Open fire, electric underfloor heating and storage heaters

bigoliver

Hi,

Its my first post to this forum, please be gental

I have just bought a 1913 built semi by the east coast, it has very high ceilings, the down stairs is very open plan and as you can imagine it can get a bit chilly in winter.

We have doubled glazed, had the loft insulated, and had cavity wall insulation in most walls (CWI done prior to us buying)

We don't have gas (don't like it) and don't feel the cold much. We don't mind it being cool upstairs, in fact we prefer a cooler room to sleep in, but want to get the best efficiency down stairs.

What we do have is...
Downstairs: Electric underfloor heating throughout the down stairs, 3 storage heater points (heaters not bought/installed yet) and 2 original open fires.

Upstairs: Storage heaters in 3 bedrooms and hallway and underfloor heating in the bathroom.

Today downstairs I turned on the underfloor heating which is 200w/m2 and lit a coal fire.

My questions are?

#Will the coal fire suck the warm air out of the room making the underfloor heating un/less affective?

#Will I lose much heat up the chimney when the coal fire isn't lit?

#Would a multi fuel stove be much more efficient? We do love open fires though.

We plan to use the storage heaters throughout the winter 24/7 on low setting with economy 7 (downstairs at least). Then underfloor heater during the day/evening when we are relaxing at home, and finally we plan to use the coal fires at Christmas and special occasions or when it is particularly cold.
Does this sound affordable or the most efficient way to use our resources?

Any thoughts, advice, help would be much appreciated

PS we are able to collect a lot of sea coal as we are just 5 mins from the beach, I have started collecting Whitby Jet and fosils/bones that wash up but mostly I find coal, I live in Bridlington and we have recently had a load of coal wash up right next to my house which was lucky Though I might have to wait a while for the next big wash up of coal, its not usually so readily available.

Thanks for reading and sorry for such a huge first post,

Oliver

Skulls

My fireplace used to be 6' x 2' Inglenook, I loved having fires in the log basket but, as soon as the fire died the heat in the room would just be sucked up the chimney.

I have now fitted a very efficient log burner and have a plate sealing off the chimney. The wood I used to use in a night is now enough to keep the log burner going all week and most of the heat stays in the room/house.

matelodave

The underfloor heating will probably work out quite expensive to run. 200w sq.m = 2kw for a 10sqm room on peak rate electricity - don't know what you are paying as I assume you are on E7 so it could be 15p/kwh or even more.

I guess you'll just have to try it all out to see how you get on. I'd suggest that you take regular meter readings (set up a spreadsheet or use something like iMeasure http://www.imeasure.org.uk/ ) to monitor your consumption. You can then optimise which form of heating is most efficient in terms of cost & keeping you warm. If you don't measure it you can't control it

I'm not sure that a multifuel stove would work properly on sea coal, they are designed for wood, anthracite or manufactured smokeless so you might find that they gunge up if you use sea coal depending on it's composition.

Robwiz

Before you make any expensive decisions, why not try different heating options and measure how much electricity you're using to achieve the comfort levels you're happy with.

I'm unconvinced whether the inflexibility of storage heaters outweighs the savings from the E7 tariff. You're putting most energy into the heaters at night when the temperature difference between inside and outside is widest, therefore losing some heat. Instead why not try either oil filled rads or a 2kW fan heater (maybe with thermostats and time switches) heating up your living rooms as and when you need them warm?

Then measure how many units your storage heaters consume and compare that with heating your rooms as and when necessary.

As far as open fires are concerned – they are bad news in energy efficiency terms. Somewhere between 80% and 90% of the heat is lost up the flue and you lose heat up the chimney when the fire is not lit. So woodburners or multifuel stoves are the way to go.

You can check how much heat you're losing up your chimneys by fitting chimney pillows and measuring either the rate at which the temperature drops when you have no heat on or the units of electricity used for heating.

Free coal may be a very tempting prospect but it's poor in terms of C02 emissions (0.42kg/kWh).

Provided you set the same temperature, you should be using the same amount of electricity whether using UFH or storage heaters because the heat loss from your house will be the same.

Also take a look at air to air heat pumps (AAHP) - air conditioning units running in reverse. Some have coefficients of performance (COP) above 5, which means that you get 5kW of heat for every 1kW of electricity you use. You could abandon your dual tariff and use AAHP for an effective cost per kWh of around 2.5p

When looking at buying any heating device work out how long it will take you to recoup the capital cost – the £500 cost of a multifuel stove would buy a lot of electricity used to run a £20 Argos fan heater.

bigoliver

Thank you all for your replies.

The electrician calculated the cost of the underfloor covering the down stairs.

I wrote down the formular he used somewhere but basicly our downstairs (2 reception rooms knocked through into a huge living room, dinning room and kitchen(4 zones)) all on full power uses 6.8kw, he said that if I pay 14p a unit then the cost of running the lot to the max is 95p/hour. I insulated the down stairs floor well so the floor heats up in 10 mins and in around 30mins all the rooms all feel warm.

I'm hoping the storage heaters when fitted will warm the downstairs so we'll only need the underfloor heating occasionally and as a top up.

I will look into log/multi fuel burners, not sure how you fit them to a chimney, would I have to fit a flume up the chimney and are they expensive to have fitted?

I will definatly get some chimney pillows and give then a try, I like houses to breath especially with older houses, but hopefully my trickle vents will be sufficient.

I will also look into the heart pumps, they sound amazing but expensive to buy, I need to research this further.

I also have an old water heater in one of our fireplaces, a hearing engineer said he could rig it up the run 2-3 rads upstairs, the cost was over a grand but it would make the fireplace much more economical. I wrote this idea off as too expensive, plus we don't really need it warm upstairs, especially while the fire is on down stairs lol.

Thanks again for all your replies, I'm going to do some more research now,

Oliver

andyrpsmith

Another option if you wish to keep an open fire is a jetmaser inset fire. The efficiency is up to 50% compared to about 10% for an open fire and 80% for a good stove. You do not have to line the chimney, it has a baffle to control the burn rate and close the chimney off when not in use and draws in cool room air at the bottom to heat and expel heated air at the top. I have just had one installed and it is £1000 - £2000 less than a stove install. Also a no smoke (in the room) guarantee. I had a problem with fumes entering the room with my open fire so the jetmaster should resolve this.

bigoliver

I really like the sound of the jetmaster inset, I will wait till Autumn now. I need to find out more in the meantime, like approx cost and whether I could self install or the cost of an install.
Thanks for your post and giving me another option.

I have installed a Chimney Sheep which has cut down the draft a bit whilst I'm not using the fire, at £30 every little helps

andyrpsmith

I lit the jetmaster fire yesterday for the first time since installation last Thursday. Really impressed with the heat output compared with just an open fire. It takes half an hour for the warm air circulation to really start warming the room. The fire is started with the lever fully forward to allow max opening of the restrictor, once the fire is roaring the lever is pushed back to close restrictor while keeping the all the smoke exiting up the chimney. This allows a slow burn and max efficiency, I used about half the amount of wood in an evening as I would normally. Very pleased even though it is relatively warm outside. I paid £750 for the fire, £350 for installation which needed some brick removal inside the fireplace plus cutting of 14 new bricks to build up each side of the fire, plus about £300 vat.

You can also buy second hand on fleabay for between £100 and £400.