UKC

I'm interested in buying a house in a rural location - currently just got electric storage heaters, and no mains gas in the village, so if I buy it I would probably want to put in an external oil tank, condensing boiler, radiators.

Anyone done this fairly recently and got a very rough ballpark figure for purchase of all the stuff and installation ( would probably be 8 radiators but an extra radiator or two not going to make a huge difference ).

No idea if I'm talking £5k or £8k or £10k..............

In reply to steelbru:

If I was you I would look at an air sourced heat pump, oil is low now, but won't stay that way.

In reply to summo:

Are they not ridiculously expensive to do, like £20k or more ?

In reply to steelbru:

Are you looking to stay there long term and has it got an EPC of E/F?
Don't know if this is in England, but if it is you could get a green deal to help with costs.

Also information on different systems is available at http://www.energysavingtrust.org.uk/domestic/content/air-source-heat-pumps

In reply to steelbru:
depends on what system you want. If your house is open plan, heating only, then £2k will get you one, spend a little more and you'll get a more powerful or efficient one etc..

Whole system, you need a tank and radiators still, they work better with underfloor than traditional UK wall mounted radiators, but would still be OK in a 'properly' insulated house. Depending on house, size etc.. the whole system could be £10k then. Many of the better warm water storage tanks have different inputs though, so you could heat the warm water with solar water heaters, or running the compressor / pump off solar PV.

In reply to steelbru:

something like one of these for heat and water - http://www.nibe.co.uk/Home-Owner/NIBE-Heat-Pumps/Water-heaters/Water-Heater...

the external unit will emit a little noise, so you do need to consider the location and not put it outside your bedroom window, but they aren't excessive. The tank location is better inside the house to keep it warm, whilst keeping you pipe run distance as short as possible.

In reply to steelbru:

We recently replaced our indoor oil fired boiler with an external one. With all the work, including a new pump inside it was about £3.5k. We already had the oil tank and the pipework/rads, so this only gives you an indication of one side of things.

In reply to steelbru:

I'd go for a tank free oil combi to eliminate sources of moisture in the loft spaces. You might expect to drop £2k on a decent boiler and £1.5k (max) on basic radiators, a towel rail, thermostats and plastic piping. After that it depends on labour costs in your area and if the pipe fitting is being done to a decorated house or a gutted frame.

Given the trajectory of energy prices I'd spend more on insulation than on heating.

In reply to steelbru:

Expensive I would say, largely as there's nothing there already.

You would need oil fired burner... £1500 to £2500 for the thing itself. Oil tank say £1 to 1.5k, Flue up to a few hundred quid depending on requirements etc. Then you have all the plumbing (copper pipes and fittings cost!) and electrical work to get water and power to where the boiler will sit, concrete base for oil tank to sit on, trench to run oil pipes to boiler. Then all the internal work of plumbing for radiators and hot water system, plus radiators.

I had a past it Oil fired Stanley cooker/heating system (internal) replaced with external a couple of years back plus new oil tank and that was £12k... and that was allowing for all radiators and underfloor heating pipework already in place along with oil lines etc (admittedly there was probably a days worth of extra plumbing rationalising/tidying up years of additions and alterations etc to make it all make sense and remove clutter of dodgy pipework all over the place)....

Neighbour has just had an external wood pellet burner fitted and that was about £17k I think... and that was going to an existing wet system so again, he had limited fresh pipework/radiators etc in his house. However, on this one he caught the tail end of a renewables incentive deal (Scotland) that means it should pay its own running costs and installation over I think about 6 years and after that he'll be back to just paying for pellets himself, so he sees it as a 'free' upgrade if all goes well.

A friend has a logfired boiler and a huge thermal store in an outhouse.... in summer you burn once every 3 days or so and heat about 7,000 litres of hot water, in winter daily in a small way runs the needs of a decent sized house. If you can get logs these are nice...

And I've been looking at log gasification fires for inside house that do a similar job - really nice focal point/feature that would heat a lot of water if required. If I fitted one of those I could use it instead of oil whenever I fancy and have oil as a reliable, timed, turns itself on when required back up. Again, access to free/cheap logs makes it more cost effective than buying logs in.

My advice - find a really good heating engineer/expert in all systems and all current deals and get them to advise either
1. The easiest, least disruptive quick improvement - the most bang for bucks with least hassel over a shortish duration and
2. His current best guess as to what to do now to have the best system for the next 20 years that will provide your hot water and warmth needs, be cost effective lonmg term and possibly add decent value to house.

Find somebody good and you could get a good system and possibly cheap or paying for some or all of itself view incentive schemes or suchlike. Go to any one expert (Heat pump, biomass, oil etc) and you will get 'sold' what they want to sell you I'd guess.

Not a decision to be bounced into quickly.

Long and short though, with no hotwater heating insfrastructure in place, whatever you do will involve a fair bit of mess and disruption and a fair bit of labour coists and time so even if system looks like a small 4 figure number, add in all the consumables and a week or two of fitting time and it all adds up.....

In reply to steelbru:

Thanks all for the replies, plenty food for thought and good links to follow up on. I'm in Scotland btw, so need to check what green-deals or other incentives are available.

If I buy, then would probbaly just live with the storage heaters over this coming winter and look to put in a new system next spring/summer, giving me plenty time to research all options. Might still try and find a independent heating engineer for some guidance/rough costs before I commit to purchase

In reply to steelbru:

You can also get RHI funding (same as the feed in tariff for PV but for heat) if you went down the heat pump or biomass boiler route, which will give you a decent payback. You'd have to make sure the house was pretty thermally efficient for ASHP but it's worth looking into if you're starting from scratch.

https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/environmental-programmes/domestic-renewable-heat-i...

In reply to steelbru:



I did this last year. Forget oil it's too expensive.

Go with air-source heat pump + solar panels + solar thermal.

I spent £22000 installing this. I have 300L tank, 2 thermal panels and 16 PV, and 11 kW air-source. My house has E and W roofs and 200 m^2 floor area. The volume of the house is twice my old one* and the EPC estimated 20,000 kWhr to heat it.

From December to May I've used 6000 units and I'm currently running at

In reply to steelbru:
we were in the same situation with our house in Scotland and went down the road of a Biomass boiler.
We installed a wet heating system and it was about £8k.

We get RHI payments for the first 7 years and got a grant towards the boiler too, its well worth doing.
The house is warm and the bills are down by 50% over electric storage heating.

Beware of heat pumps in all but very modern standard insulated houses as they have a limited low level heat output and do not work effectively in older houses.

Phill

In reply to Philip:
When you say oil is too expensive, I assume you mean the running costs once installed, and not the installation costs themselves ?

With your ASHP did you go for underfloor or radiators ? Did your £22k include the cost of whichever of these you went for ?

I've read that heat pump solutions are not really suitable to a radiator system, as the water doesn't get hot enough, works far better with underfloor. Which then means you have to rip up the floor in every room and install the underfloor pipes. Sounds a big job, very expensive and lots of work.

In reply to Phill_Away:

Thanks, need to read up on biomass as know nothing about them

In reply to steelbru:


The installation. £9k for a system that would then cost me more per month than I wanted to pay.


£15k for ASHP, tank, all plumbing and electric, installation and supply of 18 radiators (the largest weighed 120kg), all the pipework (no existing system). £5k for 4kW Solar PV + inverter + installation, £2k for solar thermal + installation.


That would be expensive to retrofit.

The problem is the information online is usually out of date. My Nibe F2040 is ultra quiet and produces hot-water at 55C which easily heats my 300 L tank (we keep it at 44-47C during winter, with fortnightly anti-legionella boosts to 60C). We sized the radiators to run at 45/35 (40C average temp). The requirements for the MCS cert mean the system is properly designed and will heat a house to 21C when the outdoor temp is as low as the record for the nearest airport. At 40C you use radiators 2.5x the BTU of the room for 70C oil/gas operations.

The problem is when the systems are badly designed. The water in the radiator circuits stays at temperature and you can feel the heat from a 30C radiator if they're sized right. If they're sized wrong then the rooms will be a mix of hot and cold, or the HP will be overworked. Older systems sometimes had immersion backups on the heating that kills the efficiency.

You need to get the full story from a reputable installer. I'd recommend Nibe equipment.

In reply to Philip:

Out of interest, you spent £22k instead of £9k for an oil system. Over how many years do you estimate making up that £13k?

In reply to Bjartur i Sumarhus:


Including the saving in cost of heating, around 4 to 5 years for the lot. But the solar confuses the situation. In reality I spent £15k on the ASHP which pays me £1.3k/year and saves me around £800 / year. So my paybck for heating is 3 years. I then added the solar PV (£5k) because the elecrical demand of ther ASHP means I can use more of the electricity I generate than an oil/gas house. This pays for itself in 10 years without the electricity saving. The solar thermal was installed more for luxury. It generates lots of hot water in summer, so long soothing baths after hard work in the garden are free (except water cost). The cost of solar thermal is paid for entirely by the RHI over the 7 years.

In the grand scheme of things I spent £300k on a house that needed CH, 3 new bathrooms, a new kitchen, a new fireplace rather than spend £350k on something perfect, leaving me £50k to do the changes I wanted.

In reply to Phill_Away:


not strictly true, just insulate the old house. Needs to be done properly though, as some older houses need to breath a little still, so you can use foil back insulation in certain places. We put 400mm in the loft and added insulation to all our walls... even the addition of a porch, veranda, conservatory, vestibule... can help add in a doo to so you can have an air lock type system and never have the wind whistling right through the house.

In reply to steelbru:
Another option would be to get a normal wet central heating with an electrical unvented cylinder instead of a gas boiler.

Not sure on price will ask Mr marsbar later.
You can get ones that are twin, so electric combined with either solar or a wood burner to give you options.
http://www.thermaflowheating.co.uk/faq/
Apparently there are extra economy tariffs in Scotland that can be used for this.

In reply to marsbar:

Thanks marsbar, bookmarked that website

In reply to steelbru:

Mr marsbar said more information is needed, size of house, construction, are the floors wooden or concrete, do you want cheap radiators or expensive ones.

In reply to marsbar:

Don't know the answers to these things yet, just seen the house on-line, going to see it this week.

Understand you can't provide indicative costs without further info though.

If I do buy it, may be back in touch, or will at least follow up on that website.

Thanks again