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Following on from an earlier article on being an “Energy miser” and the more recent excellent one on Fracking, I thought it would be worth putting down a few thoughts on paper about my own experience with regard to energy consumption.
Energy saving
13 October Posted by Mike Lavelle
Firstly, I installed a wood-burning stove in the living room. Our living room is very large, being a converted barn which we were not allowed by the planners to divide into smaller rooms, and also, because of the planning restrictions, it is open to the roof (which is insulated between the rafters and the tiles). This means that there is a vast space to heat. Initially, I had an open fire and underfloor heating, which consists of a network of pipes carrying hot water, and which was very inefficient. It would take hours to heat up, and I got through a huge amount of heating oil to keep it going. The open fire was very picturesque, but the amount of heat that it gave to the room was very little, and one needed one of those Dickensian wooden settles with a high back to protect oneself from the draught on the back of one's neck. When we installed the wood-burning stove, I couldn't believe the difference. Not only was the whole room much warmer than ever before, but there was no draught.
The underfloor heating has not been used for the past 5 years, and looking through my oil bills I found that I am now getting through 3 fillings of the tank per year, instead of 5 per year when I was using the underfloor heating. It is difficult to believe, but 10 years ago heating oil was 17p a litre, and now it is more like 70p a litre. I would definitely recommend anyone with a large fireplace to consider installing a wood-burning stove. They produce an amazing amount of heat, and are very easy to maintain. We now only have functioning radiators in the bedrooms and bathrooms.
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The one we have is made by a company in Shropshire called Clearview, and when it is fully warmed up, it can be turned right down so that the air intake is a tiny slit measuring about 4 square centimetres. This means that you can leave it burning overnight, and the next day if you open up one of the vents, it is like throwing a switch; within seconds there is a roaring inferno inside. Even if you let it go out the evening before, the whole fireplace area is still warm the next morning, so it acts a bit like a storage heater. Also, it is incredibly easy to light. We have a small bit of woodland, so I can supply my own wood to a certain extent (warming myself up three times by cutting the wood, carrying it and burning it), but if it is a cold winter like the last three, I have to buy in extra.
We live in a barn conversion to the south of the village. The conversion was done 11 years ago, and at the time, the specification for the amount of insulation in the walls was much lower than it is now. I thought then that it was "state of the art", but having recently had a small extension to the main bedroom built on to the house, I realized that I would be saving a lot of energy if the whole house were insulated to the latest standards. When the extension was done, the whole bedroom was insulated to present day standards, which reduced the dimensions of the room by about 4" in each direction, resulting in only a barely discernible reduction in my cat-swinging activities.
If I were to bring the rest of the house up to the same standard of insulation, I would have to take all the oak cladding off and add an extra layer, or fill in the gaps between the beams with insulation on the inside, both of which would be very expensive. However, we are probably not doing too badly, as the standard of insulation is probably still higher than that in a lot of old houses, and so we will continue as before. In other ways, though, I have managed to reduce my energy consumption to a certain extent over the past 5 years, and have plans to reduce my energy bills further in the next few years.
Secondly, I was recently lent a "energy monitor", which connects wirelessly to a sensor on the electricity main, and gives a continuous read-out of the amount of energy being used at any one time. I have already calculated that I can save about £200 a year using this device. In the summer, when the central heating is off, we use immersion heaters for the hot water. I say "heaters", because the house is very long, and there is a hot water tank at each end of the house. I used to leave the heaters on, relying on the thermostats but with the use of the energy monitor I worked out that it was cheaper to turn the heaters on and off as required.(Some people might say that I didn't need an energy monitor to know that). I have now had time switches installed at a cost of about £70 (amazingly, I had two time switches that had never been used knocking around the house).
The presence of the energy monitor in the kitchen really alerts one to the use of electricity. Only this morning, I noticed that switching the toaster on caused the power to go from 0.3kW, the "resting" level, to 1.2kW, a four-fold increase. It made me think that one should be able to switch on just one slot on a toaster if one only wants to toast one slice of bread. Maybe someone should invent a toaster that only toasts one side of the slice……
The third way in which I am hoping to reduce my energy bills is probably some way off in the future, but it is an exciting scheme that seems to be catching on in several places, especially in Germany (which is always ahead of the game when it comes to innovation in this area). It is called district heating, and it consists of using a large boiler that is heated with wood chips. The hot water is then pumped through special insulated pipes that are buried in the ground, and several buildings in a local area can be supplied with hot water. The hot water arrives at each building, and because of the insulation around the pipe, there is very little loss of heat over a considerable distance. The heat is transferred to the central heating system in each house using a special heat exchanger on the outside of the house. I live next to KPS in Ham Lane, and Paul Smyth, the owner of KPS, is thinking of installing such a system. He already makes tons of wood chippings as part of his composting business, and so it makes sense to use this material for heating. If the scheme goes ahead, the one boiler would supply heat to five separate houses.
Obviously, energy consumption is going to be a hot topic over the next few years, and I hope that the above musings will give some people the incentive to look at their own consumption and try and find ways to reduce it.
