Gas heating options

[Jimk]

But not currently where oil prices are lower than August....

[John]

One of our daughters lives in a house with no mains gas - only some electric storage heaters. Just pondering (on her behalf) - installing mains gas could be done at a high cost - but then the cost of a boiler, etc makes it all economic disaster. Before she sets about replacing a couple of knackered storage heaters - is there a realisic bottled gas option to get some heat into the house - there is an external wall in the lounge.

[Theo]

Would a woodburner be an option? Or oil?

Theo

[Chris Green]

I think you'll find that LPG (i.e. bottled gas) isn't much cheaper than electricity, especially if you get Economy 7 and work at moving as much consumption as possible to overnight.

We have a big LPG tank (came with the house, I don't think I'd have chosen LPG) and a newish boiler but I doubt it's any cheaper than electricity really.

[Tricky Dicky]

If you are talking about open flame LPG fires then forget it the condensation resulting from the amount of water they throw out is horrendous.

If on the other hand you are considering an LPG boiler then very carefully weigh up the costs. To start with the boiler itself will probably be dearer than an equivalent natural gas one because it is a smaller market. As for how practical it is to run it off cylinders I do not know even if it is cost effective do you really want to be out there in -5°C changing over cylinders. I think most people running off LPG tend to have a large gas tank in the garden, so do you have a suitable garden and it will still probably require some digging to run the gas feed into the house. When you weigh up all these costs it may not be cheaper than running a gas supply in from the street assuming there is gas there.

When we were buying our house about 6 years back one that we considered had been cut off from the gas and if I recollect correctly to have a new connection put was £700 but I cannot swear on that.

Richard

[John]

Tricky Dicky [e-mail] wrote in news: [e-mail]:

A balanced flue would be feasable.

[spuorgelgoog]

Does it?

Apart from being cheaper to run, gas central heating is one of the few home improvements that can often add more value to the house than it costs to put in.

Especially if you can do the radiators etc yourself.

Gas install cost depends on how far you are from the main and what civils work is involved in digging up.

Owain

[Martin Brown]

Depends how high the cost is. They would want about £2M to put our village on mains gas despite the fact that we are in the evacuation danger zone for one of the UKs high pressure gas pipelines!

Bottled gas tends to be expensive and hard work in terms of cylinder swaps during winter. Oil is a bit more tractable in rural areas as you can easily have enough fuel to last out the cold season. Tactic is buy in midsummer and use the rest of the year. Bad idea to be buying fuel during a cold snap as both delivery and prices are unfavourable.

[Davey]

Our gas switches automatically from one cylinder to the other, and the guy who delivers the new cylinder does all the work. All I have to do is monitor the indicator to know when it has changed over, and make a 'phone call.

[Michael Chare]

Why do you want gas? It can go bang if there is a leak. An oil boiler and an induction hob is a safer and more convenient option. It is easy to clean an induction hob and it will turn off if you remove a pan. You will need an oil storage tank.

[Martin Brown]

But in midwinter I would hazard a guess that when it is really cold those gas bottles do not last long when compared to a 1500L oil tank. You are much more dependent on timeliness of your supplier with gas.

Air source heat pumps are another option to consider for pure electric. I know someone who has them and thinks they are great (OTOH we haven't had a truly vicious cold winter since they moved in).

[alan_m]

Friends this summer have had oil CH heating system installed with a bulk tank in the garden. No mains gas available and the previous system was

20year old storage heaters. The new radiators are around the third of the size of the old storage heaters and have freed up a lot of space in rooms.

Various other option were considered LPG supplied from bottles LPG supplied from a bulk tank

For LPG from bottles you would need 47kg capacity bottles for domestic 3 bed house heating and typically around 20+ refills during the winter or cold months. Cylinders containing the much gas are not something you are likely to put in the back seat of your car to take down for a refill. It's something that would be delivered and let someone else do the heavy man-handling. You would need to have two or three cylinders that you could change over to cover, say, the Xmas holiday period when deliveries may not be possible.

Potential running costs: Propane in 47kg bottles = £1250/year (possible needing 22 refills) LPG from a bulk tank = £756/year Heating oil from a bulk tank = approx £730 (possibly less at current oil prices). All solutions also give hot water, not requiring electric heating.

With potential running costs of £500 more per year for bottled gas this solution was rejected.

The quotes for the boilers/radiators/bulk tanks etc were fairly comparable with the 47kg bottle solution being £2K cheaper, I believe the regulations for installing a bulk LPG tank may be more onerous than for a oil tank.

[Chris Green]

However 'bottled' gas (i.e. LPG) doesn't only come in relatively little bottles. One can have a tank with a capacity comparable with your oil tank, ours lasts a whole season.

[Andrew]

Gazco still do balanced flue fires that run on LPG. Just needs a 6 inch diameter hole for the concentric aluminium flue.

[NY]

47 kg propane cylinders are horrendously expensive. Where we lived previously (my parents' holiday cottage, between selling selling our old house and buying a new one) they had 47 kg propane, and the cost was about £140 every couple of weeks, though that was a very old cottage which is cold even in the hottest summer. You don't change the cylinders: you *must* have them changed by Calor or a Calor-approved agent.

A large LPG tank may well work out cheaper per unit volume of gas.

Oil is cheaper still, but I'm not sure whether oil boilers tend to be more expensive than gas ones. When the old bottled-gas boiler at the cottage failed, my parents chose to replace it with a new one, rather than opting for oil.

When we were living at the cottage, we used a mixture of bottled-gas central heating and coke (Phurnacite) in a woefully small wood/coke stove which just heated the living room.

[NY]

The village where my parents have a holiday cottage is about 1/4 mile from where the gas company installed a brand new gas pipe between two towns. The village enquired about being connected to the pipe via a spur, but the cost was extortionate, possibly because a pressure-reducing valve would be needed. When the villagers got it priced up for all the constituent parts, they noticed that the gas company were changing silly money even for digging the ditch for the pipe, but they've got you over a barrel: they would not allow the local farmer to dig the ditch at a fraction of the cost using his JCB - *everything* (even the ditch) *must* be done by approved contractors.

Given that there are only two farms and five cottages in the village, the start-up cost for installing gas would not be spread among many people, so completely out of the question. So everyone has to continue with oil or bottled/tank gas. One house, owned by the estate, still has no central heating and only a small fire in the living room which also heats the hot water (but no radiators).

[Bill Wright]

They have an auto changeover valve.

Bill

[NY]

And sometimes those valves even work :-) Where we were living, the changeover valve developed a faulty changeover indicator for one of the pairs of cylinders. When Pair A became empty, the valve would change to Pair B and show the red flag to indicate "now is the time to order a new pair of cylinders. But when Pair B became empty, although the valve would change to pair A, it did not show the flag, so the first you knew was when *both* pairs of cylinders were empty. We were stuck without gas for several days on three occasions before I worked out the common factor (that it always happened on the changeover from B to A) and had the valve tested and replaced. To their credit, the gas-delivery company that we used were very good about making us a priority delivery when we said that we had no gas at all. No credit to the heating engineers who we called out to investigate why we kept running out of gas without warning, and who failed to test the valve

*for transitions in both directions*; once I suspected a faulty valve, the delivery driver proved it in about 10 seconds by turning off first one pair of full cylinders and then the other to simulate out-of-gas.

It didn't help that our boiler didn't have a proper diagnostic warning to say "low gas pressure", but instead lumped that code in with lots of unrelated faults which didn't unambiguously imply that the cylinders might be empty.

But changeover valves, as long as they work properly, are much better than having to operate a valve manually once you notice that the boiler has stopped working.

[Dave Liquorice]

Shouldn't be it's just a change of jet size and possibly adjustment of the air supply (which a decent installer would check adjust anyway). I wouldn't be surprised if the the boiler came with LPG jets in a little packet.

As others have said auto change over valves solve that but it still leaves you lugging cylinders that aren't far short of 100 kG (2 cwt,

15 stone) when full as you buy 47 kg of gas.

£730... not using much oil then. Says him having just bought 2000 l for £987 inc VAT that should last until Feb/Mar. When another 2000 l will be required to last to Oct/Nov.

But yes bulk LPG and oil are currently very similar in overall cost. You can't directly compare p/l as you get less energy per litre from gas than you do oil. 7 kWhr v 10 kWhr ish.

[Dave Liquorice]

E7 night 7.69 p/kWhr peak 14.9 p/kWhr. (Bulb Area 16 Norweb as was).

Oil 4.7 p/kWhr (based on the 47p/l that I recently paid and 10 kWhr/l).

Ex VAT.

Oil and bulk LPG are very similar in overall cost at current prices.