• Hi all and welcome to TheWoodHaven2 brought into the 21st Century, kicking and screaming! We all have Alasdair to thank for the vast bulk of the heavy lifting to get us here, no more so than me because he's taken away a huge burden of responsibility from my shoulders and brought us to this new shiny home, with all your previous content (hopefully) still intact! Please peruse and feed back. There is still plenty to do, like changing the colour scheme, adding the banner graphic, tweaking the odd setting here and there so I have added a new thread in the 'Technical Issues, Bugs and Feature Requests' forum for you to add any issues you find, any missing settings or just anything you'd like to see added/removed from the feature set that Xenforo offers. We will get to everything over the coming weeks so please be patient, but add anything at all to the thread I mention above and we promise to get to them over the next few days/weeks/months. In the meantime, please enjoy!

Suggestions for alternatives to oil heating

A friend of mine has managed to get his hands on the old oil from electricity transformers where lives every time the electricity company does an oil change. He cuts it with a few other things and runs all of his heating for free!

He also gets fuel for his cars from a local scrapyard which otherwise have to pay to dispose of it. His cars aren't anything special, so he doesn't care too much about what he's putting in them.

It's not particularly green, but it is recycling and does save hime a fair bit of cash!
 
I did some research into this 3 years ago when we were renovating our house here in Hungary. The house had a wood burner which needed replacing and I weighed up all the options before making a decision.
I don't have a gas supply in my street so that option was out from the start.
The options available were - wood burner, wood/pellet burner, pellet burner, oil, electricity or solar panels.
I did some research into the costs of initial outlay plus ongoing fuel costs and calculated that the other options would take about 5 years to equal the cost of the solar panels and that made the decision pretty simple. Electricity and oil are very expensive and the supply is controlled by foreign companies and pellet burners and fuel are unaffordable to most Hungarians which jeopardises the continuig supply of fuel.
I had solar panels installed and they provide all of my energy needs plus excess. I didn't know how many would be enough and the salesman wouldn't give me any clues so I maxed out the roof space with 38 panels and 3 years later I have a lot of credit (no feed in tarriff here). I have recently worked out that 25 panels would have been sufficient. If I'd known that then the savings would have been even greater.
The other factors in the decision were to do with the fuel. I live in a remote place on the side of a hill and the burner would have been in the basement meaning I would have to move the wood/pellets myself from the road, down a steep slope, around the house and into the basement which didn't seem like a good long term solution.
 
@ rezi

Thanks for the information - another interesting viewpoint. I had not considered solar panels as I was fixed on the idea of replacing the boiler. I will do some calculations on my energy needs and possible production using our roof. It is not ideal, the roof faces almost exactly east/west and because of the restrictions on appearance of buildings around a national monument I cant use the street facing east side so it would have to be the west side.
 
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