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Need advice on choice of heating


Jmartinrg14
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We're about to start the renovation of our old stone house in theVendee. At pesent it is our holiday home but we'd like to spend more time there in the future. At present we've two wood burning stoves, mobile gas heaters and an ancient oil filled radiator. We were thinking about storage haters but I've just been reading your opinions and have consequently gone off that idea. Electricity would seem, from what you've all said, to be the fuel of choice so what are the options??? 
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Oil fired central heating isn't looking quite the dead end liability it was but a few short weeks ago although prices are sticking stubbornly high [:'(]

Underfloor is attractive but it should be remembered that it has an inherent latency which traditional wet systems, however driven, don't suffer from

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Do you have the room to install geothermal? you can then run underfloor heating in the whole house.

The problem with radiators in an old house is that you get 'cold spots'. With geothermal you could set the heat exchanger on an electric timer so that the house remained at a constant temperature, very important if it is only a holiday home as it can get very damp here in Pays de la Loire in the winter.

 

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Geothermal - actaully a misnomer in all but a handful of installations - means laying pipes through your garden ( at least deep enough to be out of reach of even the harshest frost) and pumping water round.  This extracts the solar heat from the ground and warms the water - yes even in winter the ground retains heat that it has received from the sun over the course of the summer.  The water then has this heat extracted by a heat pump and is intensified and a second liquid circuit warms your house from the heat extracted by the heat pump.  Think of it like a refigerator working in reverse.  The science is exactly the same.

In summer the system can be reversed to provide cooling in the house and to warm the ground.

 

True geothermal requires very little space but instead sinks a bore hole deep down into the ground - depending on where you live this can be many hundreds of metres deep.  Water is then pumped down the borehole, warms up is brought back to the surface and the heat extracted. 

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As I see it the problem with direct sunlight systems (photovoltaic or evacuated tube) are that when the sun does not shine the collection efficiency drops and of course when do you need the energy most?  Answer: when the sun is not shining (last 2 summers excepted).

 

The advantage of the so called geothermal systems is that you are using Mother Earth as an energy storage vessel being heated by the sun whether the sun actually shines or not.  As a potholer I can tell you that once you get more than a few feet into a cave, the temperature remains the same day in day out, summer and winter (unless there is a through draught).  It is this constant energy store that the geothermal systems tap into.

 

(PS I have no axe to grind here.  I don't have a geothermal system and don't sell or install them, but the physics just look right for a future where fossil fuel resources will become more scarce.)

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Well thats another idea scunnered!..cheers Nick.  I was impressed at how far these things have come and how much smaller the battery packs are. A colleague is currently running everything in his UK house photovoltaic / battery with the exception of hot water and heating he has a 4kw supply from two 45kg battery packs apparently. That was what got me thinking on heating the underfloor during daylight hours and allowing it to act as a storage heater. Electrical matters are not my thing...gimme pipes any day.
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I f you look towards the 'ground source heating' to give geo thermal horizontal it's proper name and you intend to use it in reverse in the summer to cool your house then you will not be able to let the floor go much more than a few degrees below the ambient temprature without causing it to reach the jew point and forming condensation on it. It is supposed to be very good, but you have to be careful.

If you can go for horizontal gorund source heating and can do the ground work yourself then it is a very good way to go, especially if you have under floor wet heating. But you have to remember that you will have something like a 3.5 Kw pump running to get your heat. This should give you about 12 Kw of heat, but you will be reliant on a  reliable electrical supply. Any longish power cuts?????? We looked into it and do not have the horizontal space without nuking our garden and the verticle option at 16,000€ for 2 100 meter holes with the pipe work fitted were out of the question.

We opted for a replacement, for our 20+ year old LPG boiler, condensing boiler which is great. But we live here full time...

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Doesn't ground source heating need to be in an extrememly well insulated house to be effective? Chances are an old property won't be and if there are orginal floor treatments it would be a shame to rip or cover them up to put in underfloor heating (which is lovely to have) or expensive to re lay. Old stone houses need to be able to breath if you don't want to suffer with damp patches, I'm not sure how effective some of these new sources of energy work in old property but I do think they are great for new build.
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