debih wrote:I have no issue with the winter fuel allowance, but it isn't just the elderly who struggle to pay. Mist of the winter we use our log burner so our lounge is nice and cosy but the rest of the house has no heat on - it costs a fortune to heat the whole house. The girls don't have double glazing and at this time of year regularly have ice on the inside of their windows!
If it helps Debih, I have two pieces of info for you there.
First windows. B&Q now does windows at around the £100 mark and you can even order sizes. Getting a local glazier to fit them or even quote to supply these cheaper windows and fit them might be very worthwhile.
On the heating front, we had a nightmare keeping the house here warm. Eventually we decided to go with a log burning boiler which drives the central heating. These can also be had in the UK, second hand, fairly cheaply and you can probably get a hopper fed pellet burner too. Whilst pellets are more expensive than logs if you have a cheap local supply, they are really efficient and controllable. Whilst I fitted all the radiators, cutting the CH costs a lot, I find that keeping the house very warm is now fairly cheap. We can't keep the main CH on for more than 3 days continuous without the house becoming too warm. So from impossible to heat and electric heaters with massive cost to too much heat. It was not mega cheap to do but the final effect was very good.
We also have a wood burner in the Dining room but it has a back boiler and can run up to 5 radiators. It is really simply fitted, I have a standard CH pump on the back (£50) and a hot water tank switch sett to 50c to switch the pump on (plus a 3 bar safety blow off valve and ad 25l expansion vessel). I only have one cast iron radiator on it but it is heating two huge rooms (circa 30sqm each and both have over 3m ceilings) and one of those is still bleeding cold air from the rest of the house which is not finished...
Two other things which help. If you have an old stone walled house, like ours, we found that even 30mm plasterboard backed with polystyrene was a godsend. The 50mm is better (40mm polystyrene), but without it the stone walls just leached the heat out of the house until we'd heated the entire wall. Not something we wanted to do on Electric.
One other godsend for a cold house (we still have unsealed areas of the house next door which are under renovation and don't have central heating), is the new mains fan driven paraffin heaters. We went from 5l of paraffin in 18 hours to 7l of paraffin every 3 days and a boost in heating power from 2.4kw to 3kw. It paid for itself in two months.
200mm of insulation in the attic didn't hurt either nor making sure that every door into the house is a sealed unit and that we reduced the air flow down to minimum. Cold AND windy days are the worst. This year I finally sealed the gap under the shoddy French sealed unit door in the Kitchen. We went from a room which was freezing every morning to a room which is easily heated by the one paraffin heater in the hall downstairs (Central Heating is still in process of repair).
It's been a long journey to move this 1850's stone built town house with 2-3 feet thick stone walls, no insulation at all and wooden doors and windows (more akin to a gaping hole than protection from the elements), into a warm home which holds the heat you put into it... But it doesn't have to cost a fortune and you don't have to do it all at once...
We have people living on the streets, elderly or mentally ill people not getting the care they would have thirty or so years ago, people losing their houses over this bedroom tax stuff, people committing suicide as they're losing their disability benefits - and yet we donate aid to India (who have a space programme) and Pakistan (who harbour terrorists and allow the persecution of Christians) and we get our boys killed in futile wars which have achieved nothing.
