Do you love your heating?

[rosMumQ]

So I do not!! I recently moved to a house with LPG gas heating, no combi-boiler, an oil aga (that doesn't heat water) and a log burner (that doesn't heat water). I'm used to natural gas and combi-boilers. This place is soooo expensive to heat...which means as it turns nippy, I'm loathed to put the heating on. I will need to save to make any changes but I know there are lots of options out there - does anyone love their heating and want to recommend??

Place marking. Would be interested in hearing about low carbon heating sources - heat pumps, solar (electric heating), etc

Heating is constantly on my mind. We are slowly renovating a big draughty old house. We have:
Aga converted to electric, as the chimneys were falling down. Gives a good base heat, but is v expensive, unless our solar panels are working at full capacity.
Wifi controlled electric panel heaters - v cheap to buy and easy to install but inefficient, ineffective and ugly.
Infra-red panels - just a few of these, but we are gradually installing them on ceilings of rooms we convert. Bit more costly, efficient, v effective at radiative heat (i.e heats people and things when we are standing in their 'path', rather than trying to heat a room full of air), look ok and we've just found some that look positively cool.
Log burner in main room which is fab but we only light on special occasions like Christmas.
We have 5KW of solar panels, which gives us free electricity effectively from May - Sept roughly, but rest of year our electricity bill is eye-watering. We're replacing windows and doors gradually, so hope to eventually have a house that is a lot less leaky of heat.
Luckily we live in Cornwall, so it's not too cold.
We use Bulb for electricity, so everything we do use is from renewable sources.

May I ask why you solar panels are so limited? Sun is great but it can also draw energy from daylight?

What is your overall verdict or recommendation?

Is the aga supposed to heat water, ie could it be needing repaired?

The Aga draws between 2-3KW. It can technically heat water too, but we have a air source heat pump on our new boiler (ariston, really good) and our plumber was reluctant to link a 70-yr old aga and a brand new fancy pants boiler. So the aga just heats the towel rail in the bathroom.
The solar panels are good during daylight, we do have a battery but it is drained v quick by the aga.
We keep the aga on 24/7, from late Oct to April.

No the aga is just for heating itself and looking pretty...the food is actually lovely from it...but as it is on all the time.it is so wasteful.

I'm very curious about this infra-red ceiling thing...

The Aga is an indulgence really. It's an antique, the conversion was a bit cowboy, so it is highly inefficient but I love the way it looks, it's part of the history of the house, and I like cooking with it.
And the warmth it gives, whilst not scorching, makes the house liveable during winter.

Sorry OP I am getting confused between my Aga and yours! Have a look at Blake & Bull for conversions to electric, away from costly, carbon-footprint and stealable oil. They are top-end conversions from what I hear.
The infrared panels are great - unobtrusive radiant heat, efficient and save wall space. Because we have our own 'free' source of electricity they are a good way of putting heating in rooms.
www.thegreenage.co.uk/tech/infrared-heating-panels/

Look at making your property more efficient. We have a five bedroom detached property, all electric apart from the woodburner. We used 10000kWh last year with four people living at home.

Following with interest as we are about to buy a doer upper.

@ihaventgottimeforthis do you mind sharing what the 'cool' infrared systems you've found are?

I'd love to make our house as eco friendly as possible.

Not mine! We have a wood pellet burner that the previous owners installed. In theory it is an efficient system but unless you can afford a massive tank in the garden the smaller systems are rubbish. We have to refill the small hopper everyday which means you can't leave heating ticking over when you are away as the fuel runs out.

We also have a woodburner in the living room to heat the very old bit of the house with no radiators. I love it for lazy days but it's hard to keep an eye on it when working from home and banking it up with coal is bad for air quality emissions.

We had oil fired underfloor heating in our last house and it was amazing, thermostat in every room, warm feet and no radiators blocking walls.

We have a 1930s house that had mostly original wooden flooring in the downstairs when we moved it. It was fine until winter and then you'd literally feel a draught passing your feet going through the floorboards. We now have underfloor heating on the whole ground floor which we put in when we did a side return extension. Best decision we ever made. It's so efficient and a pleasant source of heat. You don't have to have the heating on at all in the daytime as the floor retains loads of heat. There's other advantages too like not needing to have any radiators taking up wall space so the use of your room can totally change. We also removed the fireplaces as they were totally irrelevant and not really attractive anyway.

OK 'cool' might be an exaggeration..!
But these ones (we got the textured style) look much better than others I've seen, which frankly look like whiteboards screwed to the ceiling...
www.flexelinternational.com/products-infrared-heating-panels-ecosun-u-heating-panel

Nope, we have hot air heating. Pro: house is warm in minutes, cons : can't leave on overnight, noisy, once off it cools down very quickly, noisy, vents in the walls look ugly and did I mention noisy!
We did recently had it updated and we now have some fancy thing that heats our water which is good - we used to have to use the emersion heater so that's a pro an dit alos has a dust collector thing to help people with allergies (apparently).

We did buy a couple of electric radiators for our sons room as it is too cold overnight for him and for a bedroom that the hot air doesn't heat as there is no ducting into that room and they are absolutely brilliant, I'm tempted to put them everywhere to be honest,
these are the ones we bought : www.diy.com/departments/1000w-white-convector-heater/3663602884637_BQ.prd

This is our boiler which has an air source heat pump built in to it www.ariston.com/uk/air_source_heat_pump_cylinder

@Ihaventgottimeforthis thank you

Unless the Ariston HPC takes air from outside they're no more efficient than an immersion.

Why's that Daftasabroom? Ours is in loft space, it also has an immersion for emergency boost which we don't use but I confess to not really understanding ASHP.

Anyone with a Ground source heat pump?

The house we are looking at isn’t on the natural gas pipeline so we have to consider either oil or LPG. I would definitely consider solar panels if we could afford them and we’ve already planned for a wood burner in the lounge.

I’d love underfloor heating downstairs but we’ll have to see. I’ve been told that the air source heat pump is noisy.

I’d like to have radiators that are also powered by electric for my airing room and utility room.

All advice greatly appreciated.

Heat pumps work by taking heat from the air around them and transferring it, in your case to water. The air needs to be outside of the heated envelope of the house, so the loft is okay 👍

@LittleEsme we just have the water tank in the airing room, the heat pump feeds the tank which is very big at 300l.
We have insulated well enough that we have no heating upstairs.

@LittleEsme we have GSHP based heating. Either needs a lot of land for the coils or an expensive borehole into the ground.

Once installed it really needs to be paired with underfloor heating - as heat pumps are most effective when heating water to relatively low temperatures.

We have an old farmhouse with single-glazed windows and the underfloor heating / GSHP makes the house liveable. Costs are similar to heating with oil.

Up/downsides of underfloor heating (with solid floors) are that it takes a couple of days for the heating to bring the house up to temperature when we turn the heating on, but thereafter the house is always warm - even when DW leaves the kitchen door open so the farm cats can come in and out(!)

I have a heat pump with underfloor heating and I love it. It took a while to get used to, but I've learnt to just let it do its thing and all is well. My electric bills over the summer were £45pm. I expect winter to be around £65pm.

Thanks Daft I remember now also when it was installed we were trying to decide whether we needed it vented outside or not, that's the reason. Blurb in the manual says the ASHP cuts heating costs to a third of regular tanks.

We discounted GSHP as we are at sea level & not much outdoor space. Discounted ASHP for heating as house is very leaky.
Didn't want to get connected to fossil fuels, so oil out. Didn't want to pay horrific costs to connect to gas, plus climate impact. So only electric, solar panels & renewables. Not sure how deep/solid our foundations are, if they're there at all, plus house is in a bit of a flood zone, so underfloor ruled out.
Jumpers,lots of jumpers. & Blankets.