Anyone Own A House Not On Gas?

[RedUn]

Interesting the cost has come down a lot, we were paying 63 pence a litre in 2013, I remember thinking its half as expensive as v power!

Either way, it still cost a fortune!

I suppose I should add, the cottage was very authentic, energy rating was shocking hence the cost!

It's not put me off moving back into the middle of no where but I'll definitely pay attention to the energy rating next time, current house is a B and it's probably a third of the price to run and twice as big!

 

[Salty Spuds]

We have a large stone built 200year old cottage. Main heating is oil, we also have a log burner that just about heats the whole house in winter. We have underfloor electric heating in the kitchen & wet underfloor heating in the new half of the house, this runs off oil.
We also have a 4kw solar panel system, this provides all the domestic hot water in summer & we get around £1800/year in FIT payments. I source my own logs at minimal cost for the log burner. The oil bill is around £700/year & the leccy billl is around £500. So the solar panels pay for the oil & electricity with a bit left over.

 

[Paynewright]

The in laws have a wood burner in their lounge and a propane ‘mock’ wood burner in the dining room in addition to oil fired CH. All eventualities!

Where they live there are 30ish people on the electoral role, no shop and no pub. They have two large freezers and an extensive selection of wine. They are generally ‘siege’ ready!

During one extended power cut they cooked a pot roast on top of the wood burner!

Ian

 

[Ayjay]

A bit late to this one but we live in a well insulated small (ish) 33 year old house with E7 storage heating. Unless it gets exceptionally cold (by that I mean in the minuses for consecutive days) we only ever have them switched on in the main living room (where there is two) and have never set them to max (but they do go quite close!). When it does get really cold, we turn on the one in the hall but never leave it on permanently. During the sort of winters that we get nowadays in rural Gloucestershire, it can get quite chilly by around 1530 hrs but we either turn on a 2Kw oil filled radiator at a medium setting on the thermostat or (usually from around mid November to March) light the wood burner and the heat from that seems to warm up the rest of the house (we've got one of those little stove fans as well). I tend to use a small amount (9 briquettes) of smokeless coal to get the fire going along with logs after that but we never use anything like the amount that somebody else mentioned earlier - over the twenty odd years that we've had the word burner, we have never used any more than a load of logs each winter which, nowadays, costs about £100 and, equates to a bucket full from what to me is a big JCB - sorry can't be any more accurate than that. Having lived for a long time in hot climates, neither of us like to feel the cold indoors and I would much rather pile on the heat than the clothes and I'm usually in a T shirt indoors. Luckily, we are in the position that we do not have to worry about heating costs.

Without going into any further detail, I guess what I'm saying is that E7 has it's place for background heating in winter but will never be sufficient on it's own and I am fairly certain that you will need something extra later in the day.

PS. I forgot to say that the two heaters in the living room and one in the hall have all been replaced in the last 6 or so years but they haven't got the sort of 'auto vent' tech that somebody else mentioned above. That said, we never actually bother opening and closing the vents as they radiate heat through bricks anyway. Ours are all set permanently at Warp Factor 1. PM me if you want to know more. Also, don't forget that if you don't have gas or oil, you will probably be relying on electrickery for your water heating as well.

 

[bikers1]

I live out in the sticks in Scotland, bought my 150 yr old cottage 12 yrs ago, had a stanley oil fired range and rads along with 2 Jotul 3s

The missus did the numbers and our heating oil bill was astronomical.

I contacted J-Gas, think they might only operate in Scotland, the put in a 1200l LPG tank free of charge and the price of the lpg was half that of heating oil.

binned the Stanley and put a worcester greenstar ri conventional boiler in (£1500) and hooked up to the existing radiators and HW tank.

our annual bills have halved and th ecottage has neve rbeen warmer