Stately home owner Lord Carnarvon, who owns Highclere Castle where Downton Abbey is filmed, has done the maths and decided that in the light of the drop in oil prices a switch to wood fired boilers no longer makes sense for him and as a consequence the project is on hold. Other stately homeowners who have already made the switch to wood fired boilers find that they are still making considerable savings over oil especially when you consider that the retail price of oil has not dropped as sharply as the wholesale one. So what are the implications for those of us with much more modest homes with oil fired central heating?
Clearly the drop in oil price is welcome news and ensuring that your house is effectively insulated is probably a sensible financial and environmental step as it may qualify for an installation grant and typical savings in the region of £300 per year on your heating bill. If like many people you supplement your central heating with a log fire is this still a sensible step financially?
Of course much depends on whether you can get well seasoned logs or have the space to store logs until they are properly seasoned. Seasoning logs is a way of lowering the moisture content in wood so that it burns more efficiently and is often described as being more of an art than a science. According to Phil Potter of Woodfuel East a tonne of wood at 50% moisture content has a calorific value (CV) of only around 2,300 kWh but a tonne of wood at 20% moisture content has a CV of over 4,100 kWh. In money terms, if a kWh of heat is worth 5p then a tonne of wood at 50% MC is worth £116.38 but a tonne of wood at 20% MC is worth £206.55. The higher value takes a bit of time and effort to achieve but the rewards are clear (we will make seasoning the subject of another blog).
So given the lower oil price at the moment the benefit financially of supplementing or even replacing oil fired central heating with wood fires or wood fired boilers is clearly more marginal than it was. To gain a clear financial picture you would probably need to get independent advice on your specific circumstances but what we would say is that financial gain is not the only consideration. Having the whole family sitting round your oil central heating boiler doesn’t conjure up the same image of contentment and joy that a log fire or stove can provide. Nor is the lovely aroma generated when burning logs like apple or cherry matched by the faint smell for fuel oil that hangs around many oil fired boilers.
When making the calculation about which fuel best suits your needs we believe that the considerations are more wide spread than cost alone.
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