When we bought our house it had only oil, even though there was gas in the street.
To actually make the connection turned out to be very very expensive (we were quoted over £1000 ten years ago) and we would also have been responsible for digging the trenches across our land etc at our cost. You couldn't just "ring up the gas board and make it happen".
We didn't bother and still (mostly) heat with oil.
I don't know if it's changed or different where you are of course but you might like to enquire before looking at details like running costs.
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Until 6 years ago we lived in a rural location and had a house with oil fired heating. It was pretty cost effective then but I should think it would be at least as expensive as other forms now, if not more so. There was though, a certain psychological satisfaction in having paid for the fuel up front which I can't really explain.
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We're just the opposite about payment. I keep putting offf the ordering of the next lot of oil because it'll be £600 or £700 - but then of course you use a bit mopre so it'll be £750...repeat until we run out and then Mrs Dipstick gets tetchy and it's a painful experience all round.
Just poor organisation on my part really, but at least with gas bills they come through regularly in smaller chunks!
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I keep putting offf the ordering of the next lot of oil because it'll be £600 or £700 -
When heating oil prices are rising it might be cheaper in the long run to order in smaller quantities than you did previously.
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I've just been involved with a job for a new gas connection. Approx 10 metre trench and associated valves and pipework to provide junction into existing main - £4,000 +VAT. This did not include provision of a meter as the supply won't be used immediately.
Edited by daveyjp on 31/07/2008 at 13:41
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The cost of connection can be very high and may therefore encourage you to maximise you energy efficiency and stay with oil. Solar panels work, but the whole of life cost can negate the savings achieved, although with increasing oil prices, that may change.
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Gas is much easier to use than oil. With oil, if you want to go away in winter and leave the boiler timer on you have to check that there is enough oil left. If our oil ran out I would need to get the system bled after I'd got some more oil. Oil tanks are ugly, and oil is smelly. Oil-fired boilers are noisy. If I had the choice I would definitely choose gas.
Edited by L'escargot on 31/07/2008 at 15:41
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Thanks, everyone. Would Calor Gas be an option? Is that more hassle/more expensive than mains?
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I do not know anything about it personally, but a tv programme recently reported on Geothermal heating for a house. The cost for a large two story house for complete installation was £10,000. They claimed an 'average' house would cost £7,000 (with a grant). You get underfloor heating and hot water, and after initial installation then only servicing bills. The government are presently giving large grants for this type of installation 'cos it is 'green'.
If you google it, there are firms offering quotes for the work.
If you compare this basic 'one off' payment to the cost of running the gas pipes and connection followed by a lifetime of bills, this may be worth a good look.
Edited by deepwith on 31/07/2008 at 16:00
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d
I think you'll find that the £10k buys you a ground or air heat pump system which you then hook up to your existing heating system. Underfloor heating works best because the max temperature output from the heat pump is lower than from a boiler. Don't ask me why you can't keeping "pumping" it up, maybe someone can say. If you have an existing radiator system you appear to be taking a risk that the heating will be adequate.
As well as the servicing bill you get an electricity bill for the pump circulating the coolant. I believe thatyou can expect 3 to 4 times the energy out of the system as you put in, so that sounds like a hefty electricity bill. Unless the wind turbine powers the pump :-)
I've just put another 6 inches of insulation in the loft, bought a better thermostat (old one would run the system for a few seconds sometimes, total waste of oil) and I've asked for a jumper for Christmas.
JH
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From a cash flow point of view you pay for the gas AFTER you have used it while with oil you pay in advance of usage. Having lived with both types of boilers our oil fired boiler cost more to service than our gas one.
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Our previous boiler was an oil fired one that had been converted to run on gas. But it got very tempermental - it would switch of or not come on when it was cold outside! Replaced with a "massive" floor standing boiler. Getting that to the cellar was fun.
I'd have thought the convenience of gas is a big advantage if costs are similar. But if it costs as much as it seems to get gas to the house then that is a big consideration.
What is ironic about the cost - where we live there is a huge project to replace all the gas mains, pipes to houses and gas meters.
So they replaced our meter last year and had to lay a new plastic pipe to the house from the new gas main. Obviously we did not pay but the work for our property involved (1) lifting pavement flag stones, (2) digging a hole to find pipe, (3) digging a hole in front garden, (4) remove old pipe, (5) using a "mole" robot to dig a hole for the pipe (the hole needed to get the mole out) and (6) the new pipe was fitted. All in our house probably took no more than a few hours to run a new gas pipe and replace the meter. So why charge thousands?
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>>Would Calor Gas be an option?
Friends of ours had Calor gas - they found it very expensive, and of course you still need a tank. Things may have moved on, with the cost of energy continually changing.
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There is now an option of having an underground Calor gas tank so there is no visible ugly tank. The gas supplier can keep the tank topped up so there is no worry about running out. However, I believe that Calor gas is the most expensive fuel of all.
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"Oil-fired boilers are noisy"
My Bosch Worcester boiler (aged 10) is quiet enough so as not to be able to hear it when out of the utility room where it lives - certainly far quieter than the French made joke that we ran on gas in our old home. It has failed twice in 10 years, once a clogged injector and once a failed thermo-link thing. It is warrented by BW themselves at an annual cost of £144.00 a year which
includes an annual service. Their customer service is very good.
We pay up front for our fuel, our local neighbourhood oil chap will turn up at a drop of the proverbial, he also offers a "payment plan" where you are given interest free credit if you pay by direct debit.
Wouldn't go back to gas now.
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I have coal - it replaced an oil boiler.
It is low tech but 99.9+% reliable
Parts required to keep it going
1) Fan
2) Gravity
3) pump to serve radiators
It has needed one new fan in 24 yrs, 1 x new pump - Gravity has been 100% reliable
Cleaning takes 30 mins/week in winter - 10 mins in summer.
No servicing reqd other than clearing the flue 1 x per week - inc in above times.
To me it is a winner
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Look for good prices on oil from boilerjuice.com (recommended on here by someone else).
Calor was prohibitively expensive when I last looked at it about 5 years ago.
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I had oil at the last 2 houses, one was an oil-fired Rayburn, the other was a Worcester Bosch job ... the oil is actually Kerosene or aviation fuel, I found it noisy, smelly, and its now very expensive with the high oil prices plus I've heard of some cases where the light-fingered brigade have nicked the stuff !
I now (thankfully) have a 10 year old gas boiler, I wouldn't touch oil again and don't even think about Calor (LPG) !!!
Ideally, I'd like a solid fuel Rayburn that runs the heating & hot water, acres of insulation and a solar hot water system.
I know a chap over at Nth. Cornwall who has built his house partly underground, it faces south and the front is all glazed, he has some wind generators (proper big ones), and some old single cylinder diesel generators + some solar panels, his lighting is all low voltage form an array of batteries, he's even got a water turbine generator.
Another chap I know of makes turbines which ya can stick in a river or decent stream and generate electricity from that.
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Interesting about the solar/wind generation aspect of this question. Also interesting that nobody has popped up to say they've used these technologies on their own houses. I wonder if that's because nobody has, or they have and discovered it's a white elephant unless you have a special underground house or a LOT of space for big stuff.
Solar hot water seems appealing to me and we have the space and roof aspect to do it, but I just can't make the numbers add up even remotely financially unless I diy (not going to happen) and I haven't yet seen a convincing environmental case for it either.
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That is the problem Dipstick, some of this "green" stuff costs shed loads of spondulics,
and takes years to "pay for itself", even plastic windows take years & most folk have moved on by then, the warmest houses I've ever been in are the old cottages with 3ft thick cob walls and a solid fuel Rayburn but ... they cost *big time*
I live in a 1930's house at the mo - they were better built than most of todays matchboxes, my last house was a 1950's with cavity wall insulation & double glazing etc ... the condensation was soooooooo bad, I had to have the windows open in the winter !!!
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>>my last house was a 1950's with cavity wall insulation & double glazing etc ... the
>>condensation was soooooooo bad, I had to have the windows open in the winter !!!
Because the DG "engineer" (sic) forgot to put vents round the windows. And the vents negate the benefit of the DG anyway. Waste of money.
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"Oil-fired boilers are noisy"
OK, I shouldn't have generalised like that, so I'll change it to "Our Heating World oil-fired boiler is noisy".
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Solar heating for your hot water will save you absolutely nothing - something like £70 a year saving even at current prices; installation cost £3,000, payback 40 years excluding servicing...
One poster on here has a DIY solar hot water heating system. A black-painted old radiator in a mini-greenhouse built for the purpose, with the water moving by convection through the water tank, which has secondary (primary?!) electric hot water heating. No moving parts, nothing to go wrong.
Heat pump systems don't really work with anything other than very modern, high-insulated houses. They don't generate water that is particularly hot, hence under-floor heating is needed (so you don't have acres of radiators on the walls). This cannot really cope with horrid convection currents and draughts from single glazed Georgian sashes.
A wood chip boiler/one burning grain may be worth considering. I know grain prices are currently very high, but my guess is that they will fall as set-aside land falls out of fashion. Depends where you are, really, and how big your house is. Coal-fired Aga may very well be cheapest.
Oil is reputedly considerably more expensive than gas. On connection, gas board told me £1,000 and that I have to dig my own trench. How good are you with a shovel?
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As for bleeding the boiler if you run out; it's a doddle for anybody with half an ounce of common sense. The guy from the oil company will probably do it for you if you ask.
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