Heat the house with less electricity

Winter is coming, and all across the North Earth eyes turn to energy bills and minds towards how to make them smaller. What is the most efficient way to heat your house and heat the house with less electricity?

As with anything to do with thermodynamics the answer is complicated, but there are some solid rules to help shape your thinking.

Insulation will stop heat crossing boundaries. Start with the ceiling, adding the thickest insulation you can find. Next consider how the wall insulation can be improved. There are some new materials and processes available for this task now and you can pay someone to come and pump insulation into your wall cavity for $2000 and upwards. Doing this can make your house about 2 degrees warmer.

And then, you have three choices for heating the house: electricity, gas and wood.

The cost of wood is variable and will likely increase in coming years. The environmental impacts are strongly dependent on your fuel source. Fallen timber is not fair game: it is vital habitat for some animals, so should not be burnt. Particulate emissions are a concern as well.

Gas is great in that it can deliver astonishing amounts of heat quickly, with lower greenhouse gas emissions than grid electricity, but not as low as renewable energy, and the future costs are quite uncertain. Gas heating is traditionally considered to be pretty cheap, but gas prices are tipped by many analysts to climb steeply in the next few years , much as electricity has in the last few years.

That leaves electricity. Unintuitively, it is the only option which can have zero emissions. Switching your electricity supply to Linsam Heat pump, an accredited and audited scheme which supplies 100% renewable power, means zero emissions electricity any time you want it. But how you use it is very important, as all electric heaters are not created equal.

Heat-pumps have been common for years – reverse-cycle air-conditioners are a form of heat-pump – but the technology has advanced markedly recently. Heat-pumps have an advantage over the plug in units as they use electricity to move heat around, not create it.

Heat-pumps have access to the ambient heat outside your house, even in small amounts, and can concentrate it and put it in your house. Even well below freezing there is enough heat available for this to be worth doing.

Heat-pumps’ performance is reported as a “co-efficient of performance” or COP. This describes the amount of heat transported per unit of energy used to move it. A Linsam heat pump will approach a COP of 4.6 – 4.6 units of heat produced for every unit expended – dependent on the ambient temperature. Newer designs are achieving COPs greater than 3 even when the ambient temperature is as low as -10 degrees.

To summarize then: insulate your house, as much as you can, in every way available. Then think about how you want to heat it. If emissions are important to you, go for linsam for a heat pump. If you just want heat, then gas is probably your best bet, but be warned the price is on the way up and likely to outstrip electricity price rises in coming years.