Heating with electric rads and no gas boiler for now

It's actually very simple, @zg3409. The eddi has two outputs that you can prioritise. My mate here has one to his hot water (up to 3kW) and then when that is hot, the other output of up to 3kW is triggered and dumps electricity into a storage heater that is on a timed release. His house is empty during the day but the storage heaters are programmed to release heat before people come home from school and work

All of this only works well if you have a substantial PV array though. Eddi is a relatively cheap device (about €360 with trade discount before VAT) and install is simple. So if you have a huge PV array, payback of this is very quick with today's gas en electricity prices.

Also your point about gas being cheaper than electricity depends a lot on what plans you are on. Personally I pay 8c for night rate electricity, which I store in my battery and use for heating the house during the day. I pay 15c for gas

And on a glorious day like today, my PV is heating all my hot water at the moment and from about mid day I will hook the car up and get a few days worth of driving into it from PV too

I wish there was an online site where you can enter what you have (i.e. 6.4KW of panels E/W, 5KW battery, no gas (rural), malfunctioning and badly installed oil boiler, rotten wood from the river in the stove) and then be shown what the cost of ownership for n years would be for say, far infra red panels, electric convection heaters, high temperature heat pump.

I'll try and spreadsheet something but I'll probably be way off in accuracy. I was quoted about 5K to have FIR installed in HALF the house by you know who and then you are using 4 times the electricity compared to a heat pump. I know there are dirt cheap FIR panels on Amazon but not so after import duties and would they last as long as European made ones. I have a quote, after grant, of 10K for a high temperature 8KW heat pump, which sounds great value to me but I have no idea how much electricity it's going to use.

My number one metric is to keep She Who Must Be Obeyed happy at all times. I don't think a piecemeal approach is going to work. Filling the house with FIR panels and oil-filled radiators on wheels when every room has a functioning radiator in it (or, at least, would have if there was a derrick attached to the useless oil boiler.) I walk around the house in t-shirt and shorts when it's sub-zero outside and 12C in the house. She wears more than a polar expedition. She feels the cold even in summer!

Hi Folks, in between heating systems at the moment and with the cold season coming I'm trying to figure out what the best solution is for a temporary solution. No panels either currently, just a cheap night saver rate. Guessing a storage heater but that's not very temporary. Maybe a couple of those electric rads? Have a fire in the sitting room, it's only the large kitchen downstairs really? Upstairs I'll just use a few electric blankets I guess??

Was thinking of the second hand boiler but I'd have to cango footpaths to get at the pipework and need a sparks for rewiring etc.

Would need to buy a stove with a back boiler and then move it on when I get the A2W in.

In my head I'm thinking I'll need this solution for 4 weeks, hope it's not longer than that.

If you need a few cheap smart plugs here's a 4 pk for around €18 when you apply the 50% off voucher https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0B1WT999V?

The only heater I would trust leaving on is the oil filled radiator types, I wouldn't trust a fan or halogen or such like if not in the house. Seen a few cheapo ones that have gone on fire over the years. Depends on what you buy though.

Or Amazon for a tenner (pounds)

Yeah I agree those supercheap heaters are not the safest. Grand if you are sitting reading beside it, but not on a timer in the middle of the night

We use desiccant dehumidifiers to heat the house at this time of year. They remove the damp and have a small heater in them to liberate the water from the desiccant so it flows into collection tank. The heater warms the room better than a compressor dehumidifier and is quieter.

Humidity is what makes you feel colder in winter and muggy in summer. Ireland being well-known for its dampness, all year round. We might raise the temperature of the house by two degrees in summer but don't feel it because the humidity is lower. In winter, we keep the door of the room in use closed and run a dehumidifier. Warms the room to about 19C and reduces the humidity to about 45% from about 65%. 19C with 65% humidity would feel colder than 19C with 45% humidity.

We only heat rooms in use and aim to keep the rest of the house above 16C, which is fine for bedrooms.

There's a wood heater in the living room for persistent sub-zero nights and a fanless ceramic core radiator that I mounted on a wooden frame to make it portable for use around the house. The ceramic radiator might be used in the office or herself's snore-free bedroom. I'm happy in a colder bedroom so long as it's been dehumidified to take the damp feel off the duvet.

Our 5KW battery is more than capable of running a dehumidifier during the evening before being recharged at 11PM with cheap rate electricity.

I might import a cheap 1200W infra-red panel from the UK. I'm not paying the extortionate amount that pushy fella wants. I'd use the panel to irradiate an internal wall with excess power during the day so it re-radiates during the evening. Home Assistant will monitor export rather than an Eddi. The money for which will buy some heaters.

Compressor dehumidifier has a COP of around 1.4 too, so you'll save a bit of electricity there 😁

Ive seen a few fan heaters and convection heaters go on fire over the years. Also saw an oil filled heater start smoking heavily once. I think it was probably left on its side at some point. They need to always be upright.

But at least with the oil filled rads its much rarer to have a fire and not as susceptible as fan heaters or convection heaters to have fluff blow into them or something left on them or fall in front of them. I would never leave any heater other than an oil filled one unattended.

I bought a Glen 2150 500W heater. Can be had from Screwfix for €64 or £52 from Amazon. Runs in a bedroom at the north end of the bungalow on night rate electricity, paid for with credit from the summer's feed in (3200KWh!). The heater is put on a low setting to keep the room at just over 16C. I'd say it uses about 2-2.5KWh of power during the 7 hours it's on for.

Unless the price of heat pumps falls dramatically, I can't see us getting one. Yes, it may (depending on weather and quality of installation) produce 4 times the heat for the same energy input as the convector heater above but the up front cost is a turn off. I don't like the idea of installers/manufacturers gouging our savings. They are going to want to replace our paper thin, single wall radiators and maybe add a few as well.

I deliberately avoided a "one-stop" approach to our renewable retro-fit so that I could evaluate each change made. First was the aluminium-clad wood framed triple glazing, which was half the price I was expecting. No more draughts. No more condensation.

Next were the desiccant dehumidifiers, needed after the draughts were removed. They also generate a little heat, keeping the house dry and about 16C. This resulted in a need for cheap electricity and so the PV went in. After a year of teething problems (which I solved rather than the installers) the PV is now working perfectly and integrated with Home Assistant.

I then decided to unblock those vents I had closed off because the air was being replaced far too quickly and making the house cold. After being quoted €8000+ for Mechanical Heat Recovery Ventilation, I went for €2300 of Demand Controlled Ventilation delivered on a pallet. I installed the wall vents and already the air is fresher but not cold. A gentle trickle comes through the controlled vents and the sound baffles do a great job. I'll install the wet room extractors in the spring when the cluster flies leave the attic.

A wood stove is used in the living room at night, charged with one load of twigs and logeens from the river. I used to make briquettes from wood shavings and newspaper but my back doesn't like working the press so I'll have to automate the press with a car jack and motor. The briquettes are great but need a high wood content (50% plus) to maximise heat, length of burn and minimise ash.

The house was built the old fashioned way (locally built by a relative of a relative of a relative) and for a 21st century house there is terrible heat bridging at the top of the insulated cavity wall. I shall experiment with the bedroom at the north end and cover the walls with Wallrock fibre insulated wallpaper. About 4mm thick. An independent painter and decorator on YouTube has it in his house and loves it so worth a try. If it slows down heat loss and we use less electricity to heat the room then that'll be great.

The aim has been to heat, power and air condition the house cheaply but effectively and so far so good. The house had a BER of C3 and when last evaluated was B1 but is probably into the As now.

I had blocked the original vents because the air was being replaced too quickly. The warped PVC frames had effectively replaced the vents so the vents were no longer needed and blocked with old tea towels. After replacing the windows, the house had become too airtight and so in went the DCV. I fed the 100mm DCV tubes through the 110mm tubes of the former vents along with a squirt of expanding foam.