Diesel Heater, emergency use & costs vs gas combi boiler + electric supply for it?

QrizB

Also look up the laws surrounding Diesel for domestic heating, they changed back in April. You may still be able to heat a domestic household using red, rather than white diesel and that means £1.10 as opposed to £1.90 a litre.
If not, see if you can get a version of these heaters which burn Kerosene instead of red diesel, this is heating oil and is legal for home heating use. Prices for heating oil are on the way up, but you should still be able to find a fuel merchant selling at between 85p and 95p a litre, which is 8.5 - 9.5p per KW/H before working out efficiency losses.

All of these heaters that I've seen will run quite happily on diesel or kerosene.

However - so far as I can tell, kero is only 90p/litre if you've got a bulk tank and buy 500 litres or more. In smaller quantities it doesn't seem to be any cheaper than diesel.

Ebe_Scrooge

QrizB said:

Also look up the laws surrounding Diesel for domestic heating, they changed back in April. You may still be able to heat a domestic household using red, rather than white diesel and that means £1.10 as opposed to £1.90 a litre.
If not, see if you can get a version of these heaters which burn Kerosene instead of red diesel, this is heating oil and is legal for home heating use. Prices for heating oil are on the way up, but you should still be able to find a fuel merchant selling at between 85p and 95p a litre, which is 8.5 - 9.5p per KW/H before working out efficiency losses.

All of these heaters that I've seen will run quite happily on diesel or kerosene.

However - so far as I can tell, kero is only 90p/litre if you've got a bulk tank and buy 500 litres or more. In smaller quantities it doesn't seem to be any cheaper than diesel.

We have no mains gas in our village, most people use oil.  Several years ago there was a guy who was done for running his car on heating oil - apparently he'd been doing it for years and it never seemed to do any harm to his car.

Buying in bulk is certainly cheaper, but if you're buying heating oil then there's a lot less tax on in than there would be for diesel, that's where the biggest price difference comes from.  Most of our heating oil suppliers will sell 20 litre drums - we found this out back in 2010/2011 when the severe weather meant the tankers couldn't get through to make deliveries.

It does mean you've got to drive to their depot to collect it, of course, but in may be an option.

Apodemus

Ebe_Scrooge said:

QrizB said:

Also look up the laws surrounding Diesel for domestic heating, they changed back in April. You may still be able to heat a domestic household using red, rather than white diesel and that means £1.10 as opposed to £1.90 a litre.
If not, see if you can get a version of these heaters which burn Kerosene instead of red diesel, this is heating oil and is legal for home heating use. Prices for heating oil are on the way up, but you should still be able to find a fuel merchant selling at between 85p and 95p a litre, which is 8.5 - 9.5p per KW/H before working out efficiency losses.

All of these heaters that I've seen will run quite happily on diesel or kerosene.

However - so far as I can tell, kero is only 90p/litre if you've got a bulk tank and buy 500 litres or more. In smaller quantities it doesn't seem to be any cheaper than diesel.

Most of our heating oil suppliers will sell 20 litre drums -

That's interesting and a welcome development!  Last time I had that need, I had to take home a 40 gallon drum from the depot!

QrizB

Ebe_Scrooge said:

Most of our heating oil suppliers will sell 20 litre drums - we found this out back in 2010/2011 when the severe weather meant the tankers couldn't get through to make deliveries.

It does mean you've got to drive to their depot to collect it, of course, but in may be an option.

How much do your suppliers charge for this?

Local to me they seem to want £40 for a 20-litre drum, which is more expensive than buying diesel (noting I already own a jerrycan).

wireplay

You can run a gas boiler, completely off the electricity grid! 

I know this (and my gas safe engineer has confirmed it's OK before anyone replies saying it isn't...), because our boiler has a problem, which occasionally means it suffers an f23 fault, and noone can fix it. Other than that, it's highly efficient and not worth spending £3k on a new one. A simple solution was to unwire it from the heating distribution elec board, and put it on a standard 3 pin plug. I then power cycle the boiler every few hours, which resets it, so we don't notice if it f23s (especially as it only happens in mild cold conditions). 

Anyway, the result is that I can now plug my boiler into a standard 13 pin ups! A boiler, with the pump, takes around 80w an hour on max pump speed, could be as low as 25w on low speed, so a 1000w ups, will last over 12 hours! 

I've tested this with the upcoming rolling power outages looming, and it works perfectly.