New user

[Kel]

Hi. I'm a new user to this site and have just purchased houses in the Cruese and the haute loire.Please forgive my ignorance but could anyone inform me what sort of water heating is the best. We are thinking along the lines of an electric emersion type along with electric showers. Is that the best?

Also, we are thinking of installinga wood burning stove in one property and would this heat the rest of the house through vents?

[napoleon]

Although I can't give full answers to your questions, here are a few comments based on my first four years owning a house in central France.

• Electric showers of any use need 8kW each. Your house may be set up with EDF for 3, 6, 9 or 12kW. I expect it is possible to get higher ratings in towns but we live in a remote spot and survive with only 6kW maximum. I haven't seen any electric showers in local stores.
• Wood burning stoves work really well and in your area logs are easily found (bought!). We have one which has two auxiliary ducts that can be fed into adjacent rooms to distribute the heat. They only work well with the help of an integral electric fan. The rest of the house would be too cold without the use of a traditional central heating boiler.
• Don't rush your choice. Collect all the information and analyse it thoroughly before committing yourself to any system. Check all fuel prices and running costs. Live "rough" for a while to allow you to assess the situation.
• The common method of hot water supply seems to be electrically heated (as with our UK immersion heater) tanks. These are available in a variety of capacities to suit your requirements and would be a relatively cheap starting point.

               I know most of this is obvious but I wish I had told myself all these things when we started up.

             Regards, Alistair

[La Guerriere]

Fully agree with Alistair. Electric showers are not generally used in France because of the relatively low kW limits contracted (abonnement) on normal domestic electricity supplies these are National and apply town and country. Many houses are only set up for 9kW, and 18kW is top whack and expensive.

The French immersion heater / hot tank is a fine beast, well insulated and is available in most big DIY establishments. He also weighs a lot and is an absolute sod to get up the stairs. We have the tee-shirt and commerative mug 

Jim

[Will]

Don't forget too that French systems supply hot water at high pressure, which suits a shower very well. If you have a big enough capacity version of one of those great electric water heating tanks (which I think I can safely refer to as a 'chauffe-eau' as we seem to have lost the pedantic user who objected to such terms at such interminable length) then shower temperature can be easily maintained - particularly if you use one of the thermostatic shower mixer taps which are available cheaply and widely in France. So there is no need at all for British-style electric shower units.

Having said that, our current house has a large oil-fired boiler for both heating and hot water, with no separate tank, which provides instant and unlimited hot water and is another wonderful beast. Well worth considering if you need to power a lot (and I mean a lot in our case) of radiators as well.

[Kel]

Thank you all so much for the advice. We are currently looking at the different options but I think you have made my mind up for me.

The chauffe-eau sounds great and just what we need. We are going over this weekend for 2 weeks to start some of the initial work like clearing 15 years of dust and spider webs. We also noticed on our last visit last week that we have small lodgers in the shape of woodworm (small holes and little piles of dust) Does anyone know if they can be treated with a fungicide or something and can we do it ourselves?

[La Guerriere]

A couple of extra pointers:

a) For some obscure Gallic reason, the "standard" French chauffe-eau (it's either 150 or 200 litres) seems to be cheaper than a smaller non-standard one. Look and see what is on promo at your local big DIY establishment.

b) Wood treatment I seem to remember is something called Xylophene. Clear and can be sprayed, roughly equivalent to Cuprinol, and don't breath the fumes.

Jim