sagraiasolar's activity

Lots of questions and lots of answers.  Yes I have done it and also spent last winter writing 'Cheap heating in Italy' which you can download FREE from www.heatingitaly.com so I won't repeat all that here. Briefly though: The PV - electric panels - bought with a loan will pretty much knock out your leccy bills and make enough to pay off the bank loan. My bank wanted us to buy a 10,000 euro stake in an investment trust to hold as a deposit. Otherwise it is all effectively free and you are immediately better off in cash flow terms. PV panels do not produce what they say on the tin... go for around 5kW if you can. In a way you could say that they do produce hot water as 3 hours of an immersion heater will produce all your hot water. Gas boilers are so old hat now that I doubt if they will be around in 10 years time.  I have just been looking at a couple of small house projects where the commune were insisting on solar panels - wet - as part of the plot. Budgets were limited so I suggested a start with a large heat bank with just an immersion heater followed later with the wet solar panels - summer  use sorted. Then a choice for winter power. An air to water heat pump when funds allow (running costs on a small house are minimal) or a simple stufa for winter cheer (connection to the heat bank depends on relative locations).... even both. Hope that helps.. enjoy the guide. And by the way when the PV loan is paid off you will have income to pay all your energy bills... ZERO COST heating is real.

... aha... a lateral thinker... great idea... I hope you expand and come as far as Umbria in due course. Ginger biccies all round.

Have you considered just buying the brush and rods from your local harware store and doing it yourself? The brushes are very cheap. I did mine last week. It took a few minutes and I only got a couple of cupfulls of soot out. I didn't bother at all last year.

Bunterboy Gravity circuit? You mean no pumps? I note the Pandora thermal store comes with several  pumps already fitted are you suggesting a different sort of store? I need an idiot proof system and an unpressurised system sounds safer to boot! A gravity circuit is dead simple - just 2 pipes directly to a thermal store for example. The heat source MUST be lower than the target so you may see the thermal store on a small plinth on some installations. The water will circulate on its own accord without a pump. The DPS thermal store comes with various pumps attached but thats for other things like radiator circuits and underfloor heating. An unpressurised system is essential with unregulated heat sources. You can connect the stufa straight onto the tank without any fiurther expansion tanks or heat dump radiators. It's all very neat and cheap when you go for a gravity circuit.

Bunterboy - Unless your house is really huge a stufa will have enough oomph to heat it and the water and it has benefits of cosy flames and some cookability too. I usually only turn to a ground floor forno when there is an upstairs salone with tricky log lugging. If you can get either to be close to your heat bank you can save a lot of money by using a gravity circuit. I have examples of both the Termorossi and 14kW stoves running very well so whatever you do will work. The termorossi works with a vented tank so keep it all unpressurised. The stufa will be less than half the price of the forno and you can use a smaller tank so the benefits swing to the stufa if it fits in with your layout.

While I am principally a solar/wood exponent (you guessed) I would like to point out just how significant Badger's figures are as I'm not sure the previous posts have quite nailed it. This is important stuff. He buy's some 10,000 kw.hrs for Eur 2500 and half of that goes on normal electricity consumption. The remaining Eur 1,250 and 5,000kW.hrs heats his house and water. It actually takes about 20,000 kW.hrs to do that on most well insulated houses so his 5,000kW.hrs are multiplied up by 4 by the heat pump - ie a Coefficient Of Performance of 4. This is serious competition for us dedicated wood luggers.

Can't say I'm often coherent at this time of the evening but I'll have a go..  First hot fill washing machines are rare these days... the mfrs finally twigged that the hot water takes a while to come through so hot fill machines were really cold fill with a redundant extra pipe... doooooh .. you'd think they'd have seen that sooner.  Any way you sound as though you are well on the way to having a sensible set up with costs approaching ZERO...  If you are an Excel man let me know and I can send you a model to map your returns from the panels; not that it matters really as you don't have to match them to consumption - it is just more elegant that way. I expect you'll spend nothing on gas or electricity and 1,000 on wood which will be met from the PV panels income so Robert's your father's brother - ZERO COST on all energy.

Bunterboy - I note your aim to have a 3kW PV array and I hope this may be useful to you and anyone thinking of doing something similar. The nominal output of the panels is not what you get!!! In the winter you get about one third of the rating and believe it or not in the summer you get about two thirds even at mid day with no cloud. To get the rated output you need a cool day with sun breaking through a lot of cloud. There are loads of appliances in the house that use 2 - 3kW - washing machine, kettle, immersion heater etc so for a winter match with probably minimal use of the immersion (re wood) and pool pump off you ideally need something like 5 - 6kW nominal. My 4.6kW is so because the Commune would only allow me that size for a car port with a tidy 20 panels. It does scrape home with Zero electricity bills and has allowed the gas boiler to be turned right off (well it was on once for 15mins last month). Apart from zapping the electricity bills the separate production meter produces almost 8 Euros a day on average.  e.g.  this month (with a spare day left) 675kW.hrs at .451 Eur gives 304 Euros and also a tiny bit of surplus on the two way electricity meter.

Beery - Yes twin tanks are a great part of the many solutions and I have a pair running now to test my 'stripper circuit' which enables the solar pump to run practically every day of the year... I would say though that although it works really well the cost to benefit ratio is usually beaten by just adding more panel. As for slagging off the cheap Euro stoves... sorry if that was a bit offensive and some of the less cheap ones are very good... I was taking great care not to advertise and never mentioned any specific product...my aim on this forum is to try to steer the debate towards the real opportunities available to everyone to practically eliminate their heating costs. Everyone can then choose their favoured stove/tank/panel and do their own thing. 

If I may chip in a bit on tank sizes. The main issues revolve around recovery times (increase hugely with bigger tanks unless they are top down heated and extract from the top down too which mitigates this effect)   Energy stored to make domestic hot water... you need a bigger tank than you are used to as the water tends to mix before you can extract it all.. 500 litres odd is good for a family home and works well with a modest array of solar panels... you have to get the balance right with all the components involved. A wood furnace tends to demand a bigger tank because the burn time will load a bigger tank but 800 - 1,000 works well without breaking the bank. Actually the burn time on a 30kW furnace, say, needs a much much bigger tank but most of the time the heating will be on so half the energy is diverted. The trick with heat stores is to change your thermostats for programmable ones to get timed shots into the floors or rads so that the tank does not get overwhelmed by the unregulated heat source. A quick comment on buying Italian stoves because you can get them repaired here... the cheap European stoves have cast in boilers so yes they do need repairing eventually but actually you have to chuck them away and start again. One expensive British stove on the other hand has a clip in boiler that can be replaced and the stove is in modern welded steel plate which is not prone to cracking and leaking. Re a comment on how expensive electrical heating is - as we move away from gas in our systems we have used short bursts from immersion heaters to great effect and the cost is minimal if not better than gas as all the energy goes into the water and not up the chimney.