Well

I am in the middle of renovating a house in Kent at the mo. It is a complete job - one thing being that it has never had any central heating. So we are installing one from new

I wanted to be Mr Eco so I investigated all the options (and hired a useless consultant to advise me for ??? as well)

What I learned was that if you buy an Old Git sized house (ie bigger than average) and if it's badly insulated with no way of improving the insulation because of listed building regs, then the new green technologies aren't very effective

But these new technologies work very well, and are economically advantageous, if your house is a sensible size and is insulated

So ground or air source heat pumps are good (since you can install underfloor heating or bigger panel radiators, which make the most of the lower temperature hot water which these pumps produce)

Solar power panels have fantastic government grants at the mo

Micro CHP (which for domestic use basically means the Baxi, no-one else is rolling them out yet) isn't quite so green but still looks bloody good to me. But my heating engineer said I'd need to install three of them (THREE) to cope with the demands, so I gave up in the end and am installing a gas boiler

I'd have a serious look at the Baxi if I were you

Posted By: Old Git, Jan 27, 14:48:10