The Heating System

To the right is a picture of our rather sad heating system. Don't get me wrong - it sort of does the business - it gets the house hot and heats the water, but it's not the easiest to control (it gets the downstairs really hot and the upstairs not really hot at all), it's not very efficient (compared to modern condensing boilers) and it uses domestic fuel (or "mazout" as its called here).

It also only has the capacity to heat about half of what we need - currently we only have radiators in half of the house - which is the half that we're living in just now. The downstairs has an underfloor heating system powered by the same system - and I do mean the same system - there is no evident separation of the radiators from the underfloor system as you'd normally expect.

The inefficient combustion and the big oldish tank can make the garden smell a bit when the system is running full blast. We decided before we bought the house to change it for something better. After rejecting the favourite option of deep ground-source (we'd need two of them to heat the old house we have), we settled on the boring option of gas. As you can see, the wall that was tastefully hiding the tank has been removed (by yours truly), and we're now waiting for the gas company (GrDF) to connect us up.