What's cheaper to heat a house, wood or electricity?

Train A can't be in front as train B left the station first.
Solarhart electric boosted hot water system.
Can't wait till solar and tesla batteries become cheaper so I can afford it.

 

Wood is more efficient.
heats you twice.
Once when cutting it, second time burning it !

 

*Coonara make the best slow combustion wood heaters there are .
dry (seasoned 2 years ) hard wood , yellow box , red gum ect is best

must be cleaned once a year = Flue , Cowl , firebox , baffle plate . Replace the fire bricks as needed .
needs chimney brush and rods should last 20 years if you look after it

*The Hydronic system provides the hot water for heating and hot water ???
so your prolly getting a two-for .

anything with hot water has a limited life span .
An option would be to convert the hydronic system to gas when it dies

* buy a chain saw a trailer
and a case of beer and make friends with a farmer

 

I believe the hydronic is heating only, there is a solarhart electric boosted hot water system. Can you clean the chimney from inside up, or from the roof down only?

 

cleaning = roof down to fire box , close the door and there is less mess

theres a stack of youtube videos= slow combustion cleaning

 

This is true. You will be choked with the CO2 or your alarm system.

 

So follow up after a few months. Been using about 1/2-3/4 of a ute of cheaper gum per week. It's free as they are dead trees on our land. If I had to purchase the same wood it would be about 60bucks per week usage or about $8.50- $9 a day.
Our lounge room 10kw split system heater uses 2kw an hour @.20cents per hour, running for 14 hours costs $5.60 a day. Wood heating is the best though, I also love chopping wood and it's my new cardio work out.

 

Our neighbour gets the local builders to drop of timber in his driveway.
It is a mix of Hard and soft wood but mostly Hard wood. He has a drop saw and cuts it all up
And stacks under his big veranda.

As it’s free he doesn’t mind burning lots, sucks when the wind blows his smoke into the yard and makes our washing smell like a bushfire.

 

I have replaced a wood stove, a broken reverse cycle air con unit and an old ducted oil heating unit, that each serviced separate areas of the house, with a single electric ground sourced heat pump supplying ducted hydronic heating and cooling throughout.

I've just gone through the coldest months of the year here in the southern tablelands of NSW (elevation 950m). It has been cold enough to get snow covering the ground on a couple of those days and this has been a wetter than average winter with above average cloud cover (less rays for the little passive heating that I do get). The house is single glazed windows.

My daily electricity usage has averaged around 45kWh and peaked at about 52kWh (snow on the ground), with about a third of the house closed off for renovations. On the TOU plan that I've recently moved to I'm averaging 18c per kWh (inc GST) across a full week (based on continuous monitoring data for August). All but about 10kWh of that per day is heating. That works out to between $6.50 and $7.50 per day to heat two-thirds of the house. For the whole house this would take it closer to $9 per day. I have not included the daily supply charge for grid connection in that calculation because if you use wood heating but connect to the grid anyway then you're also paying a supply charge which is not included in your cost of wood fuel.

Other factors to consider:

Wood requires frequent time and effort for fuel management and cleaning, occupies space, pulls cold air into the house (unless you have dedicated intake ducts), and doesn't do cooling in summer.

The electric ducted system is 99% automatic all year round, has separately controllable zones, is clean, provides heating and cooling (with dehumidification).

I haven't included domestic hot water in my cost of heating above, however the system here also provides this at a much lower cost than a standard "controlled load" (CL) electric system. That's because my TOU "all-other-times" rate (ie. not peak or shoulder rate) is substantially less than the CL rate. I don't use CL for anything here.

 

@Rocso - great information. How well did the system maintain temp in the house? What did it cost to install?

 

What's a heater? It's 35 degrees here!

 

In a sentence, more comfortable than it was with the wood stove. Maintaining the comfort level in the house no longer feels like a constant chore. But the up front cost is high. I probably could have bought a budget priced European SUV rather than my current Subaru Forrester, but I'm very happy with that choice.

Over winter 20° is quite comfortable as the set temperature. For sleeping it's set to maintain 15° overnight.

On the coldest days (<7° max with 100% cloud cover) it manages to maintain 16° downstairs, which is comfortable if I'm dressed for going outdoors occasionally. It dropped to 14° downstairs the day it didn't get above 3° (-2° real feel with the wind blowing) so I spent that day upstairs. It has no trouble maintaining 20° upstairs any day or night. The disparity there is the design balance between ducted FCU and hydronic radiators, which I will fix one day. I could also run the hydronic buffer tank at a higher temperature (normally 45°), which would make it easier for the inside heat exchangers to keep up, but I don't feel the need to pump that extra energy.

With the wood stove running, the upstairs/downstairs comfort levels used to be much more uneven. I don't have records of temperatures inside from that time but would be surprised if they were any higher than now. Temperature gradients and drafts were much more noticeable throughout the space. Now I find the evenness of temperature much more comfortable.

 

It appears that way. We have used reverse cycle aircon to warm a section of our house when required. It must be our age, the older we get, the colder we feel. Kids still wear shorts in winter.

 

We love ours too... warm and toasty.

 

I just open the flue, throw in an arm full of pine offcuts/kindling and hold the door ajar until the flue glows then shut the door and flue down, you then hear all the creosote falling off/back down = fixed

We run a quadrafire (claim is that the particulates circle around 4 times) it consistently runs far cleaner than 3 of our neighbors...

Lucky if we turn of the electric ducted/zoned heating 3 times a year
(Have solar to offset using the ducted/zoned AC, only used on HOT summer days)

In winter after it gets consistently cold our wood fire runs 24/7, otherwise it takes too much effort in firelighters, kindling, wood to get up to speed again (and isn't as efficient).
It's a small wood fire, throw in a few chunks prior to leaving for work in the morning, first home tops it up, late arvo a quick top up and fill after dinner (It's under the bedrooms of our split level home, so the heat radiates up and there then into the living area, so it's never hot, just comfortable...).

We have 6+ years of wood stacked up in our suburban Sydney block, all sourced free from tree's being legally cut down (saved from the wood chipper).

If you can burn wood efficiently, without smoking and polluting it isn't that bad.
As for the carbon debate
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sou...ECC0QAQ&usg=AOvVaw3cJ1k4MMnTX8R2FDkWFuAs&cf=1
*But if a tree is left to die and decompose, Bowyer said, “the decay process is exactly the reverse of photosynthesis.”

He explains: “Water is used by decay fungi, and as the fungi works on the wood, the wood is then converted back to carbon dioxide.”

Burning that wood for heat speeds up the process, he said, but it's carbon neutral

 

Great thread, wondering how people's views have changed given the current prices in electricity / costs?

We live in a fairly old house - just had ceiling insulation re-done (R6) - and tossing up what to put in for winter:

- A reverse cycle aircon
- Woodfire

Liking the idea of reverse cycle as we can leverage this in summer to cool the house, but the prices of electricity is throwing us off a little

What's the most common setup to heat during winter these days given the current state of things?

 

Would need to get a quote to put in solar onto the roof and get it all wired up - next on the list before we make a final decision!

 

$9/ day?!?!

 

Yes initially it was. We sold that house now but eventually wood was costing us $12-15 a day of redgum and electricity was way cheaper. All the heat was going straight into near 17foot ceiling and not insulated well, cathedral ceilings look good but terrible at keeping the heat in. We placed a massive solar system on the roof and that took care of most of the bills. We still used firewood at night sometimes as it’s awesome when it’s cold and the heat is very different to using the split systems.