Around 6 to 7 years.
The full story is as follows;
When the council first acquired the building there was an ancient oil fired boiler in situ (for the heating only) which probably did need replacing for something more efficient. Hot water was by means of an electric ballon.
So some bright spark decided to have an all electric boiler and hot water system installed. The new tenants said that the system worked well, but then winter arrived and they found the electricity bill to be in excess of 1,300 Euro per month !! Needless to say that they gave in their notice and left for pastures new.
So, then a second revamp of the premises was carried out with the currently existing system of the wood pellets for both heating and hot water being installed. This seems to do the job but there are constant problems with the pellets being stored in a large fabric hopper (a bit like an upside down pyramid) in a very damp cellar. There is an air blower that blows the pellets from the cellar up to the ground floor to fill the small hopper on the boiler itself. This pipe becomes blocked with damp pellets over a period of time, and the damp pellets don’t light very well, so the maintenance engineer is a regular visitor.
Whenever the system is running there is a constant stream of smoke from the chimney. There are wooden shutters for a window directly below the chimney which used to be white, but are now more black with soot than anything else.
Fixing the situation would require two things. Firstly, the council would have to admit to having made an almighty lash-up of the job in the first place which of course is never going to happen. Secondly, the hopper would have to be removed, the cellar waterproofed and provided with ventilation, and then the hopper replaced. No doubt this would be pretty expensive.
So all in all I expect we will just continue to enjoy the sight of the maintenance van every 3 or 4 months.
In fairness, it is difficult to come up with a workable solution for a building that has no land on which to site an LPG tank, oil tank, or even a heat pump, but I did think that having the workmen paddle about on a muddy dirt cellar floor to install a pellet hopper was a bit daft.
I have a similar problem with our house in that there is no land on which to install any alternative to the oil tank and boiler in our cellar, so we have no alternative to continuing to burn fossil fuel.
By the way, we are very close to an ancient church so the ABF will not countenance any solar panels or exterior heat pumps as they would harm the architectural heritage of the area.
So on the one hand the gov’t implore us to switch away from fossil fuel, and on the other hand one of their own agencies stops us from doing so.
Tis a crazy old world !
