If you live in a listed building and/or in a conservation area and have replaced/put in a new central heating boiler, what did the planning department specify about your external flue?

[DivineInspiration]

DP and I recently moved into our house which is Category C Listed (Scotland). We currently have an antique oil-fired boiler (we're rural, so not on gas mains) which we may as well be burning banknotes in - in the coldest weather we're going through 3 - 4 litres an hour just to keep the place temperate, never mind warm.

We've been looking into and had plans drawn up for installing a new wood gasification boiler, both because we have our own woodland to use as fuel and because of the assistance we can get through the new Renewable Heat Incentive Scheme. For this, we'll need to have a new flue. In our plans we've sought to minimise the impact of this, and the main body of the flue would be internal (through our utility room) with a clearance above the roof of about a metre situated around the back of the building on an architecturally 'less important' part which houses our utility room and is out of sight from pretty much any aspect but the little-viewed back.

However, because of the listed status of the building, the conservation planning officer has still suggested they'd prefer us to build an external chimney stack up the entire side wall in original materials. This is both expensive and invasive and DP and I think it would look bloody horrible and far more out of sync with the building than a plain metal roof flue with a small-ish bit exposed. We're wondering if anybody else who's done similar with a listed building or one in a conservation area has been able to convince the planning authorities that an inconspicuous metal flue (or similar structure/addition) was acceptable?

This isn't the question you've asked, but are you starting at the right end? If you're using up so much oil, won't you be using up equivalent amounts of wood and still be cold? Have you already addressed all you can do in terms of insulation, radiator control, etc etc? We moved into a listed building that just eats oil, and we've now got it positively snug (at times) - our neighbour who lives in a house that's 20 years old always comments enviously on how warm it is. And that's without this Spring's project - the wool insulation all over the house!

Going back to the current project, what do your architects say (I'm assuming you have architects involved as it seems a fairly major project)? Have you actually made a much greater impact on the internal fabric of the house by tring to minimise the external impact? Is the recommendations from the CO a suggestion for what they'd prefer but can't enforce, or a strong guideline as to what they will do their best to enforce? Of course, you can always go to appeal on these things...

if it's an old house, surely it has old chimneys and fireplaces that could be relined and opened up?

Grendels, how do you get your house snug? Would you say the main factor is insulation or is it radiator capacity?

To be more specific about the house, it's a converted church. The conversion structure is lathe and plaster inside the original stone structure with wood fibre insulation in between the outer and inner walls. The 10-metre vaulted ceilings and original stained glass windows are probably our two biggest problems with retaining heat. We have the mother of all heavy curtains for night-time and the windows have been plexiglass-sealed on either side so we have a rudimentary sort of triple glazing and we've had the sealant replaced to try and prevent drafts - this it seems to be doing though we still can't get the temperature of the main body of the church above 16 degrees, and that's with the boiler running full pelt constantly!

We can easily sustain the required level of wood use from our own woodland for the next 25 years, plus the RHI grant which will amount to about £1,500 a year for 20 years. There's no way we can continue using oil like we have been, and we also recognise that a very old oil-fired boiler will make the house difficult to sell if we ever come to sell it. Radiator capacity is another issue and we do plan to put in more radiators as the system is undersized for the building volume. It's just the added cost of running these extra radiators on oil which makes us cringe.

The installation has been designed by a team who specialise in energy simulation planning - DP works in an engineering field and has been able to draw up some plans and projections himself as well. The actual boiler replacement itself isn't really all that complex: the new boiler will fit into the same position as the current one and the same with the new water tanks. The way we've planned it, little of the internal fabric needs to be changed, just the addition of a flue from the boiler in the basement through the utility room which sits above it, to minimise external impact. The location the CO has marked as preferable is. Their 'suggestion' seems firm and the implication is that they'll almost certainly they'll reject our application for the internal/roof flue unless we can show that the external chimney stack is unsuited to the project, which is what our eco team are trying to do at the moment. We knew we wanted to change the boiler and made our offer accordingly, just didn't suspect from speaking with the previous owners, the architect who did the conversion and from the owners of other converted churches in the area that the CO would be quite so conservative. In hindsight a bit naive of us perhaps. I think we're all a bit bemused because if anything, the CO's suggested location for the flue is more visible and completely conspicuous.

I recognise this isn't terribly usual, so thanks for your replies :)

I think the issue is that the CO has certain guidelines that they must follow, and you don't know what those guidelines are, or what buzzwords to say. Without that, you're flying blind, so to speak, as you don't know what will count as a good decision and what would be bad. That's where a local architect experienced in listed buildings would be able to help. As far as I can guess from your post, you're proposing to destroy historic fabric (i.e. cutting a hole to put the flue in). The CO's job is to preserve historic fabric, so they've suggested a way that you can get what you want while preserving historic fabric. I think that whether or not historic fabric is preserved is a very concrete issue, whereas the aesthetic tastes of people in 2012 is a very subjective issue. You thus have the rather wooly argument of 'but it looks better', while they have the concrete argument of 'it destroys historic fabric'. (If you think about the historic background to preservation of historic buildings in the UK, I believe a lot of what we have today is the result of William Morris and co's reaction against the Victorian tendancy to 'conserve' everything by making it more how they thought it should have looked, and less how it actually did look.) An architect might be able to argue that the historic fabric will be better preserved by the inclusion of a flue within the church, as it will make it so much warmer and take it out of the danger of woodworm etc.

Our house is very different to yours - it's a 16th century timber-framed farmhouse in East Anglia, but also with an oil-fired boiler which is getting on a bit. Our first winter was grim - my elderly dad ate Christmas dinner with a bobble hat on his head. In terms of heating, we don't yet have insulation in the vast majority of the house - that's this year's big project. I'm in hopes that will cut down the bills massively. We looked at GSHP but we have the original floors in some of the rooms, so don't think underfloor heating is suitable. Our neighbours have a wood pellet boiler, but I can't work out any way to incorporate the wood pellet storage and the boiler on our house without it looking very odd. We'll probably just replace with another oil fired boiler, sadly.

We have all the dull things - secondary glazing, thick woollen curtains (those are great - you can literally feel the cold air falling out at you when you draw them back in the morning), rugs on the brick floors, draft proofing and curtains on the doors, etc. Rumour has it that our COs are tentatively dabbling in conservation double glazing, so in 5 or 6 years we may be able to move to double glazing in the vast majority of the house. Blocking up the fireplaces and putting in wood-burning stoves made quite a difference. I have plans to put draught excluders around the doors to the sitting room too.

I think that radiators are crucial, though. We now have a sophisticated zone-controlled heating system which means that each room is heated to the appropriate temperature for the time of day. That alone made a terrific difference straight away. It meant we could afford to heat the house, because it wasn't a case that either the entire house was hot or cold. Instead, we now have all the rooms warmed up in sequence to match our daily routine. (It means it's freezing if you get up unexpectedly early, but that's a minor drawback).

I should also say that after the first winter we got used to living at a lower temperature, and didn't ever need to go back to having a house as warm as we were used to - but then I'm typing this with a rug around my shoulders, and we do go in for thermal undies and even thermal slippers. I'm happy to use 18 degrees as 'warm' and 16 as 'cool but okay for rooms you're not sitting in'. DH likes it a degree warmer. We put it up to 'normal' temperatures when relatives come to stay.

I can imagine a converted church must be freezing. At least we're south facing and have big windows all along our south face - although our floors mean we stay comparatively cool in hot weather.

BTW, I should say that we have a flue not dissimilar to what I think you're proposing and I reckon it looks foul, it annoys me every time I look at the house. Can't say whether or not what your CO is suggesting would look any better!

That's a really long post but I do sympathise with you. Meanwhile, are you members of a fuel co-op to get best oil prices?