Electric heaters

[DominicBest]

My house is not the easiest to heat but the secret seems to be to not let it get cold. By this time in the winter it’s warmed up to the point where if I come into the cold lounge at 4:30 and light the fire it warms up quickly and remains comfortable all evening on four or five decent logs. My main heat source that warms my kitchen and bedroom above that is electric, my luxury, an electric Aga. It was expensive to buy but it’s not expensive to run. The gentle heat it gives out is topped up at breakfast time for about an hour with a petrole heater. Despite using the cheapest fuel possible I’ve never had an issue with fumes or smell. My house is not the conventional type to be easy or cheap to heat but it seems to do fine. The pierre apparent stone walls and tiled floors act as a heat soak which allows the place to remain comfortable without a huge amount of heating.
Until the Linky arrived I made do with a 6KW supply connection and despite having the water heater on 24/7 never had any problems. I upped to 9KW after the Linky was fitted as they do not have the same flexibility if you do exceed your maximum. The ‘spare’ bedrooms are heated using oil filled electric radiators which do seem to cost a fortune to run but they are used rarely, my visitors tend to prefer to come when it’s sunny and warm. My electricity bills, up to now, have been between €6 and €7 a day during the winter months and I use €350-400 worth of wood. I know some people who spend more heating their empty holiday homes.
The best upgrade I made was to buy a Jøtul wood-burner a few years ago and have it professionally installed. The properly insulated chimney and a bit more insulation in the kitchen chimney above the Aga made a huge difference.

[RobertArthur]

@ DominicBest, not bad at all, a Jøtul. Our Vermont Entrepid warms our living room and after two days the tomettes on the first floor start to behave as a (little bit of) floorheating. Bedrooms with old electric radiateurs, one hour on before bedtime if it's really cold outside. Double glazing and all walls insulated, eighties styie, 5 cm isover.

Larger woodburners also available, interesting French design from the sixties or seventies. How to do something useful with your exhaust heat.

[Spectrum]

IMHO the best way to go if you can is reversable air to air heat pumps, with a 4 to 1 ratio they can be wall mounted either low or high and ceiling mounted "Cassette" a company called "Airton" sells them and in some cases you don't need an refrigeration engineer to gas them up, they do need an outside wall and a small hole drilling through (6cms), used them in the garage while living in there while building the first house.

[Lori]

Our 10 kw woodie, which never runs flat out, is more than adequate for our
50m2 lounge with enough residual heat rising to the bedrooms to undress without freezing our bits off.

We have a similar situation here. The wood burner is downstairs and heats the entire living/dining/kitchen area (around 45m2) - but we only start the fire around 2pm each day - if we are home. So no need to use the electric heaters when wood burner is working. The house has new electric heaters in nearly every room, but we rarely turn them on. If we do turn them on, they cost a bucket load of money (to me anyway).

Over the last few days (as temps have dropped below freezing at night), we have turned on two or three of the electric heaters (just in the rooms we spend the most time in. EDF cost 9,50€ per day (total use, so includes all other electrical usage). If we turned on ALL of the electrical heaters (set at 19), our total daily EDF cost will run around 12 to 13€ - cost prohibitive.

I often wonder how families on low incomes can heat their homes.

Wood round here cost 70€ per stere (cut to 50cms - I can't cope with massive logs). We go through around 2 stere per Winter - so far.

[hughnique]

I think that the day of recognising that any form of heating is bloody expensive has long since arrived. Our woodman delivers logs cut in to 50cm at around 200€ a corde, but just tips it as close as to where I want it as possible, once stacked away it leaves a bed of bark and rubbish that has to be manually cleared up and disposed of, tried burning the excess bark, smoke everywhere. Decided to use the brico palletised 50 or 30 cm logs, because they are clean and uniform, but that's even dearer, and seems to last a very short time. Now we have a few of these roll around LPG fires, our source at the supermarket is right on the car park so no worries lifting it into the boot, same this end, they are convenient, and have a better controllability than the woodburner, and at just about 35€ a pop, means I can buy just under 6 for the price of delivered logs. Coupled with the static heaters in a couple of rooms, if and when we use them sounds ok. The rub is when that EDF envelope drops through the door, just paid one for the last 2 months 1200€, what can you do but bite the bullet, as OP said all this new heat pump stuff that you see advertised for a euro, I have yet to meet anyone who has had this cheepo system installed. I don't think there is any schemes running for solar stand alone panels as of now, I have a redundant field at the side south facing just crying out for a few hundred of em

[RobertArthur]

Hughnique,

Le bonheur électrique se trouve dans votre pré? I'm afraid not.

Un projet photovoltaïque résidentiel. L’installation doit remplir certaines contraintes techniques d’implantation : le système doit être installé sur une toiture et de façon parallèle au plan OU sur une toiture plate OU servir les fonctions d'allège , de bardage , de brise-soleil , de garde-corps , d' ombrière , de pergolas ou de mur-rideau . Il ne peut donc pas s’agir de panneaux solaires au sol.


And of course the standard steeplechase:

Quelles autorisations obtenir pour installer des panneaux solaires au sol ?

[Blaze]

My house is not the easiest to heat but the secret seems to be to not let it get cold.

Totally agree with that and much of your posting applies to us. I remember a "heating engineer" in the UK telling us years ago that it was more economical to keep some sort of heating running in cold periods rather than turn it off and turn it on. In our case he was talking about our oil central heating.

We are extremely thankful to have oil CH here (an old granite farmhouse) because any alternative would cost a fortune. Fortunately the low-temperature boiler isn't very old so we'll just hope it keeps going. Our electricity bills are pretty low but wood is expensive here. We've lined and insulated the stone walls which were dark and very cold - what a difference in light and heat. Lots of thick lined curtains and sausages to cut out draughts as much as possible though there is always air circulating ...

[Hotrodder]

Don't the sausages attract mice?

[Blaze]

[hughnique]

When you consider a typical UK dwelling, all draughtproof double glazed windows, heaps of insulation, fitted carpets throughout and always a cold or flu materialising, let alone dust mites and the like.