David Grey's Blog

Oil - I'll be glad to be rid of it!

We live in a rural community in Yorkshire which does not have a mains gas supply. The house we live in has an oil-fired boiler, which doesn't sit easily with my plans to live a greener life and reduce my dependence on fossil fuels. When we moved here the only other common choices for heating were liquid petroleum gas or propane so there was little option but to use fossil fuels. When we moved in cost us somewhere in the region of 8 pence per litre now it is costing me nearly 60 pence per litre, so not only is not particularly green it's also not particularly cheap and getting more expensive month on month.

Last summer I installed solar hot water heating on my house in an attempt to reduce the amount of oil that I have to use. I'm really pleased with the solar system as it's working really well but I'm still looking to do more to reduce my dependence on oil. Strangely the recent credit crunch may provide me with an unexpected opportunity to do something about it. We have a mortgage with Northern Rock, who are trying to reduce their mortgage portfolio and encourage their customers to remortgage with other lenders. As our interest rate is rather high I'm tempted to do this and add the cost of new, non-fossil fuel heating on to the new mortgage.

So I'm now looking around for alternative forms of heating. Ground source heat pumps seem to be growing in popularity and a new house that was recently built in the village had one installed. I've done some research and it would seem that they give best performance when used in conjunction with underfloor heating but are a lot less efficient when combined with a traditional wet radiator system like ours.

My other option is to use wood-fired heating. We already have a wood burning stove in the house, which is fantastic but it doesn't have a water jacket nor is not sufficient to run the heating. I could install a log burning boiler and I do already have sufficient storage space for one year's worth of fuel. However it turns out that one of the major suppliers of compressed wood pellets is based about 20 miles down the road from our house so my current thinking is to install a pellet-fired boiler with an automatic feed. I think this might be a better choice than a log fired boiler as I wouldn't need to install accumulators to store the hot water, which is good as I don't really have the space for them. I do have space outside to install a hopper to store wood pellets which would be some 3 metres from the boiler. Given the layout of the house an auger feed probably wouldn't work so I guess I would have to use a vacuum fed system.

Does anyone have an experiences they are willing to share of installing and using vacuum fed wood pellet fired boilers and of storing the wood pellets in an outside hopper? If you do I'd love to hear them and the advice would come in very useful.

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