Here in rural France, starting with a blank sheet we have so many choices, but none of them seem just right.
We could have a large outside tank with either oil or gas, but in recent years costs have sky-rocketed and look to continue to do so. So we've ruled that out.
So we decided this would be an opportunity to be green and to save on running costs. As we are starting from scratch, we can lay underfloor heating. So we looked at aerothermic and geothermic. We're shown fancy diagrams and people use fancy phrases like "heat source pump" and explain it's like a fridge in reverse, but I still don't really understand. The system takes in air and it heats the water that flows round under the floor. Or you lay lots of pipes across your garden and then you can't plant anything big on top and the fluid flows round your garden and then under your house. We are told that the technology has been around for 20 years. But that doesn't reassure - I remember 20 years ago, that's no time at all!
We think we'll do aerothermic and then learn that it doesn't work so efficiently when the air temperature is around -5° to +5° but round here most of December and January is -5° to +5°! So we think we'll do geothermal until we get the quote for the installation - €14,000 plus all sorts of bits and pieces that the installers need us to do first! That's more than 14% of the total cost of restoring the cottage.
So finally, we've come back to something simple and relatively cheap: electric underfloor heating. France has nuclear energy. I never thought I'd be a fan, but I'm beginning to wonder. Eighty percent of our electricity comes from nuclear - it says so on our bills. It means that France is largely self-sufficient, isn't facing ever-escalating raw material costs and at present can keep electricity price rises relatively under control.
Well that's the underfloor bit, but I thought it would be nice to have two small Godin wood stoves as well, for atmosphere: one in the kitchen and one in the lounge, with the metal chimney pipes just going straight up, through the floor, through the bedrooms and out the roof. That was until we began to explore the costs involved in insulating the pipes and what we needed to do to protect them as they went past potentially inflammable floorboards and polystyrene filled concrete.
Ah well! Another good idea bites the dust.
Antique Petit Godin: photo from The Antique French Stove Company
2 comments:
We rebuilt our studio here (it's as large as a house but was pretty funky) so my husband's parents would have an apartment on the first floor and we work on the second. They really need to be warm during our very cold winters and we looked into floor heating which was impossibly expensive and then decided on an amazing high tech gas system which has a furnace about two feet long that hangs on the wall in the garage. There is also an on demand water heater. It was about 14,000 dollars to put in.
In our house we have a wood stove, a kerosene space heater that is very common here and very efficient and as a back up, a large gas furnace with ducts through most of the house.
Can you get fire wood at a reasonable price in France? We're in northern New Hampshire and everyone that can burns some wood.
Hi Zuleme, Your system sounds great! In our part of South West France, in the countryside, wood is plentiful and relatively cheap. We burn about 12 stere during the (shortish) winter in a kitchen stove that heats 5 radiators (not enough for our big house, but that's another story!) and a big Godin stove in the lounge. If we buy the wood in 1 meter lengths and cut it ourselves, we pay about 45-50 euros per stere. Pre-cut wood will be more 65-75 euros.
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