AL_n has brought this to us :
It could be free...
If you have some transport - Just have a chat with a local farmer about your collecting windfall wood, or find a pallet reclamation place, local builder about off-cuts of wood from their sites.
If you could find a source of used oil, you could burn that for free. I use a waste oil burner to heat my garage and workshop.
There are plenty of sources of free fuel, if you are willing to collect.
Be thankful you're in a warm-ish climate. I was just looking through bills a few days ago and ours was over 3300 kWh in January alone (and over 3000 on the months either side of that) :-)
It seems unlikely... certainly while a large proportion of our flexible load generation capacity depends on gas (applications nukes and coal are not well suited to), and especially so while we have to subsidies all the decorative wind farms and solar panels.
Can we swap? (I can use that in about 5 weeks)
and that under 4 during the winter
Because of your relatively small existing bills, any capital spending is going to take a very long time to pay back (if ever). Doubly so if you are borrowing at that rate.
Its a good plan... however the amount spent on water heating alone (i.e. rather than space heating) is usually relatively small.
Have a look if there is a label on it anywhere. You would need an "indirect" cylinder rather than a direct one for boiler heating.
Its ok if you have local free wood available. However the purchase and install costs of wood burners are surprisingly high unless you DIY.
Nuclear electricity is about 8p a unit give or take for new nuclear
Bulk gas is about 5p I think at a putative efficiency of 60% that translates into about 3p a unit raw cost. I have no idea what domestic gas costs per Kwh because I don't use it.
Electricity plus heat pump should be competitive..
As should night storage if done effectively - according to EDFS tariff sheet nightrate electricity is now cheaper than gas.
Ho hum.
make that 12 weeks
about a week, in winter
=A3463 for energy and you think that's a lot? Our spend is over =A34,000= /year between oil and electric.
=A3463 would buy about a month and halfs worth of oil in the winter. "Winter" runs from about Oct to Apr...
Even then I doubt the electricity price will fall much if at all. The subsi, oops sorry "revenue support", that the government needs to provide to get the new nuke plants built and the assurances that HMG isn't going to do a Merkel will ensure that.
John Rumm wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@brightview.co.uk:
I will; thanks.. (as soon as I can pluck up the pep to go climbing up into the loft, (with its spiders and all..)
Al
John Rumm wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@brightview.co.uk:
I would definitely DIM if I got one. A couple of things have put me off getting one. One is consideration of the combined expense and inconvenience of going hunting for free wood. Then there is the inconvenience of keeping it fed with fuel. Softwood burns up so quickly. Coal or coke might be sufficiently convenient, in comparison, to make it worth paying for. I saw bags of coal for sale locally at about £15 each. My hunch was that it looked like a rather expensive form of fuel (admittedly without finding out how many kilowatts it would convert into).
Al
No need to take spiders, there should be plenty up there already ;-)
If used on open fires etc with wood then you don't need a huge amount of it... but in absolute terms its probably not that cheap.
We typically use about 100 - 150kg per winter, and then a couple of cubic metres of logs on top of which about a third I can harvest from the garden. The local woods will do a flat bed Transit load for around £90. Keeping a fire going most cold days seems to reduce our gas usage by about 15 - 20% a day in the coldest bits of winter.
Since we're comparing...
On gas, I'm about 5000kWh/year excluding cooking, down from 6300kWh/year when I started monitoring it a year back. I haven't yet analysed if the drop is due to changes I've made or changes in the weather. I have plotted daily use here
How does one obtain the kwh from the gas meter? I record how many units we use each month, it's a metric meter. I take it that IS the kwh, e.g. last month we used about 50 kwh?
>
Gas meters measure volumes, for conversion:
multiply m^3 by 10.86 to give approximate kWh
(it's approximate because there's a calorific value fudge factor)
which, according to that website equates to 21,953kwh.
Using this method it equals 20981kWh
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