Cosy Abodes Boiler Installation is located in the sleepy community of Poynton between rural towns in the Peak District, like Buxton, and semi-rural villages on Cheshire’s plains, such as Alderley Edge.
Our boiler team is often asked to install a boiler or central heating system in a farm house or other remote property.
But like another four million homes in the UK, many of them do not have access to a gas supply.
Gas lines don’t stretch out to many areas of the UK countryside, leaving people living in rural locations with a limited choice of ways to heat their home.
The most viable alternative for people living in rural areas is to install an oil-fired boiler.
OIL STORAGE
With no direct access to the main gas grid, it’s necessary to store fuel for a boiler within the confines of a property. Most ‘off-grid’ properties have an oil storage tank outside and homeowners receive oil deliveries by truck when supplies run low.
Once you have an oil boiler, it means monitoring oil levels and ordering more oil in plenty of time. It means paying for it at the point of delivery, but it also means you have a huge freedom to change supplier at any time and top up on fuel when oil prices dip.
Regular domestic oil tanks are often positioned behind a hedgerow or in another discreet location close to the property. They can hold sufficient oil to heat a house for around eight months. Larger tanks must comply with building regulations when they are installed.
HOW AN OIL BOILER WORKS
Your oil boiler draws oil from the tank to its oil-fired burner, which heats your water supply and property. The water it heats is pumped through your radiators and taps.
Like gas-fired boilers, oil boilers come as conventional boilers – with the same arrangement and placement of a boiler situated separately from a hot water cylinder that is fed from a cold water source.
They also come as a combi boiler, where a cold water supply enters the boiler and is heated inside the appliance before being fed to radiators and taps.
And system oil boilers have built in heating and hot water components, but also an attached, pressurised unvented cylinder for storing hot water and feeding several hot water outlets under pressure.
OIL BOILER COSTS AND EFFICIENCY
Oil-fired boilers are more expensive to buy and install than gas or electric boilers. The running costs are a lot lower than most electricity tariffs and can be similar to gas, depending on market changes.
Advances by leading manufacturers, like Worcester Bosch and Vaillant, in recent years have vastly improved oil boiler efficiency. Modern oil boilers have equal efficiency to gas central heating systems.
Modern oil-fired condensing boilers can further reduce heating costs by up to 12 percent. They use the waste heat of flue gases, created when burning oil, and recycle them so less energy is needed and consumed. Emissions are therefore also considerably lower compared to normal oil boilers.
Oil-fired condensing boilers can also be combined with solar panels.
LOCATING AN OIL BOILER
Oil boilers are almost always located at ground level. Their larger size typically takes up more space than most gas-fired boilers. However, there are smaller oil boilers available.
Oil-fired combi boilers can only be installed in attics and lofts under certain circumstances. BS5410 regulations require oil combi boilers installed in lofts to be less than 45 kWh, have a tank capacity of less than 3500 litres, while the loft space must have a permanent means of access and be able to support the weight of a full tank – among other stipulations.
Cosy Abodes sells and is highly qualified to install some of the most reliable and efficient oil boilers available in the UK.
We recommend trusted brands such as Worcester Bosch and Vaillant as they offer market leading technology in the field of oil-fired boilers. Worcester Bosch has more than 30 oil-fired boilers in its range.