Advice and a question on how to keep Oil Heating bills as sensible as possible please..

[Freddieready]

We have just moved into a house with a newish Bosch Greenstar Danesmoor 18/25 boiler.
We have an unvented indirect 210L water cylinder. The rads all have TRV's on them. The property is old but well insulated with new double glazing.
The boiler has something called a "Loop" which means we get instant hot water from the taps.
I have a question, if the heating is on does it use much extra oil if I have the Hot Water also on at the same time? In my head I feel that if the boiler is heating the house and is working it may only use a minimal amount of extra oil to also heat the water. I ask this because with the loop the water gets cold quite quickly as it is constantly circulating so it needs re heating about twice a day. If it does only use minimally more I will heat the water whenever I put the heating on rather than heat both independently.
Any more advice would be appreciated.

Not an expert on your boiler, but oil is currently the cheapest form of heating,and you have an efficient boiler. As you have insulation, concentrate on monitoring oil price and topping up at the right time.

the loop will I'm pretty sure be to keep hot water in the pipes to your taps which are a long way from the cylinder. These pipes will act as long thin radiators so the boiler will need to run at intervals to replace the lost heat.

For a start, make sure the pipes are very well insulated. Pipe lagging in stiff plastic foam is made in two grades, "regulations" or "bylaw" which is as fat as your arm, and "economy" which isn't as good.
www.wickes.co.uk/search?text=lagging
Insulate all the pipes between the boiler and the cylinder as well.

You might consider adding a timer or switch to turn off the circulating pump expect during those times of day when you will be using the distant hot taps.

If the loop pipes are within the fabric of the house then their cost doesn't matter so much at times when the heating is on, because the heat they emit will help keep the house warm. But it is generally inefficient to keep running boilers for short periods.

Your cylinder is quite big, set the HW timer to run only twice a day, starting before bath/shower time. Depending on age and efficiency, it might take an hour or two to get fully hot when starting from cold.

If the loop is actually using all the heat from the cylinder in a day, that's pretty bad. I presume your cylinder is modern and blue.

sorry, your cylinder will be white or silver, modern, and well-insulated under the outer casing

We save money on oil by having the water heated about three times a day, spreading out an hour. As a result we have only used 200 litres of oil in 7 months. We only use the water for washing up, hand washing, top and tailing, washing floors, etc...

Short showers for hygeine stuff.

We had a new boiler installed this year and it is the most efficient boiler!

Starting to use it up now with the cold! (we don't live in the warmer sarf)

We just run it an hour a day and additional heat with our woodburner and free wood we have been offered. Two -three hours during a colder snap and heated to 19 degrees centrigade on the thermostat.

We're not mumsnet chicken types, just poor. :-(

Would do this whatever the fuel - We heat the water for an hour in the evening for baths/showers. The washing up is done then as well - most of it goes in the dishwasher anyway.

The water will still be hot next day as long as we don't keep running it in small bits, hence topping up with cold.

My parents live in a village which doesn't have gas and the homes have to have oil-fired boilers. My Dad collaborates with the neighbour to have the oil delivery at the same time so they get a bulk buy deal.

Other villages, I have heard, have collectives where they sort this sort of thing out for larger numbers of people. It can be a real saving.

Not quite what you were asking, but thought it would be helpful.

Our hot water goes on once a day for an hour in the morning. This is enough to heat the cylinder in the airing cupboard and will easily do showers in the morning for all and a bath in the evening plus washing up.

On our system (which might be completely different from yours I guess) the water and the heating are completely different. Having the water on at the same time as the heating will mean that the boiler struggles since it is trying to heat both the water in the water cylinder plus the water in the radiators both at the same time. The water in the radiators is not the same water that is coming out of your taps.

Other than the water issue we always fill up in the summer when the prices are often slightly lower. When we first bought this house and oil prices were sky high we literally didn't heat the house for most of the day. When it was really cold the heating would come on at 4.30pm for the DC arriving home at 5pm and would then go off at 6.30 when they went to bed (with their hot water bottles). DH and I would sit under blankets or light a fire. Our oil bills were still a couple of thousand a year.

Thanks everyone for your help and advice, I will take on board some of your comments. Piglet John, yes you are correct about the loop and it does have a timer which we will adjust. Everything is new and was installed 12 months ago just before we bought the house. the cylinder is a white Stainless steel Gledhill. The pipes are mostly invisible so they cant be insulated now but I believe the whole system is in that German flexi pipe that is white and very strong, I believe it has some basic insulation built in but not much.
I will do all the alts that people have said and hopefully we will be as efficient as possible.

We spend around £1k per year at the moment to heat a very large 5 bedroom house. I like a comfortable temperature as around most days and DH works from home.

We set the hot water to come on once a day in the morning before we get up. That does 2 showers, a bath and washing up. We have trvs on all radiators and have the trvs set low upstairs and full in the rooms we are using downstairs. The heating is probably on 3 times a day with a wall mounted honeywell thermostat downstairs.
Curtains with thermal linings made a huge difference even though we have double glazing. We also replaced some velux with triple glazed and ripped the standard insulation out in a lot of the ceiling and replaced with max we could fit in.