Heating costs

[BVC]

We are lucky enough to be able to let part of our house as a holiday let. The house is in a rural and exposed location and a lot of our guests ask to have the heating on, even in summer. We have no access to gas and have to rely on oil for the central heating. This is becoming more and more expesive and definitely not very green.At present our oil bill is about £3000.00 per year. We have had a quote for a log burning central heating boiler but this would cost £24,000.00 to supply and install. The thing is huge and would require its own store in the garden to house it.
My question is, has anyone else had experience of these boilers? We have access to free wood so the running costs would be at a minimum but it does seem a large amount to set up the system. Does anyone know of other systems available to people in rural areas? and does anyone else have annual costs for running the heating on Calor Gas? Any ideas would be welcome. BVC

[Martin]

Hi,

At those sort of capital costs you may well find a few of the renewable energy options worth investigating, especially now that the government will pay you handsomely for what you generate. Type 'feed in tariff' into Google and you should get a plethora of information. For remote locations such as yours, it sounds like ground source or air source heat pumps could be viable, along with solar.

The beauty of these methods in your situation is that depending on system design they should be able to be integrated within your existing system and provide a good proportion of your needs 'free', leaving your oil supply to provide top ups when required.

Cheers,

Martin.

[joyce_taylor]

We use a wood pellet stove for the central heating,Solar panels for hot water and log burning stoves in the guest lounge and dining room.The pellets for the boiler cost £2 per 10kg bag and we use 2-3 per day with all of the rooms let during cold weather (down to -16C.and almost none on a summers day. The boiler heats 18 radiators with thermostats.The 2 solar panels heat all of the water in the Summer but have an immersion heater back up in the winter. The log burners we use to shorten the time that we need to run the central heating.Our boiler is the only British made pellet boiler it is an Ashwells Green tec 35KW,it cost just over £5000to buy and another £1000 to install it was a straight swap for a very greedy oil boiler. Clear Skies would not give us a grant as we insisted on a British boiler and they will only give grants on imported boilers.(but since they were £14000+ it made more sense to buy the Ashwells one ourselves.)For a small space like yours an air source heat pump would probably be best as the bulk of the equip. can go outside the ratio you are looking for is 3kw heat for 1kw of electricity or better.

[Manors]

We are "lucky" enough to have gas heating and had some old solar plates which supposedly helped heat the water, but noticed little difference in the bill in summer as they weren't very effective. We have just changed our solar panels to the new evacuated tube system - needed six panels for our 14-bed property at a cost of £7200 - but since they were installed we haven't had our water heating on at all, and this is in overcast weather. The water is piping hot all day, although we haven't had many guests in to test out the capacity yet. Our supplier believes it will save us between £1500 and £2000 a year. Of course, smaller properties would need a smaller system. Worth a thought.
Ros

[Sue: White Horse Walking Holidays]

We put in 2 solar panels nearly 3 years ago (before starting the B&B). They're brilliant. Even last summer which was lousy, we only had to top up the water heating a couple of times. They work all year round, as long as there's some sun.