Put another jumper on

The Eastern European meter reader turned up at the door last week and I am waiting with much anxiety for the bills to arrive. I pay both gas and electricity by monthly standing order, so every now and then I get a wacking one off payment request to balance the books. I suspect it will arrive any time.

We have been in the house for about 8 years now and have three sources of energy drainage, The swimming pool, the domestic hot water and the heating. In that time my monthly outlay has almost doubled, so I have been motivated to investigate some of the alternative heat sources which are becoming the subject of much media discussion.

There are really only a few that I can consider, thermal/solar panels on the roof, a wind turbine on the house, or free standing in the garden, and a ground source heat pump.

The swimming pool would struggle to be heated by solar panels in the conventional way as the heat exchanger would need to be about twenty feet long. It would also struggle to work effectively during the Winter months. I could use it as a giant water storage source but the temperature would likely exceed the recommended level for the liner. Ground source heating is therefore the preferred option here.

The central heating is a real tricky one. The ground source heater would be able to do the necessary if we had under floor heating, but traditional radiators need much higher levels of heating to be able to heat effectively.

The domestic hot water could be supplemented by the solar panel solution, and that in turn could offset some of the central heating requirements by keeping the cylinder at a higher ambient temperature. we shall have to see.

All these systems will need pumps, so the attraction of wind power to reduce the electricity consumption has certain appeal. We don't live in Hill House without some blowy days. The trouble here is that the Energy Saving Trust web site is inconclusive when I enter my details, and when I discussed the matter with them they indicated a wind survey lasting a minimum of a year would be the best thing to do before outlaying the expense associated with a turbine.

So I await details of companies who can provide such surveys, but I have been more successful with the other alternative sources as I have convinced a local ( well Welsh) company to come over next week and chat through what I could and could not do. The roof should take panels if the sun can get to them enough, but the garden is too small for a wired ground source system, so it would need to be bore holes. I await his comments with interest.

On the day British gas reduced their prices by 7%, but pundits were predicting a 25% cost hike over the next ten years, it is certainly time for Maison Weathers to join the 21st century