How much oil do you use

4-bed detached; approx 1700 sq ft.; Oil fired central heating. No other form of heating in place. Electric immersion and electric shower used for bath/shower hot water supply.

Both adult occupiers out at work Mon-Fri daytime. Heating in use only after 5pm Mon-Sun and occasionally during daytime at weekends.

I would be very interested to hear what expected oil consumption should be. Recent figures tell me I am close to consuming 100 litres per week, which at first sounded incredible. I drive 400 miles per week to work and at this rate, my home heating will cost more than my car's petrol bill.

Sounds a bit heavy alright, Once.

What temp. is your boiler set at?

Similar situation to ourselves. We fill the tank twice a year. The average cost would be about 1150 per year I'd say.
Do you have underfloor heating?

..

100 litres a week is 10 weeks per fill = 5 fills per year.

That sounds way wrong to be honest....is there a leak by any chance???

more details

no underfloor heating.

have a thermo control on the boiler but it is not marked in degrees, just levels 1 to 5. Spends more of its time above 3 than it does below 3.

# fills

I know we're not on 5 fills in the year because usage drops way off in the summer. I'd say we're looking at approx 4 fills per year @ 1000 litres per fill.

There is no leak at the tank. There is no leak at the boiler. We do have a joint in the pipe between the two because we recently moved the tank. There could be a leak at that new joint, but it is in the middle of the lawn (down about 3 inches). I'm sure I would have smelled/seen the damage if there was a sizable enough leak.

Re: # fills

We've been in our house since last august and we are on our third fill of oil. So that's.....900 euro so far in 7 months. Our last fill went so fast that we were very suspicious. So we have bought a padlock since. Maybe this could be your problem???

fills

Hi Once Bitten!
1700 square feet are 188.8 square meters.
4000 liters oil are equivalent to roughly 40,000 kilowatts.
40,000 kw divided by 188.8 m2 is about 210 kw per square meter.Without hot water.
When the new energy rating for buildings comes into Irish legislation-2006- we need a new letter in the alphabet to classify your home,it would be rated worse than "Z" .But you are not alone,most homes would not be any better than "E" or "D".
You need a professional energy adviser ,even if you let one come for a day from abroad it would save you thousands.Contact the Irish energy center,they might have an address.
I have a standard home which uses around 60 kw/m2 (incl.cooking and hot water) per year.Underfloor heating,condensing boiler,two adults.
A boiler without temperature control in centigrades must be an old banger,what is your plumber saying about it when he is servicing it?Has your chimney sweeper mentioned an extraordinary thick layer of soot ?
Oil pipelines must have a secondary containment-a ducting-to protect the environment.I think this a legal requirement.The pipe should not be interrupted by joints,I don't know if this a legal requirement too, just logic.

Once Bitten, I just moved into an 1800 sqft house & had never used oil before for central heating. I went through 1/2 tank - 500 litres in about 5 weeks.

Shocked me I have to say, but I do recall in my previous house having a 2 monthly gas bill that was €320 for 2 months in winter, €35 for 2 months in summer. Averaged out to approx €90 every 2 months

Mid Jan to Mid Feb was the coldest we havs seen this winter (plus we have a rug rat so we had the heating on more than normally would have been for just 2 of us)

There is a modification that can be carried out, especially in the case of rugrats on the day shift.

A valve connected to a timer (with override switch), can be fitted so that only your immersion and downstairs radiator are heating during the daytime (chosen) hours, when upstairs is not being used.

The complexities in fitting this, all depends on how your heating system was plumbed and where the expansion pipe is tee'd off from.

Of course, if rugrat needs a nap, an oil filled electric radiator in their room should suffice.

As with yourself, KBR909, we recently moved into a 2,700sq. foot house, now consuming 500 litres a month with heating turned on in only the bare minimum of rooms. Last house was admitedly half the size of this one and gas bills were around €100 every two months.

There are only two of us at present and both are out of the house 7am to 7pm. I dread the thought of oil bills when we start to have a family!!!

We do have underfloor heating, is this heavier on usage than conventional rads?

My house is 1600sq ft, semi detached. I'm gone all day. Over the last few years I use 1 or 2 fills of kerosene a year. The first year I was broke and survived on 1 fill, now it's closer to two. The last time I got a fill I think it was 38c a litre plus VAT @13.5%. So it definitely works out at a lot less than 1000 euro a year.

I have a budget plan where I pay Jones Oil €73 a month. It works out brilliantly because I usually have a surplus after a year and get a cheque for about €200 back. There's no interest and the price per litre is usually v. competitive. Other local (to me) oil companies have budget schemes; might be something worth investigating.

Rebecca

Bad news to home owners

In the last issue of the magazine "Construct Ireland,issue 8,vol.2,ISSN 1649-3389 01" was an interesting and alarming article about the low standards in Irish homes.At page 45 of the magazine (still available from Easons) the author J.Little examines the insulation capacitys of our standard cavity walls.Bringing it to the point that the fulfillment of the building regulations is never met.Can't be met.
The builders are "calculating" the U-values .No one here in Ireland has actually ever MEASURED them.In France they did-with the result that these "calculations" are totally crap.Fantasy numbers.
Read it yourself.And ask yourself why you haven't informed yourself when you decided to invest hundreds of thousands of €s.The fuel demand of a car is not "calculated" but measured,why accepting the opposite when it comes to our homes?It's good for business I suppose.....
But when you think about reselling your new homes you can offer only huts/sheds.Since these houses never adhered to building regulations for homes.

Should this article be posted in an extra thread? Or could we just nod and keep quired? There where discussions on AAM before:Will the building bubble blast?
I think it did already with this article in the "Construct Ireland" .But we do not want to hear it.We prefer to complain about fuel bills when our money went to hell...