In your situation i would stick with the electric heating. It will cost you around £7500 to install an oil boiler and tank.
With the present price of oil at around 50p/litre it would take a long time to recoup the outlay in fuel cost savings.
A steel tank 4x6x2 foot might be easier to site in your garden than a round plastic one.
DIY installation of an oil fired boiler and central heating system is possible.
Plus the added thief magnet of having oil ...
I have a well insulated house plus we have a wood burning stove. If you live in a rural area like I do wood is free. I have about six years worth stashed.
My electric bill is £400-£500/year. I have solar panels and an electric car. The all electric houses have air source heat pumps. These roughly triple the heat of the electricity used to run them. Not cheap though and technology still a bit dodgy. (You need a specialist installer.)
You might want to consider double glazing and other insulation.
It depends on his definition of BBC.
In message snipped-for-privacy@mid.individual.net>, alan_m snipped-for-privacy@admac.myzen.co.uk> writes
Coal deliveries are easier to arrange than ever before, surprisingly. We used a local merchant until he retired, and I was then amazed to discover coal can be delivered by pallet, either 40 x 25kg or 100 x
10kg, same price. I buy 100 x 10kg, because they're easier to carry. Usually around 200 pounds at summer prices, but worth shopping around.
For propane 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.
20 refills at £60 = £1200 Add to this figure any electricity you may use day to day for other purposes.The Op will not save any money on yearly running costs using bottled LPG.
Assuming that the OP has conventional hot water CH with an electric boiler there may be some savings of maybe £400/year changing to a fuel that required a bulk tank albeit with additional up front costs for the replacement boiler and tank. The pay back time will be related to anything in the existing system needing end of life replacement now or in the near future.
Only about a hundred years ago *all* kitchens had stoves, superseding the open fires used in previous centuries.
Smokeless zones?
They are beginning to clamp down on wood burners because of all the pollution they cause.
Even in vey rural araes very few people have access to free wood nor have the inclination to prepare/saw it for wood burning stoves.
Where my friends live a 1.6m3 bag of <20% moisture logs is £160. This amount may last a few months in a 5Kw wood burning stove.
In the summer and good in hot climates for air conditioning in the really hot months. A LOT less efficient in the winter and ideally suited to a CH system being specially designed for them hence why under floor heating is often recommended. Possibly a technology not ideally suited for the UK climate.
Quote "Air source heat pumps can alternatively be powered by wind energy or solar power instead of electricity"
How?
More so when people are using recycled wood that has previously been treated/painted.
Didn't I recent see something on this group about the sale of coal and green wood logs in supermarkets and petrol forecourts being curtailed/banned because of the pollution being caused in what was once (and still is) a smokeless zone.
It wasn't unusual for old fire places to have air vents concealed in fancy fittings. Something like a fish with a mouth that could be opened / covered at the corner of the hearth was a common way. The air supply came from under the suspended floor.
Which is why our oil tank is in the garage.
Sort of...
It's in its own little room with fireproof plasterboard, it's a bunded tank... did someone mention extra regulations?
We actually had trouble getting the BCO to read the regs; They are complex.
But this way it's hard to steal from, and it'll never be affected by UV.
Andy
Electric blanket does, particularly one on a time switch so it come on an hour or so before you go to bed.
Much cheaper to run too.
Presumably lots of cogs in the first case and a low pressure turbine driven by convection in the second case.
At the moment, but pressure is on to reduce coal useage and the railway preservation societies are seriously worried about it. They have an exemption from the regulations, so they will not be prevented from buying or using coal, but they are seriously concerned that as domestic use falls, there will not be enough demand to support the delivery systems and prices will rise hugely, followed by it becoming nigh on impossible to get delivery of "small" quantities - and small in their terms is hugely bigger than any domestic delivery.
SteveW
Well, you forgot to mention accessibility to the oil tanker. I could have a tank in my back garden but the oil tanker wont get to it. If it goes on my front garden it is both insecure, a hazard and an eye sore, not to mention, in both cases a major upheaval of what is already there.
I am against the change. OH prefers gas. I dont like gas either.
I am looking at the notion of opening the kitchen fireplace for coal/wood ( not the bedroom one that OH wants to open.) That means taking out a run of cabinets.
It will if you have access to a road anywhere from your property.
Before my friends recently moved they rented a house with the tank in the back garden. The tanker parked in the street and then ran the hose through the front door and out of the back door. This was common in the village where they lived and the tankers were all equipped with very long hoses.
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