Heating Fuel Comparison

[Tarrel]

Don't know if this is useful but, since we've put our Rayburn in, I've been very conscious of the differing calorific values of various fuels, and how well they succeed in putting heat into our thermal store. The following is based on local experience, and you may be able to obtain different prices in your locality:

Fuel Unit kWh/unit Cost/unit Cost/kWH

Anthracite Kg 9.44 £0.34 3.6p
Heating oil litre 9.72 £0.70 7.2p
Wood Kg 4.44 £0.23 5.2p
Gas cu m 11.94 £0.66 5.5p
Wood Briq. Kg 5.00 £0.28 5.6p
Electricity kWh 1.00 £0.14 14.4p

The above does not take into account the efficiencies of various appliances (i.e how well they convert the kWh in the fuel to actual heat), but most modern stoves and boilers will be similar at 80+%

Burning softwood, our Rayburn is struggling to meet the demand for heating and hot water, so I had been running the oil-fired boiler for a couple of hours to boost it. However, I've discovered that chucking in a few kg of good quality smokeless fuel seems to give it the boost it needs, and is half the price per kWh, compared with running the oil boiler!

I think this demonstrates the benefit of having in place a multi-fuel stove as part of one's preps, ideally providing hot water as well, that can run on coal or wood. Even if you have your own wood supply (as we have), keeping half a tonne of coal in stock is not expensive, and is grid-independent, giving you resilience in an emergency.

Out of interest, if one uses 35,000kWh per year and was to switch all your heating and hot water from oil to coal, you'd save around £1,200 per year based on the above figures. If you were to invest £6000 in a modern, efficient multi-fuel boiler stove, this would represent a 20% return per year on the investment, which is roughly 2.5 times what the interest would be on a loan to fund it, or 5 times the best rate you could get by leaving the £6k in the bank. Plus, you'd have the benefit of being able to scavenge for wood and thus supplementing your fuel use further.

Sorry if I'm preaching to the converted.

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p.s. Anyone know how to format a table on here?!