House heating habits

As fuel costs continue to rise, Kya deLongchamps reports on how we can save on heating bills by developing new routines.

‘If you can walk around the whole of your home in nothing but your undies, question if the heating is indulgently high.’

AS THE cost of oil and gas (both LPG and natural gas) continue to spiral upwards, the financial demands of heating our homes has become a source of genuine anxiety for most of us and real hardship for others. Improvements in regulations when building or extending have helped homes to reach new heights in insulation and heating efficiencies. Still, with carbon taxes attached to oil and gas, for the vast majority, the bills are climbing stealthily year by year.

There’s nothing we can do about market prices for fuel, apart from shopping around within the limits of the fuel our system runs on. We can’t all afford biomass boilers. One fuel type may suit you better for your lifestyle habits. No matter what your situation or fuel source, you can take greater control and save more money by developing consistent, new habits around space and central heating.

The Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) releases a domestic fuel comparison chart regularly, to allow consumers to assess the true cost of running their household heating based on what they are consuming. Taken from the latest EU Energy Price Directive Survey, and set out in cent per kilowatt hours (c/cWh), it’s easy to follow, as every fuel is judged in one simple unit (how much it costs for one unit of heat), and it includes recent government duty levels, and notes on things like standing charges for the hire of tank for storing LPG. It really is a useful guide at a glance. Keep in mind the oil prices are taken from bulk (1000l) deliveries bought from the latest deals online, something you should always consider before ordering home heating oil. If you’re burning wood, the supplier network makes it a bit tricky, but for the rest, the prices have real meaning.

When you’ve recovered from the horrifying difference between heating with the luxuries of electricity, oil and LPG compared to the unit cost of natural gas and wood pellets, note the real ‘annual costs of heating a building’ depend on a list of conditions set out by the SEAI. Most of these we can change with very little investment and without taking a serious blow to our comfort levels. These include the temperature and time you run your system, the weather and insulation.

* Temperature levels maintained. If you can walk around the whole of your home in nothing but your undies, question if the heating is indulgently high. If you’re running the heating at 21ºC, try turning it down by just one degree to 20ºC. Chances are you won’t notice the change until your heating bills falls around 10%.

Tip: For optimum results your system should be serviced annually.

* Duration of heating. Rather than leaving the heating running after you’ve slipped under the sheets, try setting it to go off 20 minutes before you go to bed. In a well insulated house, its fabric will hold the heat sufficiently and radiate it back for you not to notice any change. That’s over 2 hours you’re not heating the house each week.

Tip: Space and water heating should be independently controlled, so you can heat water without warming radiators.

* Weather conditions. If the sunshine is beating in the windows, warming the house nicely, trim the heating down. Thermostatically controlled systems (some even include outdoor sensors) will do this for you, but they are not infallible.

Tip: Boiler timing controls, zoning the house into defined heating areas, and the entry level action of installing thermostatic radiator controls will help tailor and tame your fuel consumption.

* Insulation and draught proofing. Your home heating is only as good as the insulation keeping heat inside the house where it’s needed. An uninsulated attic for example will conduct about 30% of the heat in your house straight out through the tiling. A grant of €200 is available through the SEAI Better Homes Scheme when you spend €400 or more on cosying up the attic.

Tip: If you not in a position to spend this sort of money, taking steps from putting draught excluding tape on doors and windows to closing curtains will chip away at those escalating kilowatts.

* The SEAI Fuel Comparison Charts can be found at http://www.seai.ie/Publications/Statistics_Publications/Fuel_Cost_Comparison/

Choosing a stove over open fire

AN OPEN fire is a luxury no one can afford, sending up to 70% of the heat produced by the burning of coal, wood or peat straight up the chimney, compared to 40% of the heat from a typical freestanding or inset stove. Because the air flow is tightly controlled, a stove used with the doors shut, has far higher efficiencies, producing more energy from the fuel burned and burning it completely down to a fine ash. There’s a slow leach of passive ventilation present, whether an open fire is alight or not, as the draught needed to make an open fire work also pulls air around the room up and out — something that can be vastly improved by shutting it behind a fire-door.

The warmth that is retained in the room with an open fire carries a considerable amount of smoke and airborne dust into the living space, something far less troubling with a properly functioning stove or fire-door installed.

A cool flow of air engineered to cross the glass of the stove will effectively “wash” away sticky resinous emissions during use, that can otherwise tempt us to pop open the doors and cripple energy efficiencies in wood burner or multi-fuel stove. Three hours after a cast iron stove has apparently “gone out” it will be radiating heat into the room from the body of the stove itself and some stoves (Esse for example), have clever convection technology to further warm the room.

Some biomass (wood pellet) stoves don’t even need a proper chimney but can be vented through a relatively short flue straight out the rear wall. On the point of safety, an enclosed combustion chamber eliminates the potential for burning material and ash to spill out into the room. Link your stove to a back boiler and you even have the potential to run several radiators to heat other areas of the house.