Fuel prices never go down as much as they go up and over the past few years despite many fluctuations in prices we are all now paying much more to heat our homes and to provide hot water for our families.

As a firm we have seen an increasing interest in renewable energy appliances for the home and we have customers who at the present time are meeting all of their heating and hot water requirements entirely from logs and solar. Other customers have the same basic system but we have retained their original oil or gas boiler to provide a backup as and when necessary. Moving the oil or gas boiler away from the front line of heat provision and relegating it to the backup position achieves a significant saving in fuel costs.

We are Gas Safe, Oftec and Hetas registered heating installers and we specialise in linking various heating components to provide a tailor-made solution for our customers. We are also registered with the government microgeneration scheme for biomass installations.

Our Approach

Our basic approach has been how we can improve the efficiency of existing systems and although we do not supply insulation products or services, we are always quick to advise customers that this is the first area they should explore. Pound for pound improving the insulation in your property must be the most sensible first step. We can then begin to look at the areas of waste in the use of energy.

Example Customer

I can best illustrate this perhaps by giving an example of an existing customer with an oil-fired heating system and in the process of extending his property. On the face of it, the existing quite modern boiler would have been quite adequate to take the extended heating and domestic circuits but that would have left the owner feeling even more anxious about his future fuel bills.

When we discussed matters further we found that throughout the winter they sat on many evenings in front of a woodburner because they love "open fires". But there was no back boiler on the log burner so there was no gain into the domestic hot water system.

Our Solution

After much discussion we have agreed to install a solar panel on their perfect south-facing roof and retrofit a back boiler in their log burner. This traditionally would have been fed into a new cylinder and given plenty of domestic hot water but we are going to feed the solar panel and log burner into a thermal store. This means that both can be used to supply domestic hot water and preheat the central heating. The oil-fired boiler will only fire if there is a deficiency of heat from the other two sources but even when it does it will only have to raise the preheated water to working temperature – not from cold.