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I'm looking at buying a new 4 bed house in the country, it will be heated via a fuel oil tank in the garden. Does anyone have any sort of ball park figs of usage.
In our current 3 bed Edwardian house gas & electricity is less than £60 a month during the winter.
Does it run on Gas Oil or Kerosene (Standard Burning Oil-SBO)?
£60 a month for both gas and electric?? Jesus, i need some money saving tips from you Martin!!!!!
Suggest you have a look on the moneysavingexpert forum - I went looking for same sort of reasons yesterday, whilst the topic was a year or so old the consumption people are talking about ain't gonna change much and it's pretty simple hunting around for prices.
We have oil heating, very old oil burner and fuel tank in the garage. 2 bed end terrace costs £60-85p/m all year round, even though the heating stays on for 4-6 months of the year. It's pretty much on the lowest setting and its damn hot!
Looking to change to gas in the next couple of years as we can't get spare parts for the oil burner and the price has gone up a lot!
£60 a month for both gas and electric?? Jesus, i need some money saving tips from you Martin!!!!!
I second that! Our electricity bill is about £60p/m!
Bear in mind that oil based systems are very very vulnerable to changes in price, more than any other fuel/ energy supply.
Bear in mind that oil based systems are very very vulnerable to changes in price, more than any other fuel/ energy supply.
It's increasing all the time, but last year was the worst. I think it's worked out at about 20% in the last year, but the heating was on for longer and on number 2 out of 6 rather than 1 due to the cold winter.
Four bed det. here. We're running at about 500 litres for a winter here(Oct to nowish), but we have a log burner as well. We turn it off during the summer and use immersion heater for hot water, which is cheaper. The boiler is about 30 years old so I'm sure there are better ones.
as said above, oil price very varible, eg, Oct 2009 was 34p/litre, Jan 2010 up to 52p/litre.
That helps a great deal thanks. We dont do anything special to keep the prices down. We do however has a boiler that was fitted 2 yrs ago and low energy light bulbs everywhere we can. SO has a tendency to like lots of lamps on in the house. £60 is probably too much for us to pay, over last few years we had built up £500 in credit!!!
We are with Scottish Electric/Gas
Four bed det. here. We're running at about 500 litres for a winter here(Oct to nowish)
**** me I wish ours was that low. Largish 4 bedroom detatched (ex-farmhouse) here. Doouble glazing, cavity insulated and decent loft insulation.
500 litres lasted us about 6 weeks in the middle of this winter with heating coming on for 1hr in the morning then from about 3.30 - 10.30 at night.
We also have open fires but putting a stove in one of them to try and reduce the oil consumption. We probably get through 2-2500ltr a year.
Need to service the boiler - thought about replacing it but frankly I'm not sure it's worthwhile until the old one dies.
Electric monthly usage is about £120/month middle of winter but drops off rapidly in MarchI have an office running 3 x servers 24 x 7 and about 3 - 4 pcs. Also have far too many 12v downlighters (approx 40) but not a lot I can do about them right now other than not switch them on! 🙁
Heating switched off now.... do you think it wouold be cheaper to heat the water with the immersion?
We moved into a rented house in sep 2009, the oil tank had 700 litres in it. We put 500 litres in it in jan 2010 and then another 500 litres in march. We only have the heating on 5.30pm - 10pm.
It was £245 for the last 500 litres.
The boiler is about 3 years old.
Apparently heating oil prices drop in summer due to lower demand, i will be filling my tank if this is true so it will last the winter.
🙂
using the last dregs of 1000 litres we've used this winter in a very uninsulated 1 bed house (rented). We also have an open fire.
about £245 for 500 as soops said but would advise buying in summer in larger volume if you can.
boiler juice for prices & "buying weekends" (haven't bothered with yet)
http://www.boilerjuice.com/heatingOilPrices.php
We used 1200 litres in three months (over £200 a month at the time) last Winter - we had a young baby and didn't want him to get cold! Much less this year. I think oil is currently 40p a litre(ish) - dropped a bit then went up again.
I really like oil - seems fairly efficient, heats up quickly and not as much of a rip off as gas.
Big and slightly draughty house here - five bed, bungalow, big rooms, Colt construction (think of a large scout hut with wooden tiles!) but it's double glazed and has roof insulation.
Over the past couple of years, I've paid anywhere from mid 30p per litre to mid 50p per litre for heating oil (currently at mid to high 40p), which demonstrates that you're very much at the mercy of the cartel. We got through a lot over the past winter (in the region of 2000 litres I reckon), but we do have a very large, somewhat poorly constructed house. The biggest improvement I've noticed is by putting decent insulation & modern rads in a garage conversion we did. Has made me think about replacing the rest of the rads in the house as they're getting on a bit now, but the cost is rather scary.
The advantage with oil is that you can phone around on every purchase and get the best possible price from your local oil distributors. With gas/electric it's not so simple to get the best price on the market, unless you are prepared to go through the faff of changing supplier arrangements every 6 months/12 months. However, gas central heating is usually the cheapest option by overall average prices (due to economies of scale and all that), or it was 10 years ago, when I was involved in the oil trade (when we were getting gas piped from the North Sea fields). I think LPG was considered the most expensive way to heat your home, I can't remember where coal heating came into the league of costs.
Re Oil vs immersion for hot water in the summer.
I've been checking the useage rate for this earlier this month. With the boiler, just doing hot water, it was on for about 2 hours a day, (usually just for a few minutes every so often). That's something like 2-3 litres a day.
The immersion heater is on a timer and comes on at night (cheaper) for an hour. That's enough to keep it warm all day. Haven't done the sums yet but looks like over a pound a day oil vs 30p for electric.
3 bed 16-17th century cottage here - we probably get through about 800-1100 litres/year (80% during winter). But this is for heating only because we use an the immersion for water all year round.
Check out Boilerjuice for typical costs, but also look at other regional providers because the former will sometimes be undercut by 2-3%.
I haven't the full thread, so part of your expense is going to be determined by insulation, etc. We have pretty much none, plus olde worlde windows, etc. But the house somehow retains a lot of warmth (no real fire either) and we rarely have to use the stat above 20deg.
I'm running gas and elec at £50 a month on a small flat, so mine are no help, but I do have a family member with a 4 bed det on oil with a fairly modern oil boiler and he used about £400's worth over winter.