Hello everyone! I'm new to the forum but have been reading it and it's great.
We've recently moved into a 1930s detached brick cavity house (off the gas network, no current central heating). We're in Cumbria so it gets chilly!
We've been grappling with how to heat the house. It has no central heating, no ufh, no rads, just a log burner in lounge. The previous owners used an assortment of plug in and kerosene heaters. We've put in a (solar friendly) 250l unvented HW tank with immersion.
We want to work out which would be best: ASHP with low heat heaters (as there's no UFH), or Air-to-Air system (seem less popular than ASHP...why? Not as good?), or storage heaters, and how best to heat HW (solar thermal seems long pay back times though might be putting in with current RHI scheme?).
Energy prices are of course a big concern!!
(We've discounted oil due to environmental issues).
The house: has 3 beds and family bathroom upstairs, and lounge, hall, dining room, utility all on suspended wooden floors which we took up, insulated between joists, then boarded before putting down limestone tiles. Builder warned us against cavity insulation for existing brick walls due to cavity bridging issue. (But not sure we could get ASHP RHI payments without it?!).
We've added on a 30m2 kitchen extension to ground floor side of house earlier this year - The new extension is a vaulted ceiling 25m2 kitchen extension off the existing dining room to the side of the house. It has insulated concrete floor plus insulated block walls.
We didn't futureproof with an UFH wet system (oh dear!) as we thought ASHP + low heat wall rads were a non-starter and would not manage to heat an older leaky house even with our added insulation measures, so we thought the only option was storage heaters with potentially solar thermal for HW. We're revisiting our decision due to the crazy current cost of electricity.
We discounted solar PV at present as is expensive to put in and doesn't seem to give us enough energy when we need it.
Main house has double glazed windows put in 6 yrs ago, and new bifolds and double glazed windows in the extension put in earlier this year. We've added lots of loft insulation and added internal wall insulation to the rooms on the east wall of the house (lounge and 2x beds).
We aren't trade or DIYers as is probably clear with how I've described things!
I've tried researching myself, but hard to make sense of the jargon. Also the sellers of heat lumps seem so keen to sell that we don't know if it's actually right for us or not! We had a ground source person come and quote but it was v expensive as we'd need bore holes as not enough space for horizontal array...this expense seemed risky given we weren't sure if a low heat systems would work in our older house!
Any advice would a GREATLY appreciated! Feel like we're going round and round and definitely feeling our lack of technical know how!