The Great ‘Home Heating’ Hunt: Do you know cheaper ways for LPG and oil

freespirit5

we live on a narrowboat and at the moment pay 89.5p a litre for heating and engine use, in november this is going up 47p so we have been told, good old eu? we will be paying more than the pump price for oil, we need someone to look into this its crazy, we understand we may get 25% off if we can prove we need it for heating. any comments welcome.

EddyB

I have just heard back from the Competition Commission in London re. my suggestion to them that we LPG users should be able to buy our tanks.

They say that tank ownership is something that they looked into during their investigation into the supply of domestic bulk LPG but unfortunately they decided that it would not be practical, due to health and safety regulations, for individuals to own their tanks. "Instead the Commission has decided that customers will be able to simply transfer the ownership of the tank when switching supplier, make the switching process easier, improving the terms of customer contracts, and giving customers better information. Subject to resolving some remaining technical issues, the Commission intends that these measures should come into force later this year."
So the "bad" news is we won't be able to buy our tanks.
But the good news is that LATER THIS YEAR (2008) switching LPG supplier should become much easier.

We will see how easy it will be to change regularly and so force the LPG supplier to compete!

Eddy

safetyclare

We live in a village where there is no gas so we all rely on oil or LPG. We have joined a syndicate whereby a gentleman has nominated himself buyer and at regular intervals throughout the year phones up all the signed up syndicate members to see if they need oil. He then orders in bulk based on the requirements of the syndicate. We do not save huge amounts but a few pence - sometimes upto 7/8p per litre does add up when you are buying up to a 1000 litres. He shops around to get the best price from about 5 suppliers in the area. As they say every little helps!!!

Gigervamp

Problem with doing it that way, you have to pay for it all in one go. There's no way we could afford a £500-£700 payment out of our budget in one month.

Igol

I can only speak from my own experience but based on average prices for gas that kept getting banded about the central heating/woodburner system I installed last year will have paid for itself by the end of this winter.
Given the somewhat heated posts above I'll explain before someone gets excited.
I had an open fire and no central heating at all in my home so was lucky to have a blank canvas to work from.

I'm pretty good at DIY and have tackled pretty much every job in this house and have found that I do quite like plumbing. So when I tried to explain my concept to local plumbers who came to give me a quote they either ran away scared (lucky if they turned up in the first place) told me it couldnt be done or came up with their own idea that was totally against the stove makers reccomendations and were charging 1500 quid for just a pipe run.

My idea was to use a Villager Berkley Low integral boiler to power only a CH system and keep a gas multipoint for DHW so I didnt have to have a stove running in the winter. The technical people at Villager were very helpful, ok they said it was a bit odd, but it would work and gave me advice about pipes and safety valves and so on even suggesting suitable components and cheap suppliers. The installation of the complete 7 radiator system with the woodburner was about £1200 including the finished Burlington slate hearth (Quarry is only down the road).
I double lagged the cylinder to increase its heat retention and I get a full hot cylinder of water in about 20mins of lighting the stove. The cylinder has a thermostat connected backwards so that when it reaches 45 on the outside of the cylinder it switches on the pump and this is also connected to a timeswitch so I get a nice warm house to get up to.

But the big saving is the fuel cost.....nowt. Well ok maybe about 12p in diesel/veg oil when I nip over to local industrial estate and fill the Landy up with pallets. Businesses have to pay to get rid of them so let you have them for free, I get a nice workout smashing them up and my gas bill is about £30.

So now I'm wondering about fitting DHW solar panels and I've got another idea about linking them into the multipiont too, just as a back up in winter.

donaldtramp

Firstly, as a chartered mechanical engineer who works in the oil industry all this talk about magnetic devices is absolute nonsense. Pure and simple do not give these con artists any money, these systems will not work. I would know, these would be installed all over oil rigs, pipe-lines and power stations if there was any truth in the matter. They DO NOT serve any other purpose than making these scammers money.

A magnet cannot change the properties of any oil fluid or gas in any meaningful way as it passes through a pipe, FACT.

I have a degree in mechanical engineering and I can't emphasise how much nonsense these guys speak. Please don't buy these products.



Anyhow, the reason I'm posting is I really don't think enough emphasis is placed on investing in insulation and energy saving. This is the absolute key. MSE always seems to recommend a sticking plaster(saving a few pence here or there) when a bit of actual planning and insulation, energy saving devices, bulbs etc would make a much bigger difference long term.
The best advice on here so far has been the sustainable building chap on the first page. Excellent advice.:T

As for the future. I'm afraid it's bad news. The UK is slowly but surely running out of oil and gas supplies. Peak production from the North Sea was in 1999, nearly ten years ago. In ten years time from now we will only able produce about 1/4 of that peak amount.
The oil and gas price might have fallen back slightly at the moment but long term it is going to keep going up and up and up. I absolutely guarantee it.
If you want to make a real difference to your long term financial health read post 11 from Matt_outandabout and try to carry out his advice. This will make a REAL difference to your finances.

Top Post Matt!!!

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showpost.html?p=13099433&postcount=11

chubbybrown4real

EddyB wrote: »

Fizzmo, it seems you missed my post above where I advise that come Spring 2008 we LPG users should be able to arrange with a more competitive company for that company to buy the LPG tank off Calor and then fill it for us. By this method apparently the new regulations regarding the location of the tank will not apply. I have a tank in a now-unacceptable position, but by way of the above method, I expect to be able to change supply without having to change tank or its location.

What we really need to be able to do though is: buy the tank of whatever LPG company owns it, so that the tank becomes ours, and then, like oil users, we could shop around and make the LPG companies compete to fill our tanks! Also, like oil users, we could form cooperatives.

How do we get the government to organise things so that we get the right to buy our tanks, and at a reasonable sum? Any ideas?

EddyB

Ive just read this and its true,but

one thing to bear in mind.

Would you buy another Gas companies tank if it was coming to the end of its life or due a 20 year test?
I've heard that some companies will take on other companies tanks but only depending on thier condition.
British Gas Propane now owned by Flogas would not let another competitor use thier supply line as they classed is as making safe by filling it with spray foam,cheeky eh?:rotfl:

www.lpga.co.uk

for Bulk lpg and Bottled gas suppliers.:beer:

Rolandtheroadie

When I bought my house in 2000, I was paying £115 per month to pay for my LPG (cant remember cost per litre/whatever it comes in).
As the boiler was old, and at that time oil was cheaper, I converted to oil which cost the princly sum of £1275 (tradesman doing all the work, bargain I thought).

This paid for its self in 2 years.

I had been paying £63 per month for my oil ( I think I'd paid off whatever was outstanding on my budget account previously), and had what I thought was a 2 tank cushion of around £600. With the price going from 34p to 64p, that was wiped out.

I contacted my supplier and they informed me that I get on average 3300 litres per year delivered. At the 64p, this equates to £2112 per year (or £176 per month). I realise prices have come down but for how long? They cant stay down for ever either for obvious reasons.

So basically this time I've decided to go for a multi-fuel central heating burner and to tie both systems together. It is being done by using a dunsley neutraliser(recognised as a safe method of combining two or more systems together, you could even add in solar and wind if you wanted) and being done by a reputable firm (that has installed them before).

I prefer the multiburner to the pellet stove purely due to the startup costs of a pellet burner and the fact I would need to buy pellets.

I intend to fuel the miltiburner by any free means possible. Waste wood (untreated ofcourse) whatever I can get from farmers (was thinking dead trees in fields but dont know suitability for burning) and now waste paper briquettes (thanks to whoever posted, I'll be looking into that today).

If I'm not up and the fire isnt on, the oil will heat the house. Once I light a fire, that will take over.

My target is to get down to 1 tank of oil per year. Even if prices come down to 45p per litre, that would mean £1100 saving per year. The systems approx £4800 all in meaning 4 years to pay back (at 45p, quicker at current prices).

Total cost is approx £4500 to install

treefrogbandit

bbmike wrote: »

Hi, I suspect I might have got the wrong end of the stick but are you saying you can buy wood pellets for £80/ton and if so where? I have recently paid £2430 for one years oil in a new house and hope part of that is due to drying out however even if I assume a reduced figure of £1800 to £2000 it is still too much and so I have been looking at changing my oil boiler to a wood pellet boiler.

Sorry - this figure was for wood chip. Pellets are more likely to be around the £200/tonne mark (that's still the equivalent of paying about 43p/l for oil though...)

~treefrogbandit

EddyB

Further info to me today from the Competition Commission re. changes to regulation of LPG companies coming into force later this year:

With regard to safeguards being put in place to make sure that suppliers do not make a big deal out of buying the tank, the Competition Commission is putting in place a whole process to govern ‘tank transfer’ and this is set out in their draft order. It includes a formula that will be used to determine the price of the tank should the suppliers fail to reach agreement otherwise. This formula is based on the price of a new tank, depreciated over the expected lifetime of the tank and should generally ensure that a new supplier does not pay over the odds for a transferred tank.

Re. contractual tie-ins, there is an incentive on suppliers to tie customers in to exclusive contracts and thisis what they do now, sometimes for as long a period as 5 years. But the Competition Commission's remedies will limit the length of any such tie-in to 2 years. The reason they have set the maximum at 2 years was that the Commission recognised that the supplier does incur some costs in acquiring a new customer and the Commission thought a 2 year period would allow the supplier to spread the recovery of those costs over a reasonable period (ie not presenting the new customer with an upfront lump sum charge).

Do people have any thoughts on this?