And thats the problem, very few houses in the UK are properly insulated and cant be properly insulated due to the construction, as for properly designed systems I doubt there are many installers that meet that criteria...
"We're all doomed, dooomed"
We went for 4 or 5 days with no electricity last winter. Luckily with the oil fired aga and woodburner we were fine.
however your oil fired aga wouldnt work as its electric fed so would be useless
Probably the same idiot telling me I was daft not to rip my oil, water tank and PV out to fit his gshp...
And the 6 million tons of wood we import from the American every year, that should come under incineration too. They call it 'green' because it is 'renewable' but it is still burned.....
He said the Aga worked fine with the power cut though.... I imagine the oil is gravity fed - its hardly a complex setup. I dont know about Aga but many of the Rayburns were a wick based system -
My oil fired AGA works fine!
Yes it has a wick
We we 5 days with no ziggies last winter, and as the log burner heats the heating it has pumps….so-also need electric, bad planning that, Id not repeat it. But with the generator and air fryer we survived just fine.
One of our neighbours big old manse, grade 2 listed, last guy Mike, retired diplomat, eco warrior had a pellet boiler, cost a fortune, pretty stupid really as the wagon couldn't get close enough to blow the pellets into his hopper. New guy, just spent the last 7 months doing it up. Pellet boilers gone, has an ASHP from grant installed that has an oil boiler attached for when it cant cope. And log burners in several rooms. No additional insulation…..madness, all to do with the conservation folk, wasnt even allowed to replace rotten wood windows, with new wood windows with double glazed units. They had to be repaired.
This is whats stopping me putting the lounge log burner into the thermal store. In a power cut, the Rayburn will fill up the store. Its kinda fine as we can set it to cooker and not run it too hot and have a bath if the store gets very hot! But adding the log burner could be troublesome in the event of a power cut as we will need to use it to heat the room but wont want it heating the thermal store and it will be less controllable (in water terms) than the Rayburn.
we have a thermal store, heated by back boiler in the log burner, oil boiler, and solar pv. Boiler is closed system, back boiler open system with pumps through heat exchanger. If it fails it wont be replaced. Wouldn't do it if I had my time again, though it was a good idea at the time.
My CH boiler burst on the coldest day of last December, but I have a gas fire in the front room, and several blankets, so it was no great hardship for a few days until it was rebuilt.
Ours is setup so the oil boiler and the Rayburn are open. Boiler wont work in a powercut so that wont be a problem. The Rayburn is gravity feed so no pump needed therefore we still have hot water in a powercut but no central heating*). The pumps are for the boiler and central heating, with a third pump to send heat from the top of the store to the bottom if the top gets to 85C (this dissipates the heat and makes the central heating pump come on sooner. Its a clever setup. The central heating pump is designed to circulate when its thermostat kicks in (set at 55C in the winter) - as the Rayburn is on all the time, it makes sense to just constantly keep the house warm. Can ramp up or down circulation by loading the Rayburn or letting the fire die down a bit and slowing the burn. The oil boiler is for top ups if needed but we didnt turn it on at all last winter! My only criticism is that the store is probably a little small for the big bath with only the Rayburn heating it so we either need a 20 minute blast with the boiler to top the heat up or to add a second pre-heat tank to it. We didnt go larger as we didnt want to overdo the weight.
Do you know who actually runs councils? Unelected civil servants who don't answer to anyone.
