Heating!

[Anonymous]

Hi All,

having budgeted for it from the get go, we finally turned on our central heating system in December last year. I painstakingly removed the unsightly electric storage heaters (having also had to remove anything plastic that was near them as they got so hot they'd literally melt them (my £200 soundbar will never look or sound quite the same again!!). We went for LPG fired combi boiler which I'm currently in the process of hiding in a newly constructed purpose built loft in the bathroom.

As our cottage is quite small and the to avoid having to have planning permission for a large overground tank, we opted for 2 pairs of 47kg propane tanks (like those you see on holiday parks outside the caravans). These are connected to an auto kick over valve and I basically have to order a new pair once the indicator turns red.

What I didn't realise was quite how expensive they were. Currently I'm spending about £220 per month on LPG which for a two up two down cottage seems excessive, having come from a 4 bed detached mains gas fed house, it's a bit of a culture shock to say the least.

Having read a few articles it appears we've picked the most expensive way of supplying heat to our cottage but I'm struggling for alternatives that don't involve having large ugly oil / gas tank in my front garden (there's no mains gas to the village). To my mind an electric combi boiler is one alternative (but not necessarily cheaper).

Perhaps it's just something I'll have to accept as part of village life but If anyone has any other good suggestions (bearing in mind changing the boiler is going to be difficult to justify financially having only just paid for it).... any thoughts ?

I've a large wood burning stove which pumps out oodles of heat (in the front room) but with the heating off everywhere else is too cold.
My only other hope is that soon I can turn the heating off and then it might last a bit longer than it currently does.

anyone any other thoughts ?

Paul.

 

[88v8]

Oh dear.

We have storage heaters, don't know how old but pre-72. And two woodburners which top us up in the evening.
The shower room is not heated, nor the kitchen other than anything that wafts up from the heater in the cellar.

The cottage is C17, no insulation other than the attic. The wattle walls doubtless emit heat like a beacon.

We heat water in kettles on the woodburners. That goes in multiple thermoseses (?) anyway vacuum flasks for use during the day.

Coming from a gch house one has perhaps to reset one's habits. Has one been accustomed to 70F?
In our previous house, the room stat was set to 62F, and that's about the temperature we have here. During winter we wear a wooly. Or two. And three pairs of socks. In olden times, one heated one or two rooms, never the bedroom.

The difference in heating cost between 70F and 62F is around 50-100%. That's because of the increased rate of heat loss due to external temperature differential.

We gradually turn up the storage heaters as winter begins, and taper them off in spring. As you say, they can get pretty hot if left to their own devices.

Curtains... well-fitting curtains drawn at night, not dangling over the rads, can be as effective as double-glazing.

Some people, none of us of course, expect to dress in winter as if it's summer, and wouldn't dream of anything as 'yesterday' as curtains. And some of these same people then like to pretend that they're 'green'.

Chap up the lane has LPG. He used to complain of the cost, now I notice he wears a fleece, indoors. And a golf hat, but he is a bit odd.
I briefly considered LPG, then decided that as previous owners had managed the way we are, so could we.

Considering that you'd be writing off, what, £5,000? to change the system now, I can only commiserate and suggest http://www.loopknittingshop.com/c/585/Knitting-Classes

Hopefully someone else will be along with a wizard wheeze.

Ivor

 

[Flyfisher]

Have you considered replacing your wood stove with a boiler stove and combining the hot water from that with the hot water for the lpg heating system? This would supplement (perhaps eliminate) the lpg heating and reduce the running costs, but you'd still have the convenience of gas for summer hot water winter morning heat. We're fortunate to have mains gas, but have still implemented this sort of hybrid system and it works very well in reducing our gas bills.

Having said that, I also agree with Ivor about dressing appropriately during winter. Long Johns make such a difference

 

[paulc]

Have you considered replacing your wood stove with a boiler stove and combining the hot water from that with the hot water for the lpg heating system?

Some wood burners have an option for installing a back boiler, and a few are even available as a retrofit item. If the stove is a free standing model, it may be possible to replace the rear firebrick with a small stainless steel BB unit.

 

[Flyfisher]

Good point and certainly worth checking before replacing.

 

[fernicarry]

Have you considered replacing your wood stove with a boiler stove and combining the hot water from that with the hot water for the lpg heating system?

One of my pet subjects this, having put quite a lot of time and effort over the last couple of years into building out a system to combine multiple heat sources.

The vast majority of wood stoves with back-boilers are only suitable for use on a gravity circuit i.e. the pipes need to go up from the back of the stove generally into a tank somewhere upstairs (airing cupboard or loft). This might be fine for heating the hot water but you want to put the heat into your space heating system. You can do radiator loops on gravity and thats how it would once have been done (the heat rises upstairs, goes around the radiators then sinks back downstairs, through a few more radiators and back into the boiler), but its very unlikely your LPG combi will play nicely with that as its almost certainly pressurised (does it have a dial on the front marked in 'bar'?).

Alternatively you could find a stove that can go on a pressurised loop (there aren't many from manufactures you've heard of) and plumb it in line with your radiators. As the water flows round the radiator circuit the wood burner will add its own heat which gets emitted from radiators further down the line. This might still not be straightforward depending on where the WBS is in the loop. If its near the start then the water is already hot having come from the LPG boiler so there is little to no additional heat added by the WBS. If its near the end of the loop then there aren't any more radiators to emit the heat and hot water goes back into the LPG boiler which will see that as low demand and turn itself off. If the WBS can run the whole system then you're probably quite happy for the boiler to turn itself off! You might find yourself going through considerably more wood though. If you need heat from both sources to cover the demand then that will be quite tricky indeed to balance.

The approach we took is to run everything into a thermal store. This is a large body of water which sits in the middle between your heat sources and your heat demands, basically a large buffer. Its not exactly trivial nor cheap to do, but it does make for a very flexible system. One of my motivations was to try to future proof us to the vagaries of energy prices. From an eco point of view I like the idea of using non-fossil carbon (wood), but that has its downsides (particulates, physical labour). If this was something you wanted to investigate I'd be happy to go into more(!) detail.

Interestingly, at some point in our house's history it appears to have been on LPG. There was a pressure regulator on the side of the house and I recently discovered a pipe coming out the ground and some slabs at the front of the garden where a tank may have sat. Since then the gas main has reached us but next door are still on oil. I also know from a previous owner that it was on electric storage heaters when she lived there (probably pre-LPG) which would explain why we have a 3-phase cable head! We are fortunate indeed not to have those bills so I sympathise with your predicament.

-Alan

 

[Flyfisher]

We took a similar though slightly different approach for our wood stove & gas system. All boiler stove systems should be configured to run safely without the need of electricity, in case of a power cut, though that does not mean relying on gravity circuits entirely and electrical pumps can be used as long as the system design allows (let's face it, power cuts are thankfully very rare). Our boiler stove runs upstairs radiators equivalent to half the boiler stove rating, for safe operation in the even of a power cut, but we also have a pumped circuit from the stove to our 'thermal store' on the ground floor.

I say 'thermal store' but it is not particularly large and it's more like a large hot water tank with multiple coils. This tank enables the two heating sources to be effectively while keeping their actual circuits completely isolated. The unvented pumped circuit from the boiler stove goes through one of the hot tank's coils, thus heating the tank. The gas boiler is a pressurised circuit that goes through a separate coil in the tank, thus also heating the tank. The tank itself is vented and its water is purely used to store and transfer heat between the various coils within.

The other radiators (and wet underfloor heating in the kitchen) take their heat out of the hot tank through yet another coil and this is a conventional, pumped and pressurised circuit. It's actually split into three separate zones with motorised valves, though that's a detail really.

Finally, domestic hot water is derived from yet another coil within the hot tank fed from the mains cold water supply. The hot water output from the tank coil is fed through a mixer thermostat to ensure that hot water to the taps and shower is a safe heat, rather than at the temperature of the tank.

In the event of a power cut the gas boiler obviously stops working, as does the pumped radiator heating circuit, but the boiler stove continues to provide heat to our sitting room as well as the bedroom 'heat leak' radiators, so we don't lose all heating.

The system has been in operation for a few years now without problems, though we only have two of the three heating zones connected as the third will be in rooms still to be finished. We set the system timer to control the gas boiler with a typical pattern of use for summer and winter but when we light the boiler stove it overrides the gas boiler thermostat so that although the gas is timed to be on, it won't actually come on if the boiler stove is providing heat. If we ran the boiler stove all day, the gas boiler would never come on. In our first year of operation our winter gas bill was about £65 - though we did burn a lot of wood that winter!

 

[jocelyn plummer]

Hi Cre8toruk--you have my sympathy in bucket loads---18 months ago we downsized from a four bed, 4 reception house with 12 radiators on mains gas, and an Esse range cooker costing around £180. per month (combined electricity and gas) . We now have a tiny 3 bed one reception 1986 build downsize with 6 radiators ,and a combi boiler on LPG--the only available option in our neck of the woods. There are two LPG cans, and from November-to the end of April, despite using the rad stats set at number 2, and the a main thermostat temperature of 16, we get through one cannister every 8 days at a cost of £65.00. We do not use 2 of the rads which are in the living room as it is heated by an efficient woodburner (clearview) and the tiny kitchen is warmed by an Aga City 60, and the bathroom is warmed by a heated towel rail. 10 bags of logs cost us £60. every 14 days or so, and I think the Aga is about £11 per week. so, it doesnt take a mathematician to see which house is the most expensive to heat. I absolutely hate LPG and had resisted viewing properites that are heated by it, but we had no option in order to be where we wanted.

i had some old North Norfolk boy telling me how to switch to electric through out, but by the time he had finished blaaing on about where he would get the mains electric supply int the house I had fallen asleep----I have absolutely no idea how to suggest you change your heating system, but if I find an answer I will let you know.!!

 

[fernicarry]

Flyfisher, your system is identical in principle to ours. I always understood that the differentiating point of a thermal store is that you take your DHW out through a coil rather than drawing directly from the tank.

Going back to cre8tor's original post. One thing to consider is whether the heat from your system is being effectively delivered to your living spaces? If the cost of a unit of heat is high then you want to get the most benefit from it.

Our house had typical modern steel panel radiators sited purely for the convenience of the installer than for effectiveness in heating the occupants. The system would run flat out all day long and still we were shivering. If you stood behind the sofa near the radiator it was roasting hot but sitting on the sofa it was freezing.

This was 'fixed' by replacing the 2 radiators in the living/dining area with 3 cast-iron ones. Being cast iron they actually radiate! Panel radiators do not radiate, they convect. The air around the radiator is heated, rises to the ceiling, cools, sinks down the far side of the room and rolls across the floor back to the radiator. If the volume of the room is not too large and the ceilings not too high then this might work but for more typical period proportions a panel radiator is just a cold draft generator.

Also I sited two of the radiators under the windows so that they tend to offset the higher heat loss through the windows which again reduces the feeling that its drafty. The modern advice is not to site radiators on external walls because you lose more heat through the wall (which is true), but if the remaining heat isn't delivered to where you need it then that misses the point.

As flyfisher has done we've also zoned the house. The more you try to heat the space in a traditional house the more heat you lose through the fabric of the building. By zoning you get to decide where and when to heat so you have some say over how much heat loss to incur. TRV's on their own give you a degree of control over temperature but not the timing (unless you run around the house twice a day twiddling them). I work from home, so to heat the upstairs bedroom I use as a study with conventional controls I'd need to run the whole system but with zoning I can run just one room if I wish (and automatically turn it down at the weekend).

The other thing obviously is insulate wherever you can. In reality this probably only means the loft but if you have access under the ground floor then that's well worth exploring (I've yet to find a good technique for easily retrofitting however).

-Alan

 

[fernicarry]

Something occurs to me what with the govt bleating on about how important it is we cut our own throats with emissions reductions and the energy companies whining about green levies, would it not make sense to divert some of that money towards putting more people on the gas main?

You'd be shifting the fuel source for a fair number of people away from those considered polluting as well as saving them a bunch on their cost of living (== happy voters).

You could even imagine a 'district' gas network with a big storage tank for communities that are too remote to be economically connected to a main. Sort of a modern day gasworks...

Not nearly as lucrative in terms of post-elected-office directorships at Drax so I suppose it won't get done....

 

[Flyfisher]

Flyfisher, your system is identical in principle to ours. I always understood that the differentiating point of a thermal store is that you take your DHW out through a coil rather than drawing directly from the tank.

That's interesting, I thought it was more to do with the size of the tank, though your definition makes more sense because our 'thermal store' is not really that large. My initial idea was to have a large thermal store that would be sufficient to store enough heat from the afternoon/evening burn of the boiler stove to run the radiator and underfloor heating in the morning, therey not needing any input from the gas boiler at all. But it started to get so large that I became concerned about 'thermal lag' and how long it would take to get a cold store fully up to heat. Such things always seem to be a question of balancing the various trade offs!

Anyway, it all seems to work well enough so I'm fairly pleased overall. The store still has one spare internal coil, which I specified so that I'd be able to implement some sort of solar heating in the future, so plenty of scope for a bit more experimentation in the future . . . as if the 'to do' list isn't long enough already. :lol:

 

[Hobden]

Ivor (88v8) makes the point I would have made - put on two jumpers and extra socks. It really does make a difference and doesn't cost much!

 

[skier-hughes]

Sounds like we have a similar heating system fernicarry.
We have a 40Kw wood burner heating a 1000l buffer tank which has a 200l dhw tank inside.
We also use solar tubes to heat the tank and have just installed a lpg boiler to give us a bit more flexibility. My wife has started working from home and my winters worth of wood went in half a winter, I just don't have the time to chop about 20 ton of logs for a whole winter.
We had the large buffer tank so we could heat it to 70' at night and then have heating come on in the mornings and with such a big log burner we could get it up to 70'+ in no time.
I'm just waiting for the Genius system to arrive so I can zone all the rooms individually and also turn the lpg boiler off using my phone instead of going to the boiler room to do it manually.

 

[Feltwell]

Perhaps it's just something I'll have to accept as part of village life but If anyone has any other good suggestions (bearing in mind changing the boiler is going to be difficult to justify financially having only just paid for it).... any thoughts ?

Have you space for an underground LPG tank?

Another option (you'll have to work out what the benefit is) is refillable gas bottles. I've got a motorhome, and the bottled gas to run the heating system, fridge and oven is ridiculously expensive - plus it's a pain going away with a part-full bottle. I bought a refillable gas bottle that you fill at garages that have LPG pumps for converted cars. I pay 52p a litre for LPG, refilling this bottle is about £14 cheaper every time compared to paying for a "normal" exchange gas bottle. This is the firm who make the bottles:-

http://www.safefill.co.uk/

I use my bottle to power my workshop heater in winter.

Note that if you go online you'll find adaptors available to enable you to refill ordinary Calor-type gas bottles. This is a highly dangerous practice. Gas bottles must never be filled more than 80% full - the Safefill bottle contains a mechanism which prevents it being filled by more than that. This is the same as LPG-converted cars (which I also have 1 of!). When Calor or similar refill their bottles they do it with them stood on scales, which automatically cutoff when the bottle is 80% full.

If that's of interest, if you send me a PM with your postcode, I can check for you where your nearest garage with an LPG pump is. You should note that some of them may get funny even with you refilling Safefill bottles - it's because of eejits refilling Calor bottles, I've seen some of the travellers round here doing it. I've never had a problem though, only heard of it from others.

Our - less hassle in the long run - can you really not find somewhere for an above ground tank, and screen it off with trellis and some climbing plants?

 

[skier-hughes]

Screening off with trellis or plants or anything is not allowed unless you meet the minimum distance requirements, 3m for anything. So ours is just sitting outside in full view, as to get it far enough away from the house and with a 3m distance all round would have taken up far too much of an area.

 

[Hobden]

Screening off with trellis or plants or anything is not allowed unless you meet the minimum distance requirements, 3m for anything.

Does that apply to oil tanks too? We're just in the process of moving and our new house has an 'orrid oil tank sitting alongside the house, and I'd thought of screening it off ...

 

[Anonymous]

We have 47kg bottles delivered this is the most expensive way of having gas. Underground / Overground (wombling free!) is not an option due to planning permission requirements and the excessive up front cost....

I guess it'll be cheaper in the summer so I will have to hope things even out over a year.......

 

[skier-hughes]

Screening off with trellis or plants or anything is not allowed unless you meet the minimum distance requirements, 3m for anything.

Does that apply to oil tanks too? We're just in the process of moving and our new house has an 'orrid oil tank sitting alongside the house, and I'd thought of screening it off ...

Don't think so, but our oil tank was in situ when we bought the house and I've just had a gas tank fitted, so I don't really know!!

 

[skier-hughes]

We have 47kg bottles delivered this is the most expensive way of having gas. Underground / Overground (wombling free!) is not an option due to planning permission requirements and the excessive up front cost....

I guess it'll be cheaper in the summer so I will have to hope things even out over a year.......

We were told no planning required, maybe as it is in back garden??
Also, no upfront costs, £60 per year to hire the tank. Tank supplied and fitted for free. Just had to have our plumber connect the boiler to the gas pipe tail they left sticking out of the ground from a ditch I had dug.

 

[Hobden]

Screening off with trellis or plants or anything is not allowed unless you meet the minimum distance requirements, 3m for anything.

Does that apply to oil tanks too? We're just in the process of moving and our new house has an 'orrid oil tank sitting alongside the house, and I'd thought of screening it off ...

Don't think so, but our oil tank was in situ when we bought the house and I've just had a gas tank fitted, so I don't really know!!

Answering my own question, it seems that "screening (e.g. trellis and foliage) that does not form part of the boundary" must be at least 60 cm away from an oil tank. See -

https://www.oftec.org/Media/Default...OFTEC_HomeGuide_DomesticOilStorage_PUB19.pdf