Type of Heat?

[hoover1100]

Heating

As with the vast majority of British homes we have gas central heating and hot water, provided by hot water radiators.

The boiler I believe is about 27 years old, and we have no plans to replace it anytime soon, given that our gas bills aren't very high and it has to this date, never required repair (don't jinx it!). It is a floor standing slimline Myson Marathon in the kitchen, which is quite large, as most people have wall mounted boilers.

Hot water is stored in a large copper tank in a cupboard in the master bedroom which is original to the house (1973).

Originally the house was heated by a coal fired boiler, and in our terrace we are the only house which is converted to gas, the others still have their coal boilers and swear by them!

Matt

 

[MrX]

Pressure jet oil was (and still is in many non urban areas) the most common form of central heating here.

Natural gas only became available here in the late 1970s in Cork and into the 1980s n Dublin after the discovery of gas off the South coast.

In most urban areas gas pushed oil fired systems out bit by bit but it remains very common in smaller towns, older housing stock and rural areas.

The fuel is essentially kerosene type oil. Fuel oils aren't allowed for air quality reasons. The boilers basically produce no smoke or odours and come in condensing versions.

There were some forced air systems installed in the 1960s but they have a bad reputation. I think they mostly ran on the old "town gas" as a fuel but the issues were always about the odors being blown around the house and about noise traveling through the ducts as well as the air being too dry. Remember most houses here have solid internal walls so a good degree of soundproofing is the north. I found US wooden construction really noisy.

In almost every case they were ripped out and replaced by water filled radiators and the ducts were removed.

 

[davey7]

I'm going to bump this old thread because I guess I missed it.

I have a system called "The Trane Concealed Heater" which is essentially a fancy term for a convector built into the wall with an intake and register or grill higher up the wall. Ours runs on steam (2-pipe), but they could have been hot water as well. There is a damper which modulates the heat to allow for exposure a bit. I've mostly lived with steam here in Chicago (1-pipe, blah!) and for a while lived in a two-flat with hot water, which was wonderful.

 

[cornutt]

Heat pumps here. Three separate systems, one for each floor. We don't get a lot of weather much below 20F so the secondary electric heat doesn't kick in very often, except for defrost cycles. I have an HAI automation system which controls all three systems. I've spent a lot of time tweaking the code I wrote for it. It determines setbacks and temperatures based on time of day, day of the week, outside temperature, what time we're going to be home, and some other things.

The units are contractor-grade Fridigaire units (I was pretty pissed at the builder for that; we had paid for higher-end units). One of them has a leak now, and as R22 is now running $50/lb, the next time it needs recharging it's getting replaced with a R410A system. I'm looking at the Carrier Infiniti series.

 

[passatdoc]

December bill

This is my first winter with new double pane R2 windows throughout the house. Late November and December here was colder than normal, with overnight lows in the 30s (0-5 C). January and February are often that cold, but these temperatures were colder than normal for December.

Gas bill received yesterday was for $19.20, of which about $5 is distribution fee (fixed/flat, you pay this fee even if you used no gas) and the rest is gas usage. The bill for the same month last year was $40, so it appears that some major savings are on the way. I have forced air/natural gas furnace. The significant aspect of the bill was that it covered a month of colder than normal weather and yet the bill was lower than last year (which was not as cold).

 

[DADoES]

 
Heat.

 

[akronman]

North East Ohio

Most folks in NEO have gas forced air. So do I. It's almost all I've ever lived with, so you just get used to it, no problems. My house was built in 1916 with coal gravity flow heat, so almost all the registers are in the middle of the house for easy gravity flow, not around the exterior and under windows like a modern system of registers. I added in 2 extrra registers, one in the living room and one in the kitchen, to compensate for the old system, it's much more even now. When I rebuilt the upstairs bathroom, I added in a wall mounted electric heater, typical bathroom extra, but I only turn it on if I decide to soak in the tub, pretty rare.

And it's a 2 storey 2000 sq ft home, no cold air returns upstairs, so the staircase functions as the cold air return. Yes, it's drafty there, but the rest of the house is fine. And it was easy to add central air to the system, thankfully. And when I finally added in a hunmidifier, all is quite well with a Luxaire 1982 furnace.

With my nutty washer/dryer collection, my basement has become my hobby/toy room. I keep the registers closed there, but the tubes leak enough, and the chimney flue puts out some heat too, so it's only about 5 degrees colder than upstairs. And I let the electric dryers vent into the basement in the winter, after one load of clothes it's very comfortable.

I have friends with hot water systems, they are marvelous and even heat and no blowing dust around, etc. VEry pricey to install or replace, though cheap to operate and maintain. If I could pick and choose and build a new home, it would have hot water baseboards and hot water radiant floors in the bathrooms. Then you add in a seperate AC system.

I have a programmable thermostat that makes an actual click when it cycles on and off, I like that.

 

[sudsmaster]

Audible click...

My programmable thermostat is silent, maybe a very faint click, which can only be heard if you're close to it, but the gas jets in the gas forced air furnace emit a faint high pitched whine, which can be heard through the registers throughout the house. I can hear it before the fan starts up, so I know basically when the furnace is fixing to send out some heat.

I'm surprised your bill is 1/2 of it was before, just because of new windows. But if the old windows were leaky, that could help explain it. Also, look at the therms used, not the price, since gas prices do fluctuate and have been dropping over the past couple of years. Whether the local utility is passing along those savings is another question.

Back around 2001 I did a study on my gas usage. I normalized the data based on average temperatures each month, and plotted that against therms used. With this I was able to graph the difference in gas consumption before/after sealing off air leaks and adding insulation to the attic. As I recall, the difference was dramatic. After the caulking and insulating, the house was using 1/3 of the gas it used before. It was also much more comfortable (less drafty) and one of the first things I noticed that winter was that the furnace didn't cycle on for as long as it used to. Before the insulation, it would be on most of a cold winter evening. After the insulation, it was off more than it was on.

My recent attempts to seal off remaining air leaks around the single pane horizontal aluminum slider sashes probably have helped a bit. Hard to say how much, without doing a similar effort plotting therms normalized for average monthly temps, but at least the windows don't rattle in the wind any more.

 

[volsboy1]

We have a  Trane/American Standard 20 4 ton twin compressor  heat pump..It works great it runs always in low 24 hours

a day in the Winter and Summer but is weak on heat output.I found a Mitsubishi Hyper-heat 2 ton in the box at this overstock

place it was new and paid 700 bucks for it.We had it installed and it is by far the best Heat-pump I have ever seen.When it gets

about 24F the Trane goes into high and stays there and the air is cold.My Temp prob when it was 17 here said the air was 92 coming out of the vent on the Trane.The Hyper-Heat has no problem even when it really cold the air is Hot 112 F at 17F outside and we now use them and use the main fan on heat-pump to move the heat around the house.I don't even have the Aux heat hooked up at all.Trane heat pumps

are good but they need cleaning a lot that goes double when you have a two stage the runs all the time.The Spine fins catch everything with that huge prop fan it has.I was having to clean it every three months when it was running.The Hyper-Heat

Heat pumps will heat down to -13F and I don't ever remember it getting that cold here.The one thing I do know is my power

bill has dropped by 80 bucks.These are rare down here and the guy selling it did not know what he had cause he also had a TOTO toilet that I also bought new for 40 bucks those things are 800 bucks.

 

 

[toploader55]

Wood/ Oil

We have a Wood Furnace Piped in to the Oil Hot Water System.

Nice to have the Options. I posted this pic about 6 years ago.

 

[sudsmaster]

Wood Furnace Piped in to the Oil Hot Water System

Would that be a pellet wood type of furnace?

Out here in California the closest I come to that are a couple of fireplaces with inserts. But do to air pollution laws I've been unable to fire either them up this winter. We're in the middle of a prolonged dry spell which has kept winds down and led to issues with particulates from wood fire smoke. And it shows no sign of abating - it's the driest December in recorded history. Presumably we need to be prepared for quite a deluge in January or February, or else brace ourselves for strict water rationing this coming summer.

 

[toploader55]

No Pellets

This Boiler is about 28 years old, and I never heard of the Wood Pellets until around 15 years ago. (Maybe more)

Just good old firewood.

 

[jerrod6]

Oops. I never stated what type of heat I prefer. If I could but will never have it,
I would prefer radiant heat from the floor and AC vents distributed around the room but in the ceiling.

My first condo had cooling vents like this and it made for the most comfortable air conditioning. My house now uses the heating vents in the floor for cool air delivery and surprisingly it feels ok. I think this is because there are air returns near the ceiling in each room(except kitchen and bathrooms) and some rooms have two returns, and there are returns in each hallway on every floor so this keeps the upper floors almost the same temp as the lower ones. The grill on the vents directs the air flow straight up toward the ceiling, no spread, so you can sit right next to it and don't feel air blowing on you. My blower also delivers a lot of air, much more than my older heater but you don't hear it and that is a plus

Still rather have it as described above. As for source would never consider electric to heat water as the rate it too high, oil is dirty with the boiler but I would take it if that was all that was available. As far as I know coal is not available.

 

[sudsmaster]

Come to think of it, I didn't say what type of heating system I'd prefer, either.

If money were no object, and the home could be adapted, I'd probably say in-floor hot water heating. Second to that, hot water radiators or baseboard units.

As said, have gas forced air, which most homes in this area have. It's not too drying because we tend to have wet winters. Except for the past month, which has been unseasonably dry and cold. Usually excess winter indoor humidity is more of a concern in these parts.

As for the wood furnace in Mass, that's something one might not find out here, unless it was an older unit and even then it wouldn't be allowed to work unless it was the only installed source of heat for the dwelling. But it does look like it would be a lot of work to keep the wood furnace stoked.

 

[abcomatic]

Forced air- gas fired. I have a humidifier in the furnace and that sure helps with the humidity. Not really drafty; however, the furnace is using some of the original heating ducts from 1897 that heat the upstairs. The bathroom, which was the maid's room had no heat in it until a bathroom was put in that room; just a whisper of warm air in there.
My neighbor just put in a wood burning stove. I hate it! I get the smoke over here so much that I can smell it in the house. I wonder if I should say something?

 

[DADoES]

 
I hate the odor of a fireplace or wood stove.

 

[jetcone]

Steam

Steam and more Steam

 

 

[supersuds]

I sympathize with the wood smoke problem, which I used to have in a condo where all the units had fireplaces. For some reason, my neighbors smoke would be choking at times.

Then there was another neighbor who occasionally burned coal -- yecch! Glad to be out of there.

 

[sudsmaster]

Wood stove odor...

I would say something to the neighbor. They are probably throttling down the air intake in an attempt to make the wood last longer, but in reality they're more likely to be encouraging incomplete combustion and a build-up of creosote in the chimney. They may also be burning green wood, also bad for the chimney.

Of course it needs to be handled with some tact, but if your neighbor is interested in good neighborly relations he or she will be willing to make some changes to make the stove less obnoxious.

I'm also wondering if the thing has a catalytic converter. If it's new, by law it must. Perhaps the owner is not getting it going hot enough to activate the converter. In which case you'd be doing them a favor by commenting on the off-odors.

I had a similar problem in this neighborhood with one or more households burning stinky fires. The "Spare the Air" no-wood-burn days have pretty much fixed that problem, so I didn't feel the need to mention it to anyone. When I use my fireplace inserts, I make sure the wood is seasoned, and the fire is hot and not smouldering - esp since they are old, used inserts w/o catalytic converters. One of these days it will start raining and I'll be able to use the inserts again.

 

[dustin92]

I agree- if the wood stove is smoking bad enough that it is objectionable to you as a neighbor, something is wrong. We burn wood, and our stove, although it is fairly old, has a catalytic converter. It needs to be burning very well before the bypass damper is closed or the converter doesn't light off and it just smolders. Wet wood causes it to run cooler, which also prevents the converter from lighting off and smolders as well. The only time there should be any visible smoke from the chimney is when starting from a cold stove and when reloading. I would say a good 80% of the time our chimney produces little to no smoke, and only a slight smoky odor. None of our neighbors have complained, and none of them burn wood. Most new stoves are now getting away from catalytic converters, which need regular cleaning and replacement, and using secondary burn tubes to reduce emissions. The tubes are at the top of the firebox and they feed air into the smoky exhaust, creating a beautiful flame show (which most catalytic stoves do not), and burning off the smoke.
I suppose if I had my choice of heat, I would have steam- moist, even heat, no dust being blown around, no noisy fans, and no drafts.
I'm suprised nobody here has a gravity furnace- it seems like they are pretty common in older homes- friends of mine that live a couple blocks over have one, their house was built in the 50's. They have mentioned how evenly it heats the house, and no drafts. Our house was built in 1950 and has always had forced air.