Hope you're not cold!

My parents are on LPG but also have a log burner.  Just normal mains gas and electricity for us.  I'd be tempted to buy a log burner but I reckon they are going to face a clampdown fairly soon as they've become increasingly popular (and likely to become more so!)

It certainly fits the agenda.

Apparently all the electricity supplied to our house is from non-fossil fuels (so wind, water, nuclear or gerbils-in-wheels). Our gas does our heating and water but the thermostat is still deciding whether it needs to fire up the boiler or not at the moment.

The energy regulator have denied exploration of a new gas field in uk territorial waters and we sit on enough shale to supply us with gas for decades. It doesn’t have to be this way. Hopefully the Rolls Royce small nuclear reactors can be rolled out PDQ.

The Rolls Royce SMR isn’t any nuclear power plant. It’s more cost effective by design.

Magic, innit?

Fortunately I did a low 2 year dual fuel fix with EDF in Feb so I’m paying £138 a month for gas and electric for the next 18 months.

I’ll have knitted myself a whole new wardrobe by then.

I'll add that this amazes me. Our loft insulation (on the to do list but a shitty job) is poor and the boiler is old and I'm sure the radiators are half sludged up. As for the leccy, ever single light bulb is LED so I guess that helps.

It has been warm today, but it's cooling down now. Coal man dropped off the first couple of bags the other day. I've lit the fire to take the chill off.

There is some irony in this thread being on the same page as a thread where members of this forum have suggested we use water cannon, expanding foam or cable ties as we enact retribution against a protest group demanding the government provide UK homes with better insulation. I like to consider you lot as reasonably moderate in your views which would perhaps suggest that there are many other comments sections or private Facebook groups littered with people suggesting much more imaginative and painful ways of punishing those who blocked the M25.

But what this really points to is the simple fact that in this country we don't really know what we want. Well that's not true we do, we want to be able to be kept warm as cheaply as possible without any changes to how we've been doing that for the last 50 years. The problem is we can't have that. Gas isn't going to get cheaper and our housing stock is just too inefficient. Couple this to our electricity producing infrastructure being in desperate need of an overhaul and too reliant on foreign imports and we have a big problem on our hands.

The current government have been in power for 11 years and in that time they have cut incentives for homes to be more environmentally friendly. Grants for insulation have been stripped back, grants for solar panels taken away and the feed in tariff scrapped, grants for electric cars have been reduced. The same government also crows on about the UK being carbon net zero by 2050. But we could get there even sooner with more radical changes. My house was built 5 years ago and was fitted with solar panels. My leccy bill is £20/m because we take so little from the grid. If every new build since my home was built had also been fitted with solar we would be generating so much more electricity in this country that we'd be a lot less reliable on foreign imports. Installing panels adds about 5k to the cost of building a house but given that the average house price in the UK is rising by that much or more each month those buying the properties would barely notice so why not make it law? It won't solve all our problems but if your leccy bill is as low as mine you suddenly become a lot less concerned about how much gas is increasing in cost so it is a start at lease. But there is more that needs to be done. The principle of using storage heating is a sound one but we need it to be better at doing the job we need it to but it could be a good option. Use solar to power them during the day and release the heat slowly through the night. Not saying its the answer but it could be a consideration. Ultimately though we need to stop our homes leaking so much heat.

Perish the thought of Boris coming round and servicing my boiler, I'm sure I could do a better job than him... which reminds me, where is the water manometer I inherited from my late father?

I had a conversation with a friend about 15 years ago where we concluded that it was mad that new housebuilders were not forced to fit solar panels or solar tiles to all new houses. It was common sense but no Government did anything about it which says a lot for Politicians in general. 

I was very annoyed when I heard at the weekend that there would be no new gas boilers fitted after 2025 and spares and repairs for existing gas boilers would end by the early 2030's. This is a bit like Government policy on the culling of ICE vehicles - there is no leadership and no direction in how this is to be achieved and what the viable alternatives are. I often say to my Manager don't complain about something unless you can also give me what you believe is a solution. From what I can see there are no solutions being suggested.

The use of electric central heating is way too expensive - last winter we had a hot water immerser switched on without my knowledge for about 6 months despite the water being heated by the gas central heating. I got a bill for around £600 extra for an immerser that wasn't working hard at all. If I extrapolate that to an electric system having to provide all our heat and light, I would be paying between £5K and £6K a year!

So what are house owners to do? Our next door neighbours had a massive amount of work done to their house last year to insulate it, including a new roof with Kingspan about a foot thick, triple glazing, wall insulation, solar panels, a battery pack and an air source heat pump. That lot cost well into 6 figures and is way out of the reach of 99% of UK households. However even with all that money, they still needed to use their back up boiler last winter when the temperature was below freezing for a couple of days and they still have to pay for electricity although it is only £40 or £50 a month.

As you move further North in the country air source heat pumps become less and less viable and once the temperature is at or near freezing for more than a couple of days they effectively stop working. Ground source heat pumps still work if the coils are buried deep enough but they are considerably more expensive. Wood and coal burners are being legislated out of existence, so exactly how is the vast majority of the population going to heat itself especially in the northern half of the UK?

The Government needs to set proper standards (which would ban the crap solar installations) and then it needs to provide real direction for affordable and deliverable alternatives. The alternative will be a winter death rate in 20 years time which will make Covid appear like an irrelevance. Remember that pre WW2 the average life expectancy was in the 60's and a common cause of death was breathing difficulties brought on by the cold and damp. With a 10 to 15 year window to change every house in the UK, the Government had better get their finger out and quickly.

We considered buying a house that had a load of renewables - wind turbine, solar panels, ground source heat pump - but I was rather concerned about the reliability of these, given that I know the house and the wind turbine was at least 10 years old. The pipework for the heat pump didn't look all that new either.
In fact the routine service costs for the wind turbine were quite expensive.

You need to bring in specialist drilling equipment to drill the well after a geological survey. It cost £20k when we looked at it and the heat intensity was so low it still requires backup.