central heating oil

[AJB Temple]

Yes. We looked into this very recently as we need to replace our oil boiler this year. Numerous firms used to do pellet boilers, but reliability was dreadful and there are now only a few players in the domestic market. The reputable ones will only install good quality boilers. We had a quote for Froling PE1 Biomass installation this year, and it was £22,000 fully installed, including a hopper. The grants available are capped, but I think we would get about half of that back over 7 years. Currently biomass pellet cost is similar to oil (leaving aside recent oil price volatility) and would require about 8 cubic metres a year.

The installation needed enclosing in a building and consumes a fair bit of space. Think full room.

We can install a top quality large oil boiler, in its own factory supplied outdoor enclosure, for under £5k. I like the biomass concept, but the economics do not work presently in a domestic environment unless integrated with a new build.

 

[transatlantic]

I really hate having an oil tank. Almost impossible to pass regulations if you only have a very small back garden (without having it smack in the middle). And to add to that, having experienced a scare when my first one cracked, I always worry that the new one (bunded) will crack too.

Oh, and then there is also the risk that someone will drill a hole through it to steal the contents. I now just leave my unlocked. I'd rather they pinch the contents rather than damage the tank.

 

[flying haggis]

boiler juice are quoting 19.15p/L today

 

[Lazurus]

So are the oil club

 

[D_W]

I just paid 17 point something. I wish I had a bigger tank, or another tank. It'll be a long time until it's anywhere near this sort of price again.

Here in the states, terminal gasoline price before taxes is probably less than a dollar. I've seen $1.85 a us gallon here and our local stations are notoriously slow to drop in price, but quick to rise (we are not near a terminal - in appalachia and the terminals/refineries tend to be near the coasts in this part of the country).

This is frack-land, natural gas has been cheap so long that oil in this dive may come down and match it, but we don't notice much. Where I grew up (rural, outside of frack zone) they burn oil as you guys are saying.

Local online real time price for back home is $1.26 per US gallon of fuel oil delivered. My dad is the last person I know burning oil (FIL and BILs have gone to geothermal due to price and ease), but with only a 275 gallon tank.

Farmers around here, on the other hand, tend to have a lot more fuel storage - diesel and gasoline. They will normally buy tankers (8k gallons?) and store on site, but not buy all at once due to the risk of overpaying. I talked to a guy a couple of weeks ago who has bought 4 semi tank truck loads of diesel and gasoline - fuel use for him during tillage and harvest is several thousand gallons a day, and they truck from storage all year depending on market conditions.

Strange times. cheapest gasoline I ever saw. Drove to visit a girlfriend while in college 24 years ago now and remember a gas war at the time and filled on the way back to college for .879 (dollars per us gallon) and thought we'd never see prices like that again. The inflated prices now are probably in that range (about 70 cents of the $1.85 here is federal and state taxes - as much as 35-40 cents lower elsewhere)

Still $3.20 in hawaii

 

[Just4Fun]

Electric heating in any form (including heat pumps) is smoke-and-mirrors

I don't know what it is like in the UK but when we changed from oil to a GSHP a few years ago our heating costs dropped.

 

[ScaredyCat]

My local oil supplier is getting pretty desperate and is offering to let me buy it and pay them to store it until I need it.


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[DBT85]

Yeah they have monthly or quarterly quotas to hit and given everything else they may be getting a bit desperate to hit some targets.

 

[RogerS]

My local oil supplier is getting pretty desperate and is offering to let me buy it and pay them to store it until I need it.


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What happens if they go bust - still storing your oil ?

 

[Trainee neophyte]

Bladder tanks for the win!

A few weeks ago you could have bought a swimming pool full of crude oil in the US, and been given about $30,000 to go with it as the price was negative. What you do with the oil afterwards is another problem...

 

[ScaredyCat]

What happens if they go bust - still storing your oil ?

No idea, I'm just filling my tank not using their storage.

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[D_W]

Electric heating in any form (including heat pumps) is smoke-and-mirrors

I don't know what it is like in the UK but when we changed from oil to a GSHP a few years ago our heating costs dropped.

Same for my fil and two fils. I mentioned the same to my dad, who spends $4k a year on heat sometimes, but he has money to burn and doesn't care.

 

[woodhutt]

Sorry, guys. No criticism was intended about the use of oil. I genuinely was surprised it was still in use for heating and overlooked the rural aspect.
To our eternal shame (and comfort) we are still burning wood for heating. As I type, the wood burner is loaded with gum and pumping out a nice 24 C throughout the house while outside is 9 C and dropping. An entire winter season's wood costs us around NZ$600 (about 300 Pounds).
Pete

 

[MikeG.]

........ No criticism was intended about the use of oil......

I don't think anyone took it as criticism. It does seem arcane that we are still burning kerosene, but in rural communities this is a real issue. We want to do things better, but can't. Almost everyone around here burns wood as well, and that's often just cleaned up from the roadside verges and so on after a storm. Burnt in a well designed woodburning stove a woodfire is a wonderfully efficient way of using a sustainable resource in a near carbon-neutral way, but unfortunately, it's seldom anywhere near enough to heat a home.

 

[Phil Pascoe]

... anywhere near ...

My little 8Kw Dowling is the only heat source I have, but I live in W. Cornwall which isn't exactly the coldest part of the UK. We scavenge wood all year, but it still costs us £50 a year to heat the place.

 

[AJB Temple]

I agree with Mike. One of the guys who used to post on this forum, installed a big log burner to heat his whole house. It was super impressive. He needed to store quite a lot of logs though. From memory his front garden was full of logs - maybe 25 cubic metres.

 

[AES]

Just to add to the Kiwi picture of UK (and a large part of the rest of Europe I think) here, in a relatively rural part of Switzerland, but not up in the mountains (we're "flatlands", nearest sizeable town is about 8 Km away), we also have little choice for heating.

Electricity of course (if you're a millionaire, and not all Swiss are, I can assure you!) and oil. I have a nominal 5,500 Lts oil tank built into the fabric of the house (which was built in the 1960s, and also includes a nuclear fallout shelter - 'onest - and virtually all houses here have a cellar of some sort).

Wood pellets have become more popular over the last 10 years or so, but take a relatively large amount of storage space (more than the above tank needs), AND the prices are only now beginning to come down. Further, the admittedly small amount of smoke given off when the boiler first starts off does pong a bit - well my nearest neighbour's does anyway.

When we replaced our complete heating system about 15 years ago I looked into all the options, heat pump was FAR too expensive, electricity ditto, oil tank could not be converted to anything like LPG, and the nearest gas line was/is in the above town, about 8 Km away. And at the time the wood pellets thing was a new thing, and quite pricey, and the jury was still out re environmental benefits. Noting the comments above though, I THINK our wood pellets are produced in country, not imported.

Driving around here you will undoubtedly see lots of logs stored in lean-to shelters, but AFAIK, CH boilers to run those are few and far between these days (when looking for a new system 15 years ago we were told "old technology mate"), and mostly the logs are used only in "ornamental" single-room fireplaces.

So there are many here like me who have little realistic choice other than oil.

And all that makes our government policy even more annoying - even with the reduced oil price (I just filled up) I still had to pay an "environmental oil heating surcharge" of approx. 500 quid ON TOP of the standard (newly-reduced) price per litre! And the idiots KEEP saying they're going to ban oil heating here completely "soon".

Fine, in principle I've got nothing against that. But ONLY when I can replace my oil system with something of broadly similar efficiency and running costs.

As I just turned 75 the other day I'm NOT holding my breathe - and this BTW, in a country which, per comparable head of population and/or ground area, probably has more hydro electric production than anywhere else - I won't say "in the world", but certainly "in Europe". The reason why our electricity price is so high here is because we sell a lot to other countries, particularly since the next door Germans started closing down their nuclear power stations.

Like I say, give me a few more years and I guess how I heat our house will most probably be the least of my problems!

 

[D_W]

........ No criticism was intended about the use of oil......

I don't think anyone took it as criticism. It does seem arcane that we are still burning kerosene, but in rural communities this is a real issue. We want to do things better, but can't. Almost everyone around here burns wood as well, and that's often just cleaned up from the roadside verges and so on after a storm. Burnt in a well designed woodburning stove a woodfire is a wonderfully efficient way of using a sustainable resource in a near carbon-neutral way, but unfortunately, it's seldom anywhere near enough to heat a home.

Biomass is getting air quality exceptions here and has been or about 20 years. Schools use biomass boilers because they get subsidized to do it, but one of our local well capitalized foundations (that studies things others can't afford to) did a study on the impact in air quality for the state and found biomass burning to be a huge negative mostly because the particulates aren't well controlled (even in a clean looking burn) and the particulates help propagate other problems in the air.

We used to have a tradition of coal mining and burning for power, and still do, but it is dwindling due to the availability of natural gas. The region is a natural shallow valley and the coal burning has caused a lot of respiratory problems and probably shortening of lifetimes. I'm not sure which is worse for people (not environmentally concerning, but absolutely worse without agenda attached) - a cogen coal plant or biomass burning. Natural gas has cleaned up the region a lot and the air quality is better (and as someone with seasonal asthma, I can actually tell the difference when I get a cold).

That said, wood is burned a lot in rural areas here and because of the terrain making pipelining unsuitable, oil is burned in much of the northeast US (which is probably similar in population to all of the UK). I guess you guys get the exhaust when it's burned close to the coast!! We have a near unending supply of downed wood here that never gets harvested because the cost of wood is higher per btu (commercially sourced) is higher than natural gas. Gas has to be about the laziest heat in the world - if a furnace is good, there is no soot (35 years may leave a very thin layer of dust) and nothing to transport.

When oil prices are high here and government incentives offered, geothermal becomes a popular option. In FIL's neighborhood, there is no nat gas despite the existence of a huge nat gas cogen plant about 2 miles away (neighborhood built in the last 5 years), so heat pump, propane (expensive) and geothermal were the main options. Geo went in about 1/3rd of the houses at a plus cost of about $10k. I don't understand the rationale, actually, of the people who didn't install it as most of the homes are mortgaged and the loan payment for the geo is less than the difference in energy cost vs. the other methods.

coal was common for heat here, too, but is being phased out.

re: the wood, we lived in the woods when I was a kid and g-father commercially harvested hardwoods for firewood as a retired farmer. we burned about 8-10 cords per year of hardwoods and 250 gallons of oil (supplemental heating in parts of the house not served well by the wood). When oil got cheap in the 1990s, out went the wood stove and we burned oil only - about 1000 gallons per year. Then, I went to college and moved away. I miss the smell of the wood heat and the opportunity to get exercise splitting the wood.

long story short at the end of that, as satisfying as it was to burn wood back then, even with an efficient stove, I'm not sure that it's better for anyone, at least in the short term, and for breathing, it's probably worse.

 

[ScaredyCat]

........ No criticism was intended about the use of oil......

I don't think anyone took it as criticism. It does seem arcane that we are still burning kerosene, but in rural communities this is a real issue. We want to do things better, but can't. Almost everyone around here burns wood as well, and that's often just cleaned up from the roadside verges and so on after a storm. Burnt in a well designed woodburning stove a woodfire is a wonderfully efficient way of using a sustainable resource in a near carbon-neutral way, but unfortunately, it's seldom anywhere near enough to heat a home.

Amen to that. I daren't do anything with my tank, even though it's inconvenient because

1) Listed building +
2) It'd never pass any location distance requirements

Gas is unavailable. We burn wood in winter too but the house is made of poo and sticks which is effectively zero insulation. If I leave the car outside the front door in winter, the side that is closest to the house never needs defrosting.


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[woodhutt]

While we are blessed where we are with both power and gas supply (no gas in the South Island of NZ) and much of our electricity is generated by hydro, we suffer some of the highest energy prices in the OECD.
Take the gas for example. With an instantaneous heater for hot water we consume only some NZ$12 per month and this is constant throughout the year. For the privilege of having the gas piped to our home we pay an additional NZ$48 per month in line charges.
We have a heat pump but are sparing in its use - only using it for 'cold snaps' just before winter really kicks in when the wood burner takes over.
To put it in perspective, we have a relatively small home (120 sq.m.) and can heat the entire property with the wood burner. The 'cold' season lasts from about now through to end of Sept. and we can service that with 5 cu.m. of seasoned and pre-cut wood costing NZ$600. To use power to heat via the heat pump would result in bills totaling around NZ$1400 - 1500 for the same period.
Pete