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have been wondering if there’s potential to add in a wood boiler to the gas central heating
Yes
system relatively cheaply?
No
It would need to be outside on the other side of the wall the boiler is on in a little shed of some description th
Definitely no. The cheapest way to introduce a wood boiler is a back boiler on a wood stove and a water tank with a coil, if you already have an indirect water tank you will need two coils. (A new tank). This can be done relatively easily if you ch system is openvented. If your heating system is unvented you will need thermal stores or plate heat exchanger to transfer heat. If you want a boiler outside then it will need to have a heat bank / thermal store and will not be simple and cheap. The cheapest external boilers are agricultural and take a small bail. These work well on big houses but use a lot of wood. Depending on the setup you may have a plate heat exchanger to link systems or you may use the thermal store / heat bank for this.
It's all possible but depends on what you have and how far you want to go.
Thanks @julians
I was obviously too slow as now out of stock! Seems a good price though…
Those programmable trvs are back in stock now
https://www.gasproducts.co.uk/terrier-i-temp-i30-programmable-radiator-control.html
@julians thanks for heads-up, I had done a stock alert but no email received.... but now have 4 on order thanks to you 😉
I've recently swapped our hot water to electrical heating only (240v immersion heater) because we are due to refurbish the kitchen where the current, old, gas boiler lives, and we are looking at moving to some form of heat pump type system, where high temperature (>50 degC) means poor CoP.
I've put the immersion heater on a seperate 'lecy meter, so i can see exactly how much energy we are using for just the hot water. It looks like a good option will be to install some very cheap, probably second hand, solar PV panels to drive a second immersion heater. The beauty of this is that the hot water tank acts as the thermal store, so mostly you don't care about precisely when the tank heats.
Using a cheap ebay MPPT controller also allows the PV panels to harvest energy, and turn that into "High temperature" heat even at very low absolute power values. Because a resistive heating element is 100% efficient, you can put a small amount of energy into it, and get that energy into your hot water, unlike for direct solar hot water system. This is important, because mostly our days are overcast, so a typical 300W PV panel might only put out 50 to 100w. But, over the course of a day, that 50w adds up.
I've got space on my workshop roof to put 3 or perhaps 4 300w PV panels, so plan to temporarily install some cheap second hand ones and see how much energy we can harvest. It's certianly not suddenly going to slash our 'lecy bills, but with a diy / s/h home built system i think i can get a return on my cash in a reasonably short time frame 🙂
My mums octopus fixed deal ends on the 13th feb, currently paying £78 month or approx £900 year, cheapest new dual tariff available anywhere was sticking with octopus 12 month loyal customer deal for £177 month, ouch.
I imagine they'll be a number of folk attempting a hot clamp on the incoming line and running flying leads to high drain appliances, especially if they are still on an old style electricity meter as its quite simple to do if you are competent with electricity.
cheapest new dual tariff available anywhere was sticking with octopus 12 month loyal customer deal for £177 month, ouch.
The cheapest is the SVR tariff that's capped. Don't fix into anything at the moment.
...Using a cheap ebay MPPT controller also allows the PV panels to harvest energy, and turn that into “High temperature” heat even at very low absolute power values. Because a resistive heating element is 100% efficient, you can put a small amount of energy into it, and get that energy into your hot water, unlike for direct solar hot water system. This is important, because mostly our days are overcast, so a typical 300W PV panel might only put out 50 to 100w. But, over the course of a day, that 50w adds up.
I’ve got space on my workshop roof to put 3 or perhaps 4 300w PV panels, so plan to temporarily install some cheap second hand ones and see how much energy we can harvest. It’s certianly not suddenly going to slash our ‘lecy bills, but with a diy / s/h home built system i think i can get a return on my cash in a reasonably short time frame 🙂
Good thinking. A cheap way of doing this is to get a "plug-in" solar system. Which can literally just plug in to a 13 amp socket (although is probably against regulations and it is better to hard wire it with an isolator on a separate circuit). This won'tallow you to claim any SEG payments for energy exported. However, if you are diverting to the immersion heater, I would expect very little to be exported, as a significant proportion of the generated power will be covering your base load (fridges, lights, things on standby etc.). I think this would work pretty well for 3 to 4 panels. If you do it for less than £1 per w than it should be pretty competitive (e.g. <£1200 for a 1.2 kw system).
I'm needing to do work here
Used 350lts a month in oil.
I've the ceilings to do so will be celotexing before the boards go up as well. House gets battered by wind and pulls the heat straight out!
Good thinking. A cheap way of doing this is to get a “plug-in” solar system. Which can literally just plug in to a 13 amp socket (although is probably against regulations and it is better to hard wire it with an isolator on a separate circuit).
It most definitely is against the regulations. The issue is someone may be work on the network and think the supply has been isolated and bang someone plugs in their own supply and the wires are live. This goes back though the transformer and bang thousands of volts and some poor buggers tools. This is when grid tided inverters are required shit down in the event of a power cut. I am all up for homemade engineering solutions but make sure a setup like this is on its own dedicated circuit.