Logging off - from the Courier

This is my last Courier Column after more than 2 years.  

Thanks for having me guys ... but now for pastures new.

February 20 2015

The cost of going green

Oh dear, deadlines again! It seems I’ve only a month to claim the Renewable Heat Incentive grant, but first there are a myriad of hoops to jump through.

To start at the beginning.  A few years ago, when oil prices were sky high, I decided to invest in renewable home heating.  The basic choices were a heat pump or a biomass boiler.

Heat pumps are like alchemy.  They transform a small difference in outside temperatures into enough heat for you house.  You can get air source pumps but the best are ground source.  However this means either digging up a huge expanse of garden and laying a network of pipes, or drilling a borehole around 100 meters deep.

But heat pumps use a lot of electricity and, I was advised, were probably not best suited to my ancient draughty house.  So a biomass boiler then?  They’re considered green because the wood is renewable and has, in its life as a tree, sucked in more carbon dioxide that is released when you burn it.

  There are three types.  Pellet, wood-chip and log. Pellets cost money and are mainly imported.  Chips need a very large area of bone-dry storage.  But logs in the countryside round here are plentiful and, effectively, free.

The saga of installing the huge log boiler and a 2,500 litre accumulator tank is one for another day. Suffice it to say that my workshop now looks like the engine room of the Titanic and my bank balance remains in free fall.  But it’s there.  And works.  Sort of.  If your wood is dense and dry you can do a three hour burn which, as long as it’s not too cold, heats a fair portion of the house for up to 24 hours. It requires prodigious quantities of logs, but I quite enjoy chain sawing and splitting and moving them to the wood-store that’s taken over the remainder of the workshop.

My investment wasn’t dependent on government grants, but they would have helped.  The old scheme ended about a day before the boiler was installed. I’ve only just found out about the new Renewable Heat Incentive grant. Which runs out in April.  And you need a Green Deal Energy certificate.  And a heat monitor on your boiler.  Which could cost ANOTHER thousand pounds.  And no one can tell me how much the grant will be worth.  It’s not easy going green!