Energy saving measures around the house

I will keep the oil fired boiler going as long as possible. It’s efficient despite its age and I have compared my fuel bills with others who have similar buildings.
However if parts become unavailable I will have to go heat pump or gas due to new laws.
Looking on here and then following up with further research (euroga posts have been giving.me a good idea of what questions to ask)
it seems that maybe an air to air heat pump might not provide all the heat needed and supplemental heat on colder days. It might save on fuel costs but installation quote is between €30,000 + €40000 and it wont produce massive savings especially when the supplemental heat is added. This is just one quote and as with insuation there are a lot of rip off merchants around. I have not yet discovered whether ground source heat pumps might be a possibity and likely cost.
A gas boiler being a straight replacement has appeal as does the fact that there is town gas nearby but the building is not connected now.
I understand that the gas condenser boiler is the most efficient of these.
The downside is that we don’t know how high gas prices will go and whether or not they will stay there.
A possible upside is that the EU is intending to pour a lot of money into hydrogen research as a way of cutting dependence on gas by replacing it whilst not having to make major changes to existing boilers.
For the moment I hope I can keep my old boiler going for another few years.🤞

Jacko wrote:

If, on the other hand, you subscribe to the view that however much of a mess successive governments have made there’s nothing that a new government can’t make worse, then there may be merit in generating, storing and using energy independently of the grid, almost regardless of capital cost.

I think this is the mail problem right now. Basically, our politicians have either reckognized or wish it to be the case that we don’t have enough power to last the winter, so they are coming up with black outs or brown outs (the lattter term being quite appropriate for what that lot is currently doing).

So the only way to make sure you are independent to a degree of this either incapable but more often treacherous lot is to get your own power plant in the house, totally off grid or at least with the possibility to go off grid temporarily.

AIUI the French law just approves gas it does not say it has to be condenser
The house is a 3 storey bourgeoise split into 4 apartments 1 × 1 bedroom 2x 2 bedroom .and 1×3 bedroom with a large hall and staircase running up the.centre of the building.

gallois wrote:

@Inkognito when I referred to over insulating I was talking of the many people living in old stone houses who block every
entry and exit point for air, including air bricks, and the air intakes for wood burning stoves and fires, so that the air has to be pulled from all over the house causing draughts and a lack of air.

This is one of the cases where you certainly need someone who knows his way around such old buildings, because they might have quite a few issues that need to be taken into consideration, not the least the listing. Making things wind tight is basically a good idea (caveats apply) and wood burning stoves nowaday also come with an external air source by pipe, they even qualify for running a cooker hood at the same time.
Air bricks by design are wasteful, thats thermal building physics from a hundred years ago. But just clogging them without compensating for what they actually did is sure to do damage.
The simple claim one shouldn’t or can’t upgrade these buildings is false. But no simple house owner wants to pay through the nose for a specialized bureau and here, worse than anywhere else, single measures won’t bring the expected results.

Concerning the gas condensing boiler – be aware that if you use them with a high flow temperature, you can get corrosion issues. In Germany we just put this into the drain, maybe reduce the acidity before.

Concerning the issue that you don’t live on site, there are wood pellet burning heaters that work fully automatic, maybe that might work for you. And yes, throwing out that ancient beast is very likely a very good idea.

As an interesting aside, the evolution of LED lights (at least GU10 fittings) over the last 10 years has shown a lot of progress. The first 50W halogen replacements I put in were 7W (and they didn’t last too long – I think they cooked their own power supplies, despite the chunky heatsinking built into the lamp). The replacements were 6W for the same lumens. Then 5.5W. I had to replace a couple of dead ones just now, and the replacements are 4.2W for the same lumens.

All the lights in my kitchen combined now use less power than just one lamp did when it was 50W halogens.

Graham wrote:

If they only cost 2-3k then I would buy one, but might struggle to fit it bearing in mind my walls are solid stone ~60-70cm thick. Amazing that it can heat the whole house – if so then it sounds like a no-brainer. How much electricity does it consume to do this?

Had a look. It typically cost from €1.5-2k + installation costs. I don’t see any problems with the walls as such (except insulation). The outside and inside units are connected with thin tubing. The SCOP of these units are 4-5. In the temperate UK, I would think 5 or higher. For every kW you put in, you get 5 kW of heat (on average). With the electricity prices we suddenly got here, such a unit would pay itself back in a matter of months. It used to be a few years.

I maintained a 40Kw oil boiler by changing pumps, nozzles, flame failure devices etc. until at 50 yrs the cast iron heat exchanger rusted through and began dripping. I couldn’t fix that (even with Tig welding) but it lasted long enough to build a plinth and plumbing for a modern condensing oil boiler which cost around £3k and took only a day to swap over. The new boiler is close to the house (the old one had its own building at the bottom of the garden!) but is noisy and emits clouds of steam. We plumbed the condensate into an existing soakaway (allowed) but this choked with leaf debris and flooded the boiler internally requiring new circuit boards within a few months!!!

Despite all that, oil consumption is way down, but nowhere near as much as prices have gone up, even before Putin! We should have made the change way earlier because when the old boiler finally gave up, it could have been catastrophic.with flooding etc..

In UK, you can ‘repair’ a steam boiler by replacing everything but some piece of platework, even the nameplate. Could you not buy a new oil boiler on eBay, paint it the same colour as the old one, and ‘fix’ it that way?

Thanks for the comments @Aveling. We have been fixing the old boiler as problems have occurred but as you say, nothing lasts forever and it will need changing, perhaps soon. Who knows?
At present it is doing its job well and at a price (not accounting for recent increases) that it is estimated by heating specialists that I would pay in fuel with a modern system. ie there are little or no running cost savings.
I will of course have to pay for a new boiler and its installation.
The current boiler is in the cave/basement. The noise is not a problem.
French law says I cannot replace with an oil fired boiler even a condenser one.