Hi from Portugal

[Bruno]

Hi @all

 

Thank you for allowing me to participate in this community. I am looking forward to discuss my goal for my heating system, currently using a wood burner with water circulation and radiators, which I'd like to replace with an ASHP. I will open a topic for that shortly.

 

Please apologize if sometimes I'm not using the correct English words. Eg I don't know how to call the "wood burner with water circulation" thin, but it's something like this (not mine, got the image online)

[SuperJohnG]

Welcome Bruno. Lots of good info here. 

 

I think it might be called a back boiler. But I get what you mean. My thought are you might not need much heating as its Portugal but does it get cold? 

[Bruno]

Thank you for the welcome ?

 

In my case it's more about convenience. I use the "back boiler" for both DHW and heating, which means that I have to burn wood pretty much every day of the year. Not good when it's 30º+ outside ? (I do have an electric backup heating resistor which we use when it's terribly hot).

About heating, I use 6-8m³ of wood each winter. It's not terribly cold in Portugal of course, but it does get cold. The main problem with wood (apart from dirt...) is that you can't preheat. It's really bad to get home from work in a very cold day, tired, the house is really cold, we start the fire and only ~2h later we get some comfort.

 

Apart from the heating system, we are also investing in improving insulation, especially replacing the windows and insulating the window blind mechanism and its straps (and that really, really sucks in our buildings, awful window blinds - windows in general).