Our bungalow is just over 200 sqm with 400mm insulation all round. It has electric heaters which 99.9% of the time don't get used. We have a 5KW Morso Squirrel and two desk fans to move the warmth as required and we burn about 40x25kg bags of coal a year, £8 a bag for smokeless. Water is an electric immersion. I might make my own 1.2mx1.2m solar water heaters at some point connected via a thing called a Solasyphon. A pair of panels linked in series in winter and shunted to parallel in summer I think is how you stop it boiling when hot but still being useful in the winter, at ground level too no fiddling with roof tile malarky.
I've planted about 1800 willow shrubs not trees the initial few from
Grow Your Own Firewood |
As shrubs these won't get bigger than my forearm so no big heavy logs, 1m spacing one way, 1.5m the other so don't take up acres and acres. We're now at the end of year 3, a few died, a few got blown over, most are now 4m tall and thickening up, first harvest is supposed to be year seven starting a five year cycle, so a fifth of them cut. They I hope will last twenty years and I will have copiced alder ready before the end of that, again, not a massive area. Coppicing giving a controllable log size suitable for me being an old codger. Willow is of course not the best firewood, but I hope better than coal, better than a big electric bill, better than being cold. It may need a physically bigger stove to fit the longer but lower quality logs for the same heat output we have now.
One advantage of a rocket stove is you have one or two quick hot burns of the kind of sticks left over after harvesting my willow, they are not for big logs I believe?
One construction site I spent some time on a few years ago was a shiny new techno building for Cambridge Uni. All heat was supposed to come from boreholes, all the ground investigation said it was suitable but the man doing the drilling spent about ten times as long drilling many more holes than planned because the water could be pumped up but refused to go down again. They gave up which meant a retro not as suitable/eco design for heating was needed. Mucho red faces.
Our house before last was an old thatched cottage with oil heating, very comfy. We moved to a new uber insulated similarly sized house with a concrete floor slab housing the underfloor heating and an air source heat pump. That kept shutting down (SE UK) saying it had frozen up but clearly hadn't. By the time you discovered it was off it took a day or more to heat the floor again, if the error code was one you could override yourself. The basic mechanics may be simple but the control box required a laptop and their dongle. The electric bill was a fair bit more than the thatched house oil bill, similarly sized buildings.
This current new house was classed very poorly in the house purchase eco survey (EPC?) because despite mega insulation the electric heaters were described as shockingly bad. We were advised to improve our house "efficiency" we should install electric solar panels or a wind turbine. The domestic turbine closest to here had it's blades blown off.
There is some talk that obtaining a mortage may be the trick to force people to get an air source heat pump, so despite how well I think our house works as it is we may have to install a heat pump if/when we sell.
People tend to put insulation at the top of the list, which I agree with, but I think joint top are the simple measures such as a jumper etc, etc.
