Central heating trauma....

[TurboTheChicken]

Central heating has to be one of the dullest AND priciest purchases I have ever made, please help me not make a massive mistake.

Our 20 year old oil boiler has finally packed in after over £1k in call outs and repairs in the last three years. I have had three different oil boiler engineers saying that it is impossible to replace due to changes in recommendations, the position of my chimney, flue problems and narrow access to our house.

I have had one quote of £7.6k to remove the boiler and oil tank, install flue ventilation and make good and to install a 210l hot water tank and electric boiler (11kw) elsewhere in the house. This seems massively expensive and I have serious reservations about an electric boiler being up to the job of hot water and heating.

We are very rural, no mainline gas, we have solar PV panels so electric seems to be the way to go I suppose?

I was thinking maybe just a hot water tank and storage heaters?

Any advice would be appreciated - or useful links to decent web sites?

I have no hot water or heating so there is an element of time pressure!

Obviously I had an oil delivery five days before the boiler gave up - so any ideas of what to do with approximately £600 of oil that people want me to pay them to take away would be great too!!

We paid ~8.5k for boiler removal, new boiler installation, new flue (requiring a fair bit of routing, new unvented cylinder and some pipe movement (redirecting some soil and heating pipes). Tidying up & cementing/plastering holes made as appropriate.

That was about 1.5k more than the cheapest quote. However this was a recommended firm (not 1 or 2 man band) who came when supposed to, had up to 4 guys on site and gave me confidence in their knowledge.

I wouldn't go for an electric boiler. We don't have mains gas either and have Calor gas cylinders for our boiler, which runs some central heating and can do the hot water, but we mainly do that overnight using the immersion and Economy 7. Our heating is a bit of a lashup - the old part of the house is heated through the woodburner and radiators running of the LPG boiler, and the extension has storage heaters but we are about to replace this with underfloor electric heating.

If you are looking for an electric solution I would think the best would be an air or ground source heat pump, but they work best with underfloor heating so it would be a huge amount of work to do it properly.

Calor gas in cylinders certainly isn't as cheap as mains gas but not as bad as having an LPG tank, and you have freedome over who you buy your cylinders from. We hardly buy any gas in summer either.

In your situation I'd ideally want to replace with an oil boiler. I take it you're confident in the assesment of the 3 people you've had round to quote?

Thanks for your responses.

I've been talking to another oil engineer today who seems to think that we should be able to simply replace our oil boiler - he's recommended another guy to do the installation so I'm getting one more engineer in to look at it. We will see......

I do really like the idea of air or ground source but I've heard a few different opinions about them. If we were eligible for a grant I might be a bit happier to risk it.

Thank you for your advice so far.