Oil fueled boiler - alternatives

Shfpower

Hello, 

We are currently house hunting and visited a property with an oil fuelled boiler.  Where we live now we are on mains gas which is nice and simple! We have read around oil fuelled boilers and understand that the government will start phasing these out. Is having an oil fuelled boiler problematic? Would this make a property less attractive when we come to sell it on in years to come? If we were to change this and put in a greener alternative, would this enhance the value of our property? From what I have read, the government did have some good incentives for doing this, but they have now been scaled back. Sorry for all the questions, but we are very new to this, and feel a little out of our depth.

Many thanks!

Verdigris

There are a couple of alternatives, but it depends on the design, construction and orientation of the house which may be most suitable. If you have a good area of south(ish) facing roof, or large garden, then you could install solar PV panels which could provide a good proportion of the electricity to run a heat pump. If you have large grounds a ground-source heat pump would be most efficient, but will require more capital outlay. GSHPs also attract proportionally less subsidy uner the scheme that is replacing RHI (renewable heat incentive). The alternative would be an air-source pump. A bonus, given a reasonable array of PV panels, is that you would be able to charge electric vehicles, at least in the summer months.

If you can't have PV, and thus don't have "free" electricity you might consider a wood-pellet boiler, but that required quite a lot of room for fuel storage.

Reed_Richards

There was a while a few months ago when heating oil was in the running to be the cheapest way to heat your house - but I understand that the price of heating oil has risen a lot since then.  I doubt that most house buyers pay much attention to the heating; if the house has central heating and it works that will be sufficient.  A savvy buyer might look to see how full the oil tank is!

I swapped out my oil boiler for an Air Source Heat Pump in December 2020 but the good incentive scheme runs out in 10 days, to be replaced by a more meagre one (although paying up-front, which the old scheme did not).  A heat pump is certainly greener because you get around 3 kW of heat for ever 1 kW of electricity (when the heat pump is installed and running properly).  For the first year it was marginally cheaper to run than my oil boiler had been - but now I have lost track of comparative pricing.     

Verdigris

A savvy buyer might look to see how full the oil tank is!

Yes, suck it (don't try this at home kids!) and see. Oil prices have been through the roof, recently, if suppliers can even get it to you, but if the tank is fairly full it takes the pressure off making a decision for a while. On the other hand, if you do opt for a heat-pump or pellet burner, you may want the installation done before you move in, as fairly major upheaval may be involved.

lohr500

We have had oil central heating in our property since we moved in in 1993. We had the old boiler replaced last year with a modern design condensing boiler.

I'm not sure if the Govt has set a date for the phase out of oil and gas boilers in new builds. But my understanding is that the rules will only apply to new builds and it will still be possible to replace oil/gas boilers with the same type of boilers for existing properties.

There are lots of people on the forum in favour of greener options such as Air Source and Ground Source Heat Pumps (ASHP/GSHP) , but also many who have had bad experiences with heat pump systems.

Hard to say if sticking with oil or switching to a greener system will enhance or reduce the value of your property.

After investigating the possibility of replacing our old oil boiler with an ASHP, I just couldn't justify the additional running costs that would have resulted. And for our size of house, the installation was going to be close to £20k. ASHP/GSHP systems typically run with lower water temperatures so it is often the case that many of the existing radiators need replacing with larger ones to ensure adequate heat transfer into the rooms. And ASHP/GSHP typically need a large hot water "heat store" to function. (A bit like a large immersion cylinder).

You are correct that there was a Govt scheme to help with the cost of installing greener heating solutions. It was a complex calculation and could pay up to circa £12k if I remember correctly, Payments were not up front though, but spread equally over the 7 years following the installation. And the payment stays with the house, not the owner at the time. So if you had invested up front to install the system, then moved before the end of the 7 year period, the new house owners got the payments, not you.

The new scheme I believe starts on 1st April and pays a maximum £5000 towards greener heating installations. My own view is that the £5k won't cover the additional cost of installing such a system over replacement of an existing gas/oil boiler.

Oil prices have increased dramatically over the past few weeks and it is hard to predict where they will end up. But my gut feel is that they will return to the previous £0.60 per litre (plus 5% VAT)  levels in the not too distant future.



For comparison purposes, you can assume a litre of oil will yield around 9.3kWh if you have a modern oil boiler with a 90% efficiency.

So at £0.63 per litre, 1kWh would cost £0.068 per kWh. At todays price of £1 a litre = £0.11 per kWh.

When looking at ASHP/GSHP manufactures quote a COP value. This is an indication of how much energy you get out, compared to energy put in. So with a typical COP of 3:1, for every kWh of electricity used, you would get 3kWh of heat out.

It is a very rough comparison but in our area (Yorkshire) the EDF deemed variable tariff for electricity from 1st April is £0.2736 per kWh. 

With a COP of 3:1, 1kWh of heat out from an ASHP/GSHP would cost £0.2736 / 3 = £0.0912.
With oil at £0.63 per litre the cost for the same 1kWh would be £0.068, or at £1 per litre £0.11 per kWh.

Unless there is a major intervention by the Govt this week on home energy prices, all the indications are that electricity prices will rise again in October. My gut feel is that oil prices will fall back to the £0.60 to £0.65 level by October.

My conclusion from all of this is that switching from oil to ASHP/GSHP is expensive on two counts.

Firstly the capital cost to switch is high due to more expensive hardware and a high probability of having to change radiators/ install a larger hot water tank heat store. The reduced Govt grant makes it an even bigger gap.

Secondly, and this is very much dependant on the relative cost of oil and electricity, daily running costs are in my opinion likely to be much  higher with ASHP/GSHP than oil.

Others may will disagree with the above and I am only sharing my own opinion on the subject, based on some 1st hand experience when we looked at an ASHP solution ourselves.


Unless I was looking at a very recent build property with the best possible insulation levels and with a heating/water system designed for ASHP/GSHP from the ground up, I would personally be put off buying any property with ASHP/GSHP regardless of how wonderful the owners told me it was.

Apologies for the length of the post.

Verdigris

Others may will disagree with the above and I am only sharing my own opinion on the subject, based on some 1st hand experience when we looked at an ASHP solution ourselves.

I think yours is a fair assessment. However, as I outlined, having a reasonable sized solar array could be financially beneficial, in the longer run, especially if you put an EV, or two, into the equation. An oil boiler won't charge one of those.

matelodave

Verdigris said:

There are a couple of alternatives, but it depends on the design, construction and orientation of the house which may be most suitable. If you have a good area of south(ish) facing roof, or large garden, then you could install solar PV panels which could provide a good proportion of the electricity to run a heat pump. If you have large grounds a ground-source heat pump would be most efficient, but will require more capital outlay. GSHPs also attract proportionally less subsidy uner the scheme that is replacing RHI (renewable heat incentive). The alternative would be an air-source pump. A bonus, given a reasonable array of PV panels, is that you would be able to charge electric vehicles, at least in the summer months.

If you can't have PV, and thus don't have "free" electricity you might consider a wood-pellet boiler, but that required quite a lot of room for fuel storage.

PV will only help a heatpump in the summer when you dont use it all that much. We get through between 30-40kwh a day in the winter sometimes peaking to nearly 60 when its everso cold and the sun isn't shining so we can easily use 1000-1200kwh a month in Dec,Jan, Feb. Not all of that is the heat pump but our general average is around 10kwh so the majority of it is.

The forecast output of a 4kwhp array for where I live in Cambridgeshire (assuming an optimised array - both azimuth and elevation)) is around 165-227kwh. Not to be sniffed at but not really what you'd call a good proportion. However the summer months would generate 400-450kwh a month when I'm only using around 250kwh'

I'm not saying that Solar PV isn't worth having but dont expect it to help much in the winter when its cold, the days are short, the sun doesn't shine very much and when it does it's so low in the sky that it's not very effective.

I dont know what the cost of oil is per kwh at the moment but even with a heat pump with an SCOP* of 3 you'll be paying around 10p/kwh for your heating. A heatpump may save energy but as it uses very expensive electricity it probably wont save you any money.

Personally I'd stay with oil and consider what to do in the future when the cost of heatpumps come down and there's a bit more parity between the cost of leccy, gas and oil.

*As SCOP is an average over the whole year, it's better in the summer and not so good in the winter when the heatpump is working hardest and you are using the most energy

tetrarch

We had a 15kw Windhager Biomass Pellet Boiler installed in December. It is now registered and qualifies for the last of the RHI before the Clean Heat Grant kicks in for 2022

The total cost was just North of £17K (with some extra interior connectivity) and we qualify for a RHI kickback of ~£12.3K over 7 years with our horrible EPC. We've had some UFH and new rads installed, but the insulation is woefully inadequate (awaiting planning appeal) so some things are difficult to assess at the moment. It's not connected to the HW yet, so will be actually going into huibernation over the Summer.

Our experience so far is mixed. It is not a perfect solution. I'll list some pros and cons vis-a-vis the Oil-boiler and rads that it replaced. Some of these are down to the UFH solution

Pros
Fuel cheaper than oil (despite pellets coming from Belarus and Ukraine and prices 30% higher than December)
No unpleasant noxious smell from combustion or storage
Frees up interior space (boiler moved from in-fabric boiler room to outside covered installation)
Loving UFH, never had it before and it is a very pleasant experience

Cons
Pellet storage - we have the space but the faff of dealing with a likely ~300 15kg bags of pellets a year is not zero
Loading - We chose to load pellets by hand into a 200kg hopper. 1-2 bags a day during the Winter and (we're told) one bag a week during the Summer. This is actually quite a satisfying process and I'm not finding it a chore currently
Controllability - The boiler takes time to get to temperature, add that to the UFH time and you have to plan your zones and on/off times carefully to avoid stop/start and leave enough cool down time
Noise - The boiler is on the outside wall next to the lounge, so we can hear the augur grinding and other noises of the boiler in operation whilst it's on. The planned insulation will remediate this to some degree. The other noise issue is the circulation pump which is way too noisy at the moment. My installation guys are flummoxed and I may have to go back to Grundfos to ask why the pump is so noisy

Happy to answer any questions

Regards

Tet