sagraiasolar's activity

Working out heating power needed is easy enough. Have a look at 'The Heating Guide' on www.heatingitaly.com there's a graph where you can locate your house size and read off power needed to warm you for any temperature outside. The other interesting graph shows how much energy Eur 1,000 buys you. You will be quite clear after seeing it that wood burning is the way to go.

Judging from a lot of comments on this forum a lot of us don't use gas apart from cooking and maybe a boost on the boiler if fitted at all. We've learn't the hard way but if you are new to the plot I suggest you only fit a small and cheaper 500 litre tank. A 1,000 litre tank would (or should) last for 2 or 3 years. Gas may be heading towards its last decade.... the future is electric with a lot of help from wood and solar. If you don't use gas who cares what it costs.

Thanks for the link to Klover... I've been looking for a flush fitting stove with water heating built in but unfortunately these ones pull heat out of the exhaust smoke which is OK in principle but hard to keep clean and probably needs a pumped circuit which is much more expensive than a gravity circuit straight to a heat store. I love the German SPARTHERM range for really big windows on the fire but again not very powerful and not good enough to do serious heating duties. I'm still looking so if anyone comes across the perfect kit please post. Meanwhile a Clearview 750 with a clip in boiler putting out 7kW to water is a good solution for many applications especially on a simple gravity circuit. The pumped circuit costs almost as much as the stove - E 2,210 delivered - because you need: pump, controller, sensors, heat dump valve, heat dump radiator... all this to accomodate a power cut and pump  failure.

The 12th and 13th are the correct dates for the peak but these dates begin after midnight so really you are looking at starting your first spotting session late tomorrow night (WED)

Sounds to me like you are heading towards a heat pump solution... it runs on  your favourite energy, electricity, but delivers over 4 times the energy consumed. .. and no log lugging at all. There are really slim underfloor heating solutions around now - not much deeper than your 20mm quoted. Badger is the expert on heat pumps so I will presume to say no more.

You don't have to be resident to do the deal - only to claw back tax if applicable. The pay back is not 15 years at all. 7 - 8 is the norm.  Don't forget your leccy bills are going to go up every year meanwhile. The savings on your bills alone should buy the kit over 15 years... meanwhile there is something like 10 Eoros a day going into your pocket, or the bank's. A cash machine in the garden is a fine thing

The answer to your question is yes - in a way. It is the bank that pays for the panels and you then pay them back from the production meter revenues which GSE pay directly into the loan a/c. As I have done this I can report that it works out OK. I have a slight overproduction too so the other meter - the two way one - returns a slight surplus on electricity bills as well. If you don't have an income the bank might demand a deposit, say Eur 10,000 so the entry cost might be that much.  At first glance this looks like a tight call as to whether it's worth it but the clincher for me is the fact that electrcity bills are not only below zero they are frozen too. Within 15 years just the saved bills should pay for the panels and they will still be there for more free years and payments that eventually go in your pocket and not the banks. I look on this as being like a pension where the income from the PV panels pays for all my other energy costs which with the solar/wood/ heat store combination are minimal anyway. You can do away with a gas boiler altogether so there is an immediate saving to be had there.

Anyone with an existing tank and looking to have electric water heating might like to know that you can upgrade a tank by fitting a remote immersion heater. It looks like a long canister and is plumbed in on a simple gravity circuit. Old immersion heaters in tanks can be so welded in that you can rip the tank open trying to service or replace them so it can be easier to leave them be and fit a remote. As Alan H points out you need a lot of power for instant heating so a 3kW immersion will need a store of some sort. I have taken advantage of my PV panels this summer and give the immersion a quick boost every day rather than sell the power to the grid for a paltry 10c. So on average the panels pay me 10 Euros a day and I spend about 30c on the immersion. The gas boiler as usual remains switched off nearly all year round.

Abbruzo, Your point about gas before or after the accumulator hints that you are still thinking about the old ways of doing things. A heat store is full of dirty water with EVERYTHING - OK not the solar coil - connected directly to it, gas boiler included. The clean hot water is extracted via an internal coil or an external plate heat exchanger. As you will almost never use the gas boiler there is no need to worry about optimising it - just remember that the heat store should be vented and therefore the gas boiler will be the vented, heat only type and, from my experience, often not quite the one your plumber fancies. As you are not on the ground floor I suspect you are not going to be keen to lug tons of wood around so the heat pump sounds like a good plan and with one of those and some electric water heating you might not need any gas at all! I find that under-floor heating saves a fortune by producing tolerable temperatures and warm feet so I would put it under all floors except bedrooms where faster response times are better.

Michael, I know the yearning for a Ruby. There's a shop in Arezzo that does all this stuff but I haven't been there yet. Apparently if you park near the station and walk up towards town for a block or two you'll find it. Maybe someone else can nail down the exact spot for you.  Also there's an ex-pat foody shop in Rome that probably does spices.