The problem of how exactly to provide Westacre with heating and hot water is not an easy one to solve. The main difficulty is that there are many unknowns.

Our first strategy for making the house environmentally friendly and cheap to heat is to insulate it as well as we can. We will be installing high spec windows and external wall insulation.

The trouble is that, once all that is in place, it’s hard to know how much heating we’ll actually need. How much heat will we lose on an average day? We won’t really know until we’ve tried it.

Initially, we thought we would have a wood burner with a back boiler to provide us with most of our heating and hot water. The problem with that is that either
1) you have to light fires in the boiler to get hot water, even if it’s warm in the house, and if we don’t need much heating, the room will soon get too hot.
2) you have to install a sophisticated high efficiency burner that will put 90% of its heat in to the boiler. Trouble with those is that we don’t like the sparse aesthetics of them.

In order to give ourselves the rustic looking wood burner we want, as well as a steady temperature in the house, we need to think of some alternatives.

The current idea is to have more solar hot water panels on the roof, so that most of our hot water and heating comes from that source. And for insurance against many consecutive days without sun, we’ll need a bigger heat store than we originally planned.

Heat stores work like this:

We were originally thinking of having a heat store with a 300 litre capacity. Now we’re considering 1000 litres.

These things are big. I’d even say huge. At 2.1m high and with 1.05m diametre, they take up a lot of space.

So where in the house can we lose one of those?

The thinking continues.