Energy prices, what's your plan?

Old gecko fingers Gareth? Not sure I'd trust him on these matters.

 

Fully agree, along with making sure the water is sufficiently soft.

 

Possibly an interesting data point:
Felt cold to the core yesterday after the school run so immediately got the log burner going and kept it fed until going to bed. Smart meter claims we spent £5 less on gas than the day prior (£14 vs £19) - and I'm pretty sure it wasn't as cold on Monday as it was yesterday. I don't think we fed £5 worth of logs to it either, once it was ticking over perhaps one per hour.

And then today we came upon another technique to save on gas bills: central heating failure. A failed valve actuator was the problem and has now been replaced, graciously, and not something more serious that would leaves the heating out of commission for any longer. I'm pretty sure the emergency visit will outweigh anything we saved on gas though, so wouldn't necessarily recommend this one.

 

Yeah, we've used the log burner exclusively except for two weekends that we had guests; going by those figures the winter has come out at £770 worth of logs which would have been £1900 in gas. The back of the house is cold (6° in the kitchen this morning!) but conversely the living room is lovely and warm, whereas with gas the whole house would have been 17.5° which doesn't feel warm when you're sat still.

 

Bioethanol fireplace perhaps?

We've found a standard electric oil radiator has done a grand job in our attic which has no heating and is outside the houses thermal envelope ( of course there is some insulation in the roof but not as thick as between floors) it's only needed to be on a couple of times in the morning a grand total of 23Kw use since November, not even been on in Jan quite surprising as missus is the type that is typically always cold and wants to put the heating on.

It's only a small loft space probably helps and it gets a nice sun on the roof in the late morning.

 

We had our chimney lined and burner installed about 2 years ago. Its been awesome. We also had 5 large trees taken so have some "free wood" we are working through. I have also built some storage now



Also plan to register as a "ARBtalk tip site" to get free wood once I work through what I have.

 

Absolutely. AC is essentially a heat pump, it moves heat from outside to inside (or other way round), they are usually 300% efficient. Whereas electric radiator only turns electricity to heat, 100% efficient at best.

I'm considering getting split AC units installed to a few rooms of the house. This will then allow cool of rooms during summer and boost heating or overnight heat select rooms during winter. Will also compliment central heating heat pump when I eventually decide to change over.

 

Yeah, thats how I understand it. If they (tree surgeon) are part way through a job away from there base they bring it round and drop it off with you. I havent actually got a delivery yet and you would need to split / process and store it yourself.

 

My worry would be that log burners are apparently pretty horrible from an environmental pov (especially particulates). Now your mileage may vary as to whether that matters to you, or if it is even true/significant. However from a purely practical standpoint, when making a substantial financial investment installing them, I'd be worried about future legislation clamping down on them in some way for that reason.

 

Aye, I'm not too keen on burning logs myself, but at least it's not pulling gas out of the seabed and turning it into CO2. Certainly if I was installing one myself I'd be looking to get one DEFRA approved as likely everything else (if not all of them!) will get clamped down on soon.

 

That's an important point and its an area with some significant variations in what's reported as fact and its hard to get concrete answers. Its definitely something to be aware of even if its hard to get a clear understanding of the real picture.

 

I know countries like Norway uses ASHP central heating quite a lot, and they should work with 3x efficiency down to minus temperatures no problem.
I also feel AC units in southern China doesn't warm the room as nice as UK central heating, so not sure if there's any difference between Air-to-liquid heat pump to air-to-air heat pump to AC units.

Yeah...... log burning is much greener in terms of net CO2 emission, than extracting and burning hydrocarbon from underground.

So I'm personally not against them for other people, but I wouldn't entertain installation of any new burning related hardware myself.

 

So heat pumps are being pushed now I guess. Are they any better than the ones we had in New Zealand?

When it got frosty they'd stop pumping heat very regularly to go into a defrost cycle. Made it all a bit pointless, we had to keep the log fire going as well just to keep one room at 18 degrees, the rest of the house we were lucky to see 15.

Mind you insulation was shocking there.

 

What's the prices on heat pumps, when I looked a couple years back it was 20k, which is stupid pricing and destroy your garden for the privilage ... for new builds yes, for existing homes I think it will be a very hard sell

 

Dunno exactly but I think pricey is the answer.

I also heard something about companies being penalised for selling too many gas boilers over heatpumps although many won't have the extra money spare for pumps.

Don't know the details on that though.