stupid to get new oil CH installed over biomass??

matelodave

Virtually any bolier nowadays whether oil, gas, biomass etc requires electricity to run it. You also need electricity to drive the central heating circulating pump and the controls. So unless you've just got a woodburner that relies on you shoving wood through its front door you will be reliant on electricity.

How do biomass units cope with heating hotwater in the summer?, I can see how the controls on a gas or oil boiler do it but does a biomass boiler have to slumber all summer to just get hot water out of it. If not how does it light & extinguish it'self during the water heating cycle?. I'm not trying to be controvertial, I'd just like to know.

Heatpumps aren't very noisy, about the same as fridge running. We know ours is running because the central heating pump is running, but you'd get that with any sort of boiler.

pokadot

to be honest im not entirly sure how they work im just looking at the figures before i investigate how to operate the thing!

im swaying back to the idea of oil at the mo- just for simpliity and to keep capital costs as low as possible- any idea how many litres i would need a year- as i was hoping to get a big enough tank to fill it just once a year in the summer- cheapest time to buy oil i presume. to give you an idea we are a family of 4 with 2 children under the age of 2 1/2, so i am in the house 70% of the time, i was hoping the oil would heat the hot water and run the shower off the tank rather than an electric shower- at a later date we will be putting an en suite in with another shower, the children have a bath every oher night, there will be approx 8-9 adverage size radiators throughout the bungalow with all new double glazing and good loft insulation/ cavity walls etc.

ilikecookies

In answer to a couple of your questions:

1) I'm not sure how easy it will be to drop on a second-hand oil tank and you *might* find that installers don't want to sign-off on a second hand tank. Still might be worth a look on gumtree etc or maybe talking to some installers as they may remove oil tanks from customers switching and have a small stock up their sleeves for oil installs. Alternatively when you get quotes get your installer to list out the individual cost of key components (eg. the tank, boiler, etc) so you can check that they aren't applying a mark-up or at least are not applying a ridiculous mark-up.

2) Estimating oil use is virtually impossible as there are so many variables - eg. how long you plan to have your heating on each day, the temperature you like to keep your house, levels of insulation (including things you may not be able to know about - eg. levels of floor insulation, invisible areas of heat-loss - eg. thermal bridges, where insulation has failed, etc), aspect/exposure of your house, system efficiency (eg. you may have a high efficiency boiler but if the system short-cycles then you will burn more oil), etc etc. A quick trawl of the forums will reveal the huge differences in consumption even for similar properties.

One thing that might help is to look at how many kh/w of electricity you use today and then equate that to litres of oil - eg. 1 litre of oil contains 10.4 kh/w of energy, so if you use 10,000 kw/h of electricity for heating today that would equate to 962 litres of oil/year if you boiler was 100% efficient (and they are not so you'd have to adjust this to say 90% efficiency so more like 1000 litres in this instance). You'll have to make a guess as to what % of your electricity bill is spent on heating vs lighting, TVs, etc. To be safe I'd stick 15% on top of the total anyway to give you some leeway for things like heat loss from the new pipework, etc.

3) You are certainly right to get as big a tank as you can afford. This allows you to fill-up when it's cheaper (typically in the summer) and ride out the winter increases. This is what I like about oil over LPG. Personally I'd go for at least 2000 litres and maybe 2500 if you can afford it.

Hope that helps.

crawmo

Interesting reading about Biomass systems here. Would anyone be able to supply details of reputable and reliable suppliers and the best boilers on the market currently ?

Thanks

DM South east