you can so the fire pretty much just stays put, ready for the morning rather than burning much. I find that if my fire is damped down low the heating clicks on and off quite a lot, I suppose because there is little heat going to the tank but if I turn it up the heating comes on and stays on. You would also have a switch to put the heating pump on yourself so you don't always have to wait for water to heat up before having heat! You figure your system out pretty quickly and how you use it. For exampkle I hate having heating on at night if I can help it so I often put the pump on att eh switch in the day and switch it off as I go to bed so that teh fire is mostly heating the water at night.
With temperatures as tehy are at the moment we are only really using teh fire on cooler days for the water and mostly using the immersion. I really, really want to get a timer put onto ours as the lack of hot water in the day does my head in. We don't have a dishwasher so the washing up piles up in the day then in the evening we put teh immersion on for half an hour to do bathtime for the dcs and all the washing up. Our shower is electric which is essential for the summer months thouh I am looking to get a shower put in that runs off the hot water for the winter as it seems daft to have all that hot water and not use it.

Costs wise the immersion isn't too bad although not ideal. Our electric stays pretty much the same all year round so the costs of the immersion is roughly equal to the cost of extra lighting and the heating pump in the winter. Solar panals are my ultimate dream for the hot water in the summer months, when I've sold a couple of kidneys to pay for them . I can't really comment on fuel costs for the stove as we got ours towards the end of the winter. Our old stove used 10 bags of coal a month at the height of snow etc and this one seems to burn much less though we are also on smokelss fuel now whcih seems to go further.

Quite a few people around here have LPG. Sometimes I really, really envy them their combi boilers with heating on a timer! Some have a woodburner (not connected to water or radiators) which heats the downstairs and just use the gas for a bit of extra heat and for cooking (oh for a gas cooker!) That seems like a very practical system really.

We are not on mains gas and have oil. OMG it's so expensive at the moment, in fact over £300 a month in the winter. When we moved here, it was about £120 and it levelled out cost-wise as it basically cost nothing during the summer months. However, we now seem to spend the summer recovering from the winter costs.

I've always lived out in the sticks; we had a cottage before this place and it had electric storage heaters (hideous) and we installed a large woodburning stove in the living room - excellent and really warm. Expensive stove - Jotul - and had expensive work done on the chimney. Cost around £2000 at the time. Bear in mind though that logs are not cheap.

Also bear in mind coal is expensive - the basic is not too bad but if you use the cleaner so called "smokeless" you are looking at £18 perbag or more. It burns for longer though.

Hope I haven't put you off, its something you have to factor into country living - as well as the petrol for driving every where!

Thanks so much for all the detail Indith, that's really helpful. LPG does sound very practical. Is it as expensive a oil though? And is it another giant tank in the garden system?

Elsie, you haven't put me off, don't worry. I'm used to the country so know what to expect, I'm just trying to work out which type of system to install. Definitely not oil by the sounds of it!

The cost of using our immersion in summer isn't too bad - as Indith says it just evens out the electricity cost around the year (I think we pay around £40 a month elec all year round, gas is now only around £2 a month as we still cook with gas, I don't know the cost of wood though as we are lucky to have access to a free supply).
Also, I don't know what lead times are like on obtaining multi fuel stoves at the moment, but when we got ours 3 years ago there was a 20 week waiting time for delivery of the Stratford Eco Boiler, across all the retailers we found, apparently due to the surge of people switching to stoves.

Our electric is a little less than that, we cook with it too, don't have LPGor anything. We had our Eco boiler fitted at the end of the winter and it was done pretty mcuh right away, no problem with waiting.

Oh yes, also meant to say the tanks for the gas are not huge jobs like oil. New build houses around here usually have a buried tank but older houses with gs like our neighbours just have a couple of bottles with sit next to the wall or in a little outside shed.

Oil is very expensive, so I would avoid it. Similarly, LPG is quite expensive as well. We have an oil fired aga and it heats the kitchen, bedroom above and does all hot water, however, agas are not cheap to run. I would investigate solar hot water (there may be grants in your area) and air source heat pump (easy to install and if you can mount it relatively high on the wall it should still work even if there is ground frost). I would top heating up with your wood burner if necessary. For the air source heat pump there may be grants around as well. You say you are about to sign on the house, just keep in mind that your heating bills might still be very very high in years to come if you are not on mains gas!