What heating would you put in? No gas

[Cartref30]

I know this thread has been done to death but we have lived in our house for 7 months now and still don’t have an answer!

We have old storage heaters on economy 7, and a modern log burner for back up. I’m not going to debate the log burner - that is staying as back up.

My question is around our main source. We hate the storage heaters - having to think about whether they should be on the night before, running out of heat by 3pm, dangerously hot to touch etc. However they do work well and all we would gain from changing to new ones would be more control. What would you do?!

A) air source - we feel like this would be silly. 1900s cottage, never going to be insulated enough. Could be wrong.

B) stay as we are until renewable options develop

C) install oil - seems crazy in this day and age but is it?

D) change to new storage heaters slowly for purely aesthetic and controllable reasons

Any other ideas welcome!

[quote Cartref30]@Upsky brilliant thank you. If the previous owners who had lived here 30 years had put oil in we wouldn’t even question it!
The underfloor heating that had been suggested was wet - so powered by gas / oil / airsource - whatever your normal supply was. I haven’t looked into it more yet though so radiators may well be better for us![/quote]
UFH does mean your walls don’t need radiators so there’s more space and rooms are more flexible - it can be useful

We’ve just replaced our old oil boiler with a new super efficient oil boiler (large old house no gas). We also have solar panels and the overflow from the solar heats the water via the immersion heater before it is fed back into the grid which minimised the oil we use at certain times of the year. We then have a back up multifuel log burner in the main living space and our cooker also provides heat using electricity (everhot). So we’ve got quite a good spread but are still dependent on oil.

We’ll be fine unless they go the way of Austria etc and ban sales of oil..

@CombatBarbie

We Are in a no gas area. We are on oil and it works well for us just now, tank sits hidden at rear of house. Our house is over 200yrs old so are taking all the walls back and putting insulated plasterboard over it (as much as the original walls are gorgeous). We have done 80% of upstairs and already noticed a huge difference. The oil heating is set to 18 and we put the wood burner on to keep the downstairs temperature warm.

We have looked at air source but we are still debating it, I'm keeping an eye on oil prices over winter which will determine our decision.

We did this too and replaced lathe and plaster with modern insulation made a massive difference but the mess! Managed to get a grant for 2/3rds of the cost under green new deal since expired but I think there are still schemes to make it cheaper.

I live in an old house and recently had underfloor insulation fitted. They crawled under the floorboards to do it. It’s made a huge difference to warmth and heating costs. That could be something to consider when you do your downstairs renovations.

We have oil, and live in the country mentioned above that are banning sales of oil. It will effectively be impossible to get heating oil after 2025.

We are getting new communal heating which is high pressured water pumped from communal biomass unit. It’s only been available in our street for a year so far. Annoyingly because it’s now in street outside house, we are no longer eligible for government grants for the air pump or individual biomass we were going to install. The government will pay 65% of the cost to change, and local town an additional €1.500 so it’s pretty coat effective

We will add solar for electric in future. Maybe electric heating with solar and batteries isn’t a bad idea?

There is sometimes a bit of exaggeration on how much insulation is needed for a heat pump. Sime of the scare stories are because the heat pump and/or radiators were too small, not because a heat pump couldn't work. The right system could have been fine.

With good loft insulation and draughtproofing plus underfloor heating a heat pump could work well. You'd need to get advice on sizing and on eligibility for the RHI (now) or grants (from next spring) from someone who does a lot of installations (ie a heat pump specialist) but I do know of people who have installed them in minimally insulated houses and they work fine, so long as there are enough rads/ heated floor area, and the pumps are are set to run for long hours. Then when you do insulate you can run for shorter hours or lower temps for even lower bills :). And no stinky oil :D! You should get the heating for the house you are going to have, even if you use you top-up more while you are finishing insulating.

Might also be worth investigating the newer "co2" types of heat pump that run efficiently even up to 60 degrees . I have heard they work more efficiently in a medium-insulated house.

Also re heat pump, ours is old house, and we were told it would easily heat it ( it’s -20 here often and lots have), but it would only be super efficient at 40 degree water if underfloor heating added or larger radiators . It can easily run at 50/60 degree needed for regular sized radiators but then it wasn’t eligible for as many grants etc . You can get around underfloor heating by simply getting larger radiators if that’s all needed to run at lower temp.

From what you’ve said, I think oil too. Maybe solar panels too if it would work?

We have some ‘wet’ underfloor heating in a large kitchen diner space that runs off our oil boiler

It’s great, tho took us a while to get the timings right. Takes a long time to heat up and cool down so it comes in at something like 5am to make it warm for 7.

What does "showing its age" mean?

I was wondering the same thing. Our near 50 year old boiler has been “showing its age” for as long as I can remember.

We’ve just installed a pellet stove. It replaced our solid fuel central heating and is the best thing ever. The radiators are actually hot and we can turn the heating on and off at a switch (people with gas or oil don’t understand what a game changer this is). The system is clean, good for the Earth and really straightforward. We’ve got a Klover 80 boiler but there’s several options, depending on your property.

www.stovesonline.co.uk/wood_burning_stoves/Klover-Traditional-Smart-80-Wood-Pellet-Cooker-stove.html

Where do you load the pellets?

A relative has a wood pellet boiler with a hopper feed from an upper level. It takes up a huge amount of space in a barn.

We have oil and our supplier offers hydrogenated vegetable oil instead of kerosene. I'm looking into transferring over but from what I've read it is a renewable fuel. We use Johnsons which have suppliers across UK.

I would move house. No heating is as good as gas.

@Viviennemary - you do know entire countries don’t use gas? And have far far colder climates?

@Viviennemary no house in the village or surrounding area has gas. My parents and grandparents don’t have gas. I feel like leaving our house, jobs and family for gas central heating might be a little dramatic :)

Is it possible to put wet underfloor heating in? It runs much colder than radiators and so easier to switch to a heat pump at a future date.

@Geneticsbunny yes I’m hoping so! I’m thinking we could do underfloor in our main living area downstairs then radiators upstairs possibly. Then if we ever could change to air source, hopefully the underfloor would still work then the upstairs radiators might just need to be changed to bigger I think

You can put suspended underfloor into the upstairs too but it might involve taking all the floors up. We have an old cold house and have done downstairs so far and it is pleasantly warm.

You can always have a toasty fire or a electric blanket.

@Geneticsbunny brilliant that’s good to know, thank you

I agree with posters saying insulate as much as you can. It would mitigate the running costs of whatever feasible heating option you settle on today, and allow for greater efficiency if you're made to swap to a lower-carbon system at a later date, especially if that's a heat pump.

I do see the news drip-feeding potential near-future requirements for homeowners to upgrade their heating systems to heat pumps. Hydrogen boilers might have a chance, but sourcing hydrogen will be terrible for the climate unless the investment effort is put into green hydrogen rather than blue. Neither option will be that great for a homeowner in an older house unless the insulation is upgraded to the best and most appropriate kind available.

[quote SmartCar]You could replace you storage heaters with these. I have them and they are pretty good. Set the heat you want and it heats to that. www.heatershop.co.uk/rointe-kyros-kri0990rad3[/quote]
We have just replaced storage heaters with these. True you can't use overnight electricity but they only come on when you need them - no freezing or boiling inspring /autumn when the weather is all over the place and you can programme the times and temps in each room separately. You can set an economic setting and change from.your phone. So when we go away for a week in December we can leave it on a frost setting and turn up on our way home.

Electric heaters are the most expensive to run. Expensive electric heaters are no more efficient than cheap ones, but add to the expense.

@PigletJohn yes that was my understanding, if we stay purely electric, our existing storage heaters are probably the most economical really in terms of no outlay and they use the cheaper electricity. So I don’t think changing to electric heaters would be a good way to spend any money

@Preech yep I think insulate as much as possible needs to be our priority, with a baby on the way oil for now means we at least will have hot water and heating on demand. We can then look at solar, and eventually hopefully a renewable source (whatever that ends up being) for our heating. If we could wait 10 years before making any change I wouldn’t dream of oil, but for our lifestyles we do need to make a change before then unfortunately

Our 40+ year old oil boiler died about 10 years ago. We swapped it for a K series Rayburn, so it cooks, heats the house and does hot water all on timers + installed solar on the highest (oldest) FIT. The solar when generating 2kw+ tips over to heat the hot water, so in the summer, when we cook in sunlight hours on our electric cooker we're effectively using solar for everything and then we use no oil. We have a log burner in our lounge which is the biggest room to supplement the 1 radiator, living rurally we always have trees to take out, we barn store for 2-5 years . We have masses of insulation and double glazing. We spend about £50/month on electricity, and £600 per 2 years on oil (it's not a big house, and very efficient on timers, the thermostat is set at 16 and won't come on in the house till the outside temp is below 5 degrees for more than 12 hours, which may or may not be this side of Christmas. We get back about £1300 a year in FIT payments, so currently the house effectively is energy self-efficient at the moment. We're planning battery storage to compliment the solar for when the FIT payments run out, little point before then as technology will advance. We may by then need to replace solar panels, or consider an air pump.