desmondo84

Okay, bought a new house but need some kind of heating system installed. Any recommendations? Don't want to fork out a fortune so considering just a decent heat pump. Any other suggestions - eg wood burner?

And has anyone around Auckland installed solar panels - worth the effort and would you recommend anyone?

TIA

Snap Shot

Good luck in your new home, hope you will all be happy there.

Had a heat pump installed 3 years ago. Make sure you also pay to have a daily four event timer installed too, i.e. on and off in the morning and on and off in the evening. So you wake up in a warm house and come home to a warm house.

Upstairs is another heat pump, same deal with the timer. The heat pump machinery is installed in the loft void and the warm air is vented through ceiling vents. There's another ceiling vent in the linen cupboard which becomes the airing cupboard in the winter when the heating is on.

The downside of course, is, no radiators to warm your shorts on ! However, you should be able to find a company to install radiator central heating. How is your hot water heated ? We have an infinity water heater. So, there was no point in installing radiator central heating as it would have meant installing a hot water cylinder.

Heat pumps are not space heaters. They use compression technology to get the heat from the outside air no matter how cold the outside air is. (I've had it described to me as the same heat that is generated when you pump up a bicycle tyre using a hand pump and the pump goes hot in your hand because of the friction of the air molecules or something.)

This is why you will need somewhere to put the fan unit/s outside your house. They cannot operate at -6 degrees centigrade or less but do have a defrost function so they can defrost themselves if the external temperature drops.

They also operate as air conditioning in the summer if the heat pump has that function.

Don't know about a wood burner. However, buying and storing the wood is another consideration i.e. the cost of buying wood versus the cost of the electricity bill to live a modern life. You can buy it 'green' i.e. fresh cut and dry it out yourself, do you have a woodshed ? I've heard of people storing firewood on their porch, then putting it on the lawn to dry and then putting it back under their porch at night. OK if you've got all day to do this I suppose.

Or for a bit more you can buy it dry aka seasoned so it's ready for the fire. I see people with a trailer full of firewood round this way as I live in regional NZ. I also see signs for firewood for sale. For the last couple of days I have been able to smell the lovely smell of coal tar as people are loading their fires with coal and I can smell it on the air.

Solar panels ? No idea.

Buy a dehumidifier for the unheated areas of your house. Also, reinstate any missing internal doors in your house, we did. It's a kiwi house after all. They're weird about doors in this country IMO.

BEVS

Congratulations on your new home purchase.

With regard to solar panels. If that is for hot water , the usual payback time is around 8/10 years on average. Of course there are variables to consider.

For log burners, you could think to also have a wetback to heat water in the winter months.

escapedtonz

Go the heat pump route. They are clean, efficient, easy to service and cheap to run. Have the air con function also so you get cooling through summer and yes the timer is a must.
Radiators would be great but expensive. Around $1000 per radiator installed and that's without the boiler to run them, plus the standard and quality of housing insulation / windows here just means you would waste a lot of the heat unless you had valves in rooms that you didn't use much.

Wood burners are a novelty and that novelty quickly wears off when you have one as your method of heating. They're a pain in the arse.
You feel like a boy scout again the first few times you use them but after a while it gets very monotonous setting them up and making sure you have all the materials - fire lighters, tinder and wood to burn.
They are dirty, you get smoke in the house whenever you open the door to stoke them or add wood to burn. The wood doesn't last long. It's a nightmare having to lug bags of wood from the supermarket or DIY store and you have to have somewhere to keep the wood dry. If you go the trailer or scoop full of wood every now and then your talking hundreds of dollars a time and you need somewhere to store it where it keeps dry as damp wood just smokes like heck.
The burners also get very hot so not good when you have kids in the house unless you have a guard. They don't actually heat much more than the room they are in unless you leave all the doors open so the heat travels around the house. They're a pain to clean.

Next door neighbor has solar panels and a great idea if you have the cash to buy and install them. Cheap electric for sure in the sunny climes of NZ. Should knock around 2/3rds off your bill per annum but may cost $30k for the privilege ?

Bo-Jangles

Definitely depends a lot on your lifestyle and who's at home during the day (if at all) I could not be arsing around with lighting fires, I need to get up and out asap in the mornings and often not home till late. We have heatpumps on timer - not used YET for heating this year to date but that may change by the end of the week and then they will be on pretty much every night until about October.

As for the air con cooling 'feature' I suppose we might have put ours on about four times this summer for a quick blast of chilling for 20 minutes or so.

If I were at home all day though I think I might look at alternate solutions though and maybe go for the wood burner as a back-up or nice to have on sometimes. They do stink and I know I would tire of the chore of it everyday. You do need to get consent from the council to install solid fuel fire, so it won't be a quick fix.

barnsleymat

Get a log burner, it's the cheapest way to heat your home/hot water if you're a bit of a scavenger like me. I've got a huge pile of pine, gum, pallets, fencing, decking in my garden that hasn't cost a penny and will do us for 2 winters.

It takes a bit of effort but if you kept your eye out and spend the summer collecting wood winter can be lovely and toasty.

moonie2011

We put gas central heating in our house and love it.
The house we bought need a ducted heat pump upstairs, a heat pump downstairs and some other sort of heating in the downstairs bedroom and bathroom. For the same price as all of this was the central heating
Done deal

Mark Smith

$350 of pine will see us right for the whole winter and the heat transfer kit warms the rest of the house nicely. Don't fancy stacking firewood for 2 days when I'm older though.

Tom H

Unless you are happy to please your electrical company's shareholders - get a log burner

desmondo84

mmmmm, about 50-50 in terms of heat pump V log burner - arrggghhhh

MrsFychan

heat pump and air con win - win

log burner - have to stock and prepare then keep stoking, then cleaning out the ash and if you have a chimney you need it swept or it invalidates your insurance

Snap Shot

You can't have the log burner on a timer. Also, all that cleaning and restocking of the fire and the woodpile

Stormer999

NI go for the heat pump ...easy just switch on hot or cold air.
SI colder times log burner chucks out hot hot and can heat the whole house.
Young and fit able to stack hundreds of odd shaped logs! Somewhere to keep it dry. At home all day to feed it. In and out often heat pump. Will the council even let you have a log burner.
Me both......heat pump for ease...log burner for the couple of real cold Canterbury months. log burner inset just fitted takes about 3 months to get Chch consents approved....
Cat prefers the log burner.....
The saying is the log burner heats you three times
1) Chopping the wood.
2) Stacking the wood.
3) Burning the wood.
Seriously though investigate the variations available in heat pump systems.

barnsleymat

I've changed my mind. You're in Auckland so the temps don't dip like they do down here in the Deep South. A heat pump would probably do you up there.

I do love our log burner though. Just like at this very second a roaring log burner to gather around on the cold nights is something I look forward to, especially as the wood hasn't cost me a penny. Its my dog Ringo's favourite thing in the world.

Bo-Jangles

And a whole let less chance of setting your house alight - I just passed a place on my way home with thick stinky smoke billowing for miles up the road.