Electric Central Heating

justmyself

Have an old solid wall house that I need to install central heating in. At present there are only fireplaces.

There is no gas in the area. Therefore I guess my options are Oil, Electric & Solid Fuel.

Its a town house, no back garden for an oil tank, so i'm assuming Oil Central Heating isnt an option?

What are my options for solid fuel? A log burner with a boiler is it? Any advice on what I should look in to?

Electric Central Heating is obviously easier to install/ maintain seeing its in modern apartments. I'm just wondering how expensive is it to run. It would appear 4 times the price of gas. Gas is 6c kWh and Electric 24c kWh.

Now maybe its more efficient, therefore you'd use less units. Guessing there might be modern storage heater options (make use of low night time rate)? Anyone have any experiences?

Thank you all.

seamus

The responses you will typically get about storage heaters is that they're expensive to run and don't do a good job of heating.

This is only true if you don't really understand how they work and how to use them. In my experience they can be just as cheap as other forms and keep the property nice and warm.

That's their downside - unlike gas or oil where you can set a schedule and basically be hands-off for months at a time, a storage heating system requires you to plan ahead every single day and configure it based on the expected forecast tomorrow. If the weather is colder or hotter than forecast, your property will be too hot or too cold.
Year to year the maintenance costs are non-existent, it's the lack of flexibility that lets them down. If the house is too cold, it will cost you dearly to switch on the convection heaters to correct the problem.

For oil and gas there are options of underground tanks. I know you say you've no garden, but is there anywhere you have space for such a tank to be installed?

Biomass is an option, but does require quite a bit of storage space for the fuel. If you have a mostly disused garage space or utility room that you could sacrifice for the wood boiler, there's an option.

Probably the option with the least amount of work involved would be solar panels on the roof for hot water and storage heaters for internal heating. Using electricity to heat your water is ridiculously inefficient, so if you can farm this off to solar panels, then the ongoing cost of the storage heating should be at a minimum. All without needing to pull up the floors everywhere or knock lumps out of all the walls.

justmyself

Seamus. A fantastic detailed response. Well done and thanks for taking the time to respond.

While I have you. I've heard there's this newish system: a unit you connect to the back of you house. It sucks in cold air from outside and somehow transfers it into heat internally. Any idea what the system is? A lad told my dad about it. Must investigate further. Supposed to be THE system at the moment.

seamus

Somewhat out of my depth, but you're probably talking about a HRV/ERV system. For all intents and purposes it operates much like a refrigerator, using a heat exchanger to heat up or cool down external air and circulate it inside the building.

Like I say, I'm out of my depth on that one, but my understanding is that these are probably more suitable for newer buildings with decent airtightness. Just from looking at what needs to be done, it may also be a very expensive and messy job to install.

No harm going and talking to someone about it though, it may work out a lot cheaper than storage heating in the long run.

As Seamus details there are lots of positives for modern electric heating........ http://www.ecovolt.ie/ ........ are worth a look.
If I was in your shoes I would consider solar panels for the water as per Seamus's suggestion and electric heaters in the rooms and one in the hall & landing.

I would also really recommend a stove install in the fireplace in the main living room, I'm a big fan of stoves. The ones that burn both stove coal & logs are great job. The heat output is great and they are a lovely feature, we all love a fire

I think given our climate folks can go OTT on the insulation and heating in a house striving for an ultra efficient and low cost solution when the problem isn't overly an issue in the first place

antoinolachtnai

Electric water heating is not necessarily that expensive if you heat the water at night.

You need to look at the practicalities and see if solar will work financially for you. The cost of a solar system will pay for quite a lot of night time electricity. It really depends how many people are in the house and so how much hot water you actually need.

There are very good comments above about storage heaters. Again, it is very important to consider how much heat you actually need. This depends on the type of house and the aspect and the insulation. For example, a house with four sides exposed to the elements, with poor insulation and all the windows on the north side will probably not store enough heat from storage heaters. But it would be just fine in a small or medium-sized terraced house with a well insulated roof. Storage heaters may suit better if you are in the house all day, rather than just in the evenings.

The ecovolt (and similar solutions) are basically electric heaters, no more efficient than the one you can buy in Power City for €30 and they use full-price daytime electricity. We may be assailed by posts about how they are different and new. They have some controls and timers, but that does not make them any more efficient.

You can however get more modern storage heaters with extra controls, and these are worth considering because they use cheaper night time electricity.

There are various types of heat pumps. This is probably what your friend is referring to as well as or rather than HRV. These are like this. http://www.dimplexrenewables.com/range/Air-Source-Heat-Pumps . These are electric and in principle, will give you more than 1 kWh of heat for every kWh of electricity expended. In practice, it really depends. As suggested, you really need to find an expert you have confidence in to tell you if it will work for you.

It is worth finding out what your new neighbours do for heat.

It is really important to keep an eye on the budget. Solar panels are going to cost thousands of euros and heat pumps likewise. Similarly, stoves may not appear that expensive, but if you get the type with a boiler, you may find the overall project including installation will cost quite a lot of money. That is fine if they are the right solution, but you might be better investing the money into the fabric of the building to improve the insulation, or even accepting higher heating costs.