scotview wrote:That's a significant bit of transformation to your property.
I suppose the 60000$ question is, would you heat your entire rebuilt house solely by heat pump, or would you still prefer a gas boiler and/or wood burner in the mix somewhere ?
Short answer - "no" - not AHSP supplying rads or underfloor. We'd still need to install extra rads and we replaced the gas boiler 18 months ago anyway. The house is only 18 feet so one room deep, which means a lot of extrnal walls and windows, and ASHP don't save anything costwise over gas at the moment (people I know who've converted say they spend slightly more). Also we swap between rooms throughout the day, and the lower ASHP temps seem to mean running it for longer, whereas at the moment we can heat a room up pretty quickly. The new higher temp ASHPs coming along look interesting though.
The wood burner was removed to be replaced by the Split unit. Cleaner, quicker, easier, and doesn't take up one of the few walls in the house that doesn't have a window.
The new lounge incorporates the old dining room but with the stairs partitioned off, will have a multisplit unit, and the main bedroom which is above it will also have a unit, mainly for summer cooling.
The original place was only 12 feet front to back, with a 6 foot extension downstairs, which meant the middle upstairs bedrooms were pretty small once a corridor had been taken off the front. The original roofline is visible as the old gable end in the pevious photo (which has the remaining bedroom and only bathroom in it). Also being 230 years old, insulation wasn't a priority. The timbers weren't in great condition in many places.
The new roof will extend over the downstairs extension, but more importantly be thicker and higher and have insulation, which might bring the place up to a standard that could cope with ASHP heating. The old roof was so low we couldn't have insulated inside either.
The old lounge and diner are being merged into one and we will put insulated boards on the wall, however the concrete floors will remain uninsulated. You can see we are bricking up some of the 3(Yup!) sets of patio doors the new room would have had which will help with heat retention,
'major transformation' probably describes it, but no surprise the cost is not cheap. And that's the problem with a lot of UK housing stock - I know ours is a little to the extreme end of things but insulating a lot of the older properties you see in the villages and towns takes a lot of space or costs the same as several decades of energy bills.
Paul