Not at all Wendy - thank you for your nice comment!
And sorry, no experience of pellet stoves (sure someone else will have though?) but we heat with a log burner and duct the air upstairs and it works fine!
Does anyone have any experience of using wood pellet stoves - the room heater type that have a 'confort air' pipe that is placed in the wall or floor to send heat upstairs?
Dear James,
I'm a new member so forgive me if I'm posting this in the wrong place as I see that the discussion is from last year :)
I just wanted to say thank you for this info - it's a great check list to use
Those with a carte d'invalidité don't pay the TV license!
Installing a 'distributeur de chaleur' when using a wood burner enables us to heat the entire house (160m3 + basement of 160m3) with one Yotul.
And if you have a basement, think of using it as a 'puit Canadien'.
Also, with double glazing + hermetically sealed houses, you must have a VMC.
And for those who close the shutters at night: BRAVO, now you are really French! :)
great advice and tips james thank you - can i ask could someone clarify the french health system... (don't chuckle you lot!)... i am coming over end jan for 6 months as a volunteer in an EcoVillage (Ecolonie near Nancy) but will be buying my own home in the summer - i am not of pensionable age lol! but my 77 year old mother is and i'd like to bring her with me (for at least part of the year anyway).. do i need to take out med. insurance?
I agree with the airchange thing Ian- it's essential. When I was working as an architect in the UK Building Regulations made buildings more and more air tight and in fact one has to do airtightness checks on new buildings now. Houses used to have fireplaces and airbricks, the latter being essential under the old London Building Acts. Now people living in air tight homes, go out to work, shutting all windows on security grounds, leaving clothes drying on racks and in machines and lo and behold condensation appears in brand new buildings. Here in Bretagne our house is far from air tight as gaps exist around all doors and retained window frames but heat lost through single glazing, which is the worst culprit, is minimised. We tend not to heat bedrooms other than in the v coldest weather. Up here we don't have an excessive heat thing in summer!
I've fixed those links now Roger, they should open in a new window now :)
Thanks
James
Stuart - after all these years! I never knew about that option! Thanks!
I think the suggestion still stands though, as the first reaction is usually to just left click.
I like the act of opening and closing 8 sets of shutters a day, not least for the exchange of air in the house. I get the impression that with double glazing and hermetically sealed houses we are creating an unhealthy environment.
Shutters also help enormously with keeping cool in summer.
Not wanting to install electric shutters on aesthetic grounds we still have manual shutters. All our French neighbours shut theirs at night giving the village a ghostly appearance, whilst we don't. I don't fancy opening/closing 15 pairs of shutters every day. Double glazing has just been installed but we kept the original hardwood frames and had special units made with glazing bars externally and internally to keep the proportions. This is the first winter with these so here's hoping costs will be much lower. We have also insulated the ceilings of the first floor rooms leaving the grenier above unheated.
An excellent point Kate, our house is at least 5 degrees warmer with the shutters closed at night, it is equivalent to secondary or double glazing. Apart for the glass of course :)
Thanks for pointing that out Roger, my mistake, I shall attend to it now.
Hi Roger
I use right click - open link in new tab or window, which leaves the SFN page open.
Interesting article. Some food for thought.
On the web page technical side - can I suggest that the links you give go to a new window, making it easier to get back to SFN?????
I sympathise with Bruce Brewer as my wife comes from the Pacific. They don't put glass in the window frames there and have no a/c in the houses usually. Here I am forever shutting doors as our old granite house is onthe top of a hill in Bretagne. If you open the front door and the back door at the same time you would lose the wallpaper (if we had any) let alone the heat. We survive on a mixture of woodburners and electric but we do it on a room by room basis and don't heat the whole house in the winter. Incidentally there is a campaign going to the European courts to get all expat Brits (especially those in colder climes of course) the Winter Fuel Allowance. I used to benefit from it through my slighly older wife but she died and I was a little younger than 65 and ineligible under current regulation in the UK. I have made a claim and am awaiting a decision.
When we renovated our farmhouse on arrival in France 5 years ago we installed two solar panels (each about 2 m. x 1 m.) . They are linked to our oil central heating and a little computer automatically switches between the two to give us the best utility. We've compared our oil bill to friends with a similar size house and we reckon the panels save us 1000 litres of heating oil a year. So I reckon after 5 years they've now paid for themselves.
we have oil central heating which gobbled it up faster than they could pump it out of the ground as my wife is cold at anything less than 27 degs, after she saw the bill she decided that another jumper was cheaper we had an estimate for a pellet burner @19k euro that didn’t include radiators as we were keeping the originals the guy was either taking the proverbial or thought I was a millionaire, we have a wood burner cooker that gets the kitchen hotter that a hot thing so not only does it cook thus saving gas and electric it filters through into the lounge but not the dinning room, also leaving the stairs door open and the heat from the chimney it warms upstairs to a comfortable temperature so have found we don’t really need the oil perhaps a storage heater in the dinning room to filter into the little study is all that is required
Richard, yes, exactly, that was another of our fears. Sure pellets are cheaper now (or were back in 2006), but if they decide to drive the costs up you have little alternative.
HI Catherine, and thanks for this very detailed article. I wonder, though, do you have any figures on the costs and benefits of saving money this way, especially over time? I have the impression, from running my own house, that when you tot up the capital cost of investments such as the new washing machine, the insulation, the wood burner, thermostats, energy monitors, solar panels, etc. and you add to those the costs in terms of time required to do the research, the running around, the installation, etc., as well as fuel costs, labour costs, etc., and and then look at the actual amount of money you save annually, it may take several years before the amount you save balances what you invested, and then several more years before the amount you save is significant enough to be worth the "comfort cost" of having to switch lights and equipment on and off all the time, slow and poor light from energy-saving bulbs, shivering 'twixt bed and cupboard while you rummage around for the extra sweater, etc. etc.