In reply to balmybaldwin:
I live in a very badly insulated house in the French Alps. Its very big but we only heat about half the building. Me and the wife both work from home maybe 75% of the time so we're each running a home office most days and the house has to be warm and comfortable throughout the day.
We've done the maths and paying to properly re-insulate would never pay itself back with reduced fuel bills over a realistic period of time.
We pay about €800 per year for electricity - we have electric cylinder heating for our hot water (there's only two of us most of the time).
About a month ago I took delivery of 4 tonnes of wood pellets for our central heating boiler. This was much more expensive than normal because of our remote location and our local supplier was unable to get their act together.
The pellets cost about €1600 (including €300 for delivery). They should heat us through until March/April (we're running the boiler almost constantly - we're lucky if it gets above freezing outside this time of year and we've had snow on the ground for 3 weeks. I'll probably have to buy a few more bags of pellets to see us through the spring so I would say all in our yearly energy bills come to around €2600.
Average all that out and we're probably paying around £180 per month.
Post edited at 13:59