Seem to have to stimulated a bit of debate here. Thanks for all the suggestions. Had obviously realised about insulation / draft proofing etc. and this is in hand, just thinking really more about equipment as this is where I have less knowledge. A bit more info Loft insulation is currently 300mm +, windows are sash but not particularly drafty due to the years of paint covering every gap - theres a whole new debate. Want to add insulation without losing character of house where one exterior stone walls is exposed inside want to keep that. Boiler is very old - haven't managed to identify make/model yet (out in boiler shed - will venture out later). Any suggestions for a new one. Idea of Thermal store - vented obviously! - was to make use of back boiler on wood burning stove. Also house is quite high up (260m above sea level) and fairly windy most of the time ( just built a commercial wind farm 1 mile away). Thought about using a windmill to drive some kind of immersion heater in the thermal store, hopefully saving cost of connection of turbine to grid or batteries - more efficient use of power? Any suggestions for a possible turbine - have 1/2 acre land around house and nearest neighbour 1/4 mile away so no complaints from neighnours. I was thinking of something bigger than B&Q verson - Also only want one decent turbine rather than several smaller ones. House is in North Cumbria just outside national park, so solar panels probably not particularly cost effective. - interested to know how figure of =A37500 saving was arrived at and how long would take to achieve this benefit. Thanks
In that case, there is almost no point in doing anything else on the insulation side, unless you insulate the outside of the house.
More loft insulation will never pay back.
You could put well-done, from local stone facing in the inside of the insulation.
Ripping up the floor completely and insulating for example will save you around a quarter of the current energy bill. (assuming that the house is around 20m*5m)
Adding double glazing (or secondary glazing, or insulated shutters) will give you a tiny bit more.
Ensure proper insulation of the pipes.
Are you as high as the wind farm? I'd first invest in an anemometer, and see if I could beg records of wind from the wind-farm, to do some sums with.
There is lots of useful information on wind turbines here:
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I must add that unless installing a wind turbine is only for personal satisfaction (or perhaps saving money is not the primary driver) it really does appear to be an all or nothing solution. To generate useful amounts of electricity (and assuming that your site is appropriate in the first place) will require a moderately sized turbine erected on a mast, with a fair sized battery storage bank and power conditioning. To do it right will not be cheap. That said, I think that distributed power generation from a range of resources is the future. But I digress. Hope this helps.
Mmm. Tapestries are good for that. Big heavy ones.
The bigger the current fuel bill, the greater the ROI on a new boiler will be. a 10% saving on a £100 quid a year fuel bill wont pay for a boiler, but 10% on a £2000 a year fuel bill may,..
No.
Hmm. Seeing that you probably only light the stove when the house is cold, I suggest that a store is not necessary - besides you have one anyway in term, of the massive stone walls. It should be possible to use the back boiler as part of a pumped system that will either preheat water going onto the main boiler, or at leasts run a separate hot water primary coil..there has to be an arrangement of water stats, motorized valves and pumps that will use the back boiler when its available...
Research that one carefully. I am no believer in domestic turbines.
About a million years probably.
If those are the sort of conditions you have, you really must look at insulation as priority. And even DG may have its uses. If the exterior of the house is unlovely, consider building another wall outside the existing and cavity filling it..or build another stone wall INSIDE and cavity fill THAT.Getting 50mm of celotex or more into every outside wall should be a priority..if drylining and plasterboard destroys the character, use something else..wood panelling, blockwork - stone - it matters not.
The problems with 'alternative energy' is that the outputs are piss poor, and they only really work in conjunction with a house that is so well insulated one fart hangs around for a fortnight...you HAVE to get energy requirements down before the things like windmills and solar panels start to make any significant difference. Windmills big enough to be useful are almost certainly big enough to raise the ire of neighbours and planning departments..my gut feel is a 20ft diameter mill on a 100ft tall pylon would be the sort of scale to start to be interesting,.
FAR better if you have land area to plant fast growing wood for fuel and coppice it. I believe willow is good, but personally it don't burn well for me in an open hearth. Stove might be better. I'd go for hazel maybe..but anything that grows well will be good.
My wife has just been calculating that if we bought the neighbours ten acre field for 30 grand, we could in principle grow 4000 liters of biodiesel a year..about 1200 quids worth. Hmm. We save about £600 a year using scrap wood from fallen trees on our own and neighbours land. Costs about 50 quid in fuel and chain oil and chainsaw blades..I reckon an acre of coppiced and rotated wood would be fuel forever..no need to grow diesel when we can burn the wood direct.
Seriously, if you have the time, and the land, consider investigating wood burning properly. I have seen at country shows machinery to fast process wood..saws, splitters, and chippers..given an air blown furnace you can combust even green wood chippings pretty well and pretty cleanly. Boilers like that will rapidly convert biomass to energy - and a surprisingly high amount. 50KW is probably achievable at the rate of a couple of wheelbarrows of logs a day. We just cut and split about once a week in winter, and stack an old landrover (no tax, insurance or MOT, and never goes on road) with the result and park it next to the house.
The resultant open fire probably pushes out about 5-10KW.And easily as much again up the chimney. A stove would be MUCH better.
Then if you want to generate electricity, think about a steam engine :-) :-)
Solar power == growing stuff to burn IMHO. Nature is more efficient convertor of low grade sunlight tna anything we have designed to date, and it costs bugger all to plant willow twigs and turn them into trees. Just time.
Even the average trailer load of wood - maybe 300kg - only costs about £70 .. on a weight for weight basis thats probably near enough 300 liters of diesel..in energy terms..23p a liter. Cheaper than you can buy it.
And a multifuel stove will take all the junk mail and old catalogues too.. ;-)
If you have the grid, then there is very, very little reason to put in the battery bank.
It will with extroardinarily rare exceptions never pay back, just be an on-going money sink.
Feeding back onto the grid is the _vastly_ cheaper solution, if possible.
With a large amount of land, if the electricity is to be used for heating, then a thermal store makes far more sense.
Dig a pit 3-4m deep near the house, line with concrete, put in ventilation round the outside to keep out any damp, put in half a metre or more of fibreglass round many tons of heated water.
Heat the water from an immersion heater, or better, a small ground-source heat pump.
Feed this through UFH, maybe with a small heat pump to boost the output temperature a little.
Firstly, only the inner half of the wall is hot, the outside is cold.
Secondly, even with thick stone walls - 60cm here - the walls have a thermal conductivity of some 4W/m^2/K. This is low enough that the walls are significantly - 2-3 degrees cooler than the room, even when 'warm'.
Say 20cm*100m^2 of wall, "warm". This is 20 cubic metres, or around a hundred tons. The stored energy in the inside 20cm of the wall is around 100 million joules per K, or .5GJ.
Heat loss from this warm bit of wall over 20cm of stone is some 12W/m^2/K, or over 10C (freezing out) some 12Kw.
It'll keep the place not-horribly cold for 12 hours or so.
On the other hand - if the stone walls had even minimal insulation put outside them, say 2cm of kingspan, then the house would stay warm for coming up to a week.
I'm in North Cumbria too - what a wind last night! The wind turbine idea had occurred to me as well, but the capital cost is too high for me. I think a heat pump and thermal store might be interesting as you have the land for it, which I don't.
My house is 1970's and the windows are huge, so DG made a big difference. However the biggy is the draft-proofing, and that's still my big problem - I plug one and that shows up another - the plumbers deem to have thought that waste-pipes all need a working gap round them. With the wind we get...
Thought about heat pump - only problem is capital cost of about 6-8000 and then cost of electricity to run it + only runs low temp underfloor heating at about 35 so still need another system for the hot water
- though some of the info on the website doesn't seem to appear in my browser (Firefox).
It's the same kit as the people in the new house next-door are using - and they're getting 75F from the heatpump into their space heating and hot water coil.
In their case it's feeding underfloor heating - but we'll be retro-fitting it into a radiator system. It's reckoned to return at least 3x as much energy as the electricity used to run the pump - and over here (Ireland) there's a generous grant to make it a little less expensive to install
Thought about using a windmill to drive some kind of immersion heater in the thermal store, hopefully saving cost of connection of turbine to grid or batteries - more efficient use of power? Any suggestions for a possible turbine - have 1/2 acre land around house and nearest neighbour 1/4 mile away so no complaints from neighnours
+++++
This site
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will interest you if you have not already found it.
I reckon a 2kW+ wind turbine; a few square metres of solar tubes plus your back boiler all connected to a heatbank such as these guys DPS:
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supply and you could be be well on your way to very inexpensive hot water and space heating year round.
If your ever down south I strongly recommend visiting DPS. You'll be fascinated. I'm intending to install one of their "GX" heatbanks later this year.
Grant make a nice set of oil boilers, fitted one in our last house and have one in this house.
If you're redoing much of the system, I'd definitely fit a thermal store. We got ours from Range. They give you a lot of flexibility, and work well with oil boilers (long burn times).
I'm still not convinced this ever pays back. I've done the calculation using a few different assumptions. If you add battery storage, it definitely won't pay back.
Thermal solar is probably a much better bet, it will at least provide much of your hot water for 6 months of the year. The only renewable you can use for space heating is ground source heat pump.
An "old" oil boiler can be horrendously expensive to run. I'd suggest virtually any new model would be a vast improvement. Try Firebird, or Trianco,for a start. The Firebird Olympic range have been around for some time and are reliable and highly efficient. They need a minimal amount of maintenance as do the Trianco Eurostar range. Just make sure you have a new boiler properly set up and commissioned and your oil usage should improve dramatically. Then you need to examine the situation regarding the other losses and reduce them. You may find a decent secondhand but modern oil boiler on ebay for 2 to 3 hundred quid
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