I'm a new user and very non-technical, I live in the North East of England, near the mouth of the the River Tyne. I'm about a mile inland from the coast, and a quarter mile from the river. It's a 1902 two / three bedroom mid-terrace on a corner. At the front, it's wide - double-fronted - and narrow at the back, effectively a cheese-wedge shape. The house faces east / west with the front facing west, so it gets very warm in the summer at the front. It's brick-built, with sealed unit sash double glazing at the front and sealed unit pivot windows at the back.

It's basically a three-up & three-down arrangement with a hall | stairs | landing separating the rooms through the middle of the house. Downstairs I have two large reception rooms at the front with the kitchen at the back. Upstairs, I have two large bedrooms at the front with a box room and boxier bathroom at the back. I'm planning to make a larger bathroom at the back by knocking these two rooms together.

When I bought the house some 18 years ago, it had two storage heaters in the hallway and some electric & gas fires in the other downstairs rooms. No heating at all upstairs; an immersion heated hot water storage tank in the smallest bedroom; and, an electric towel rail in the bathroom.

As the house had to be rewired, I got rid of the immersion heater and storage tank and had a Vokera Excell 80SP combi boiler fitted in the kitchen. The combi is connected to each of the main rooms which have a single radiator. In the last four years I have replaced all of the double glazing and exterior doors; had the roof re-slated; and, put in new insulation in the loft.

As some of you will have spotted, the boiler is getting rather old now, so I started digging into the options for it's replacement. Ideally the replacement heat source should be floor-mounted, as I have a 1.2m x 1.2M x .6m deep space in the chimney breast in the kitchen, and I'd quite like to use that space. I'm aware of the regulations on venting the boiler to the outside. While the chimney itself is sealed off in the kitchen, the chimney breast continues through the room above - although this is sealed up too.

My original plan was to just replace the boiler with another one, but had second thoughts prompted by an advert for SunflowLtd.co.uk for German refactory clay core electric radiators. I started doing some (google) research on the company and their radiators; which led to looking at electric heating & hot water systems; and, finally - so far - to this forum. I've read through quite a lot of the forum posts - I'm even starting to understand some of the less technical ones. Now I'm trying to make sense of the best options I might have.

I live on my own in the house; I'm out at work during the week; and, in the winter I spend Saturday's on sport. So, I don't use a lot of heating in the house. It tends to be on first thing in the morning for getting up and having a shower - ideally with a warm towel - and again in the early evening when I get home from work. If it's really cold I might have the heating on again before I go to bed. There are rare occasions when I work at home, but then if it's cold I just tend to leave the heating on low or put a jumper on when the temperature drops. The two storage heaters in the hall are an eyesore, and I would like to replace them with something - ideally to provide a background heat.

My initial thoughts are that I don't seem to fit a normal profile for heating a house. But, whatever I do needs to be flexible enough to not require a complete redesign if I ever sell the house or change my work life to spend more time at home.

So, thus far this is what I've got as options:

[a] All-electric heating & hot water. Electric radiators - the German ceramic ones - to replace the storage heaters; an electric towel rail in the bathroom; an electric boiler to connect to the existing radiators; and, move to an economy 10 tariff. This would let me remove the gas supply to the house and - if it ever became affordable - look at some form of solar generated electricity in the future.

[b] Mix-and-match. Replace the storage heaters in the hall with electric ceramic radiators. Replace the gas combi boiler with the smallest / most efficient gas combi boiler. Put in an intelligent heating control system to "manage" the electric and gas heating assets. My original thinking with this was that I could use electric heating for most of the time as background and just use the gas boiler for hot water and on the coldest days. Having looked through the forums, maybe it would be better the other way round and use the gas boiler for most of the time and the electric only for when it gets really cold.

[c] Something else. I don't have enough technical knowledge to know what the other alternatives might be. I was fascinated by the long discussion on zeolite and zeolite-like systems a couple of months ago and I've tried to follow the ashp discussions, but I don't know enough about how any of this might work in my house.

Thanks for reading this far, any thoughts or comments are more than welcome. I'm particularly interested too in finding a local company to do any work on the house.

Welome to the Forum, Gamberoni

I don't think you should replace a gas fired boiler system (even one with an inefficient boiler) with an E10 heating system - it will cost more to run.

I don't know what you pay for gas, but E10 is probably similar to oil in respect of unit energy costs. Quick calculation:

Gas at say 3.5 p/kWh @ say 75% efficiency = 4.7p/kWh
Vs E10 at say 6.5 p/kWh or higher?

Why pay to have a more expensive and higher carbon heating system? I would also be concerned that you could devalue the house if you remove the gas heating.

May I suggest the following strategy:

1. Change all of the storage heaters to wet radiators
2. Fit dual heat towel radiators in the bathrooms (wet rads with auxiliary electric element)
3. Install a 500-1000 litre thermal store, with immersion heaters
4. Connect the existing gas boiler to it
5. Run the gas boiler for all heating unless the E10 works out cheaper per unit

This will give flexibility for adding solar, ASHP (which can run off E10), log boilers, replacement gas boiler, or whatever.

GaryB - some good points there, and I would be thinking along similar lines. Couple of caveats however: Take a peek at nottenergy.com - Last time I looked, an inefficient boiler on gas was around 6p/KW/h where a condensing boiler was about 4-5p. ASHP was around 4p/KW/h. Run an ASHP on E10 as you suggest and if store is correctly sized, you are down to at least 3p/KW/h, cheaper by some way than oil.

And of course, it wouldn't do to put an old boiler on a big TS (unless you wanted to just heat the top bit, as the boiler would condense and rot. Unliek a new condensing boiler, which, applied to the TS, will give you a further 15% + savings a/c to Keston & Co - quoted by CWatters in an earlier thread.

Posted By: GaryBI have an ASHP on order

You going to put a cheap energy logger on it so that we can all have a look at how it works?

not much, less than 20 quid each
http://www.homechip.com/catalog/
Ask for Ellie she usually sorts me out.

Be cool if you could get something like the CurrentCost meter and see what is happening every few seconds.
I think skywright knows how to drag the data off them.

Gary, are you claiming Rhpp? one of the conditions is that BRE will want to install their preffered metering kit. Free of charge to you, but 1 year on im still waiting for them to show up.

Back on topic...

Yes I'm claiming RHPP - if they give me a meter that's great. Otherwise I will fit my own so I know what's happening.

Gamberoni: Five years ago there were odd adverts in the trade press for renewable technologies, now you can't turn a page without seeing them, so every man and his dog have different solutions. Trick is to steer a middle course and not get too tied into any one method, as you can guarantee that next year the Sterling Engine or Fuel Cell etc etc will come on stream and blow everything else into the weeds!

Keys IMHO for a 'future-proof' installation are 1 - Insulation 2 - Zoning 3 - Open architecture (ability to use any fuel/energy source, typically by using a thermal store of some denomination) and 4 - Leverage (eg Heat Pump on E10 - a typical 4:1 ratio, but run half-price electricity...produce and store it while it is cheap, use it sparingly when needed)

Predicting longevity and efficiency in best practice - now there's a big ask! Take a look at threads on here like the current thread asking which evacuated tube system is most efficient, but which takes no note of longevity or degradation. IMHO therefore, a fairly pointless thread. Why?

Take early solar thermal 'entrepreneurs' (I'm in a polite mood) SMART energy as a case in point. Before they went bust, the firm fitted around 17 000 solar thermal systems in the UK. Using a quality bit of Swiss kit with all bells and whistles including parabolic reflectors. Yet my understanding from a very reliable source within the renewables industry is that fully half of these installations have failed (in some cases in numerous ways, as I found out first hand a few weeks ago on one of their local installations - see my own recent thread - Replacement ETs'). They failed primarily because of the stupidly high temperatures they were allowed to stagnate at, temperatures manufacturers insisted - and some still insist - would be OK because the kit was high quality. (I have been banging this drum since 2005 - see 'Future Proof Heating' at CAT 2008 for details)

My point? Spot efficencies are very nice to quote, but mean nothing if the methodology of the installation leads to premature failure and/or high running costs. Which, if I read you right, is what you are seeking to know. Take solar as a case in point - If your running costs are very low AND you have a high efficiency AND you can harness ANY solar out there AND keep a cooler (non-stagnating) installation, the system will last longer and save you more money, meaning that when replacement time does come, you will be better placed to afford replacements - AND their carbon footprint will be tiny due to the extended longevity and immeasurably better performance.

Crusoe
Thanks again. I'm getting the message from this thread that a thermal store is a key thing to look at. If I go through your points:
[1] Insulation: from the perspective of my house, I'm reasonably happy - all of the house walls are solid; the loft has the current recommended depth of insulation; and I have v. recent high-end double glazed windows and doors.
[2] Zoning: I really haven't thought a lot about this. I do a bit of this in that I only heat the rooms that I really use. But the current heating system doesn't allow for a lot of flexibility - it's on or off. There's no central thermostat and the radiators don't have trv's.
[3] Open Architecture & [4] Leverage: absolutely

On the "spot efficiencies" you are exactly right, I'm certainly not looking for the "best" solution. I'm not naive - I hope - and I know that just replacing the gas boiler wouldn't be the worst decision I could make. I also know that getting something more than that will cost more money. I'm hoping that the extra cost will pay for itself over the coming years but I know there are no guarantees.

I think my problem is that I'm sure out there are solutions that would better than what you could get by just googling or using the yellow pages - if I could just find them. I'd done some digging around on my own before I came here and I was disappointed in the response - principally the lack of it - when I tried to contact potential suppliers. I just hope that there is a company in the North East who have a space for a small domestic project like mine. In the meantime, I'm afraid I'll probably continue to ask inane questions in this forum. :o)

Sorry to drag this up again, I've been catching up on the forum comments in other discussions and a couple of questions popped into my head. I was looking through the "is heat necessary upstairs" thread and ecocent and intergas were mentioned as suppliers. I'm assuming that the ecocent would be classified as a thermal store? The thread seemed to suggest that the ecocent would be used with ufh but looking at their website it appears that it's just for dhw? Have I missed something there - is the ecocent just being used for dhw and a separate heat source for the ufh?

Posted By: Chris P Bacon
The reservation I would have with the ecocent is that if you are using it with the air intake from inside the house you are just taking heat energy from inside the house and putting it into the water. That doesn't make sense to me unless you are using "waste" heat say from a wood stove that is overheating the house.

The sun provides most of the "waste" heat that my Ecocent transfers into the water.
Domestic appliances, lights, bodies, etc. are also useful sources.
In winter, when the sun is feeble, solid fuel/radiators do the job.

The energy in the water gets distributed around the house via UFH (in winter) and dish-washing, showering, etc.
Most of the UFH energy and some of the DHW energy gets sucked back into the heat pump and delivered, once again, into the water in the cylinder.
The aim is to keep as much energy as possible within the house, cycling it round and round the system.
The need to keep the house ventilated means that some energy is lost outside via the heat pump's exhaust.
And some energy is, of course, lost down the drains.

(deleted, wrong thread)