3505 Water Heating

Hi - I need to install a heating system in my Italian house in the hills and am thinking about a wood burner for the central heating but don't know what to do to heat the water. This might sound really dumb, but I'm thinking that, in summer, I don't want a hot wood burner heating up the house! Can anyone please advise this complete novice? :confused:

Category
Building/Renovation

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed, 05/03/2006 - 20:16

I can't speak from experience here (I'm still in the process of buying the house), but like you I'm planning to install solid fuel central heating. Advice from this forum has been to have an electric or gas water heater (scaldabagno) to use during the warm months. I intend to opt for an instantaneous gas heater, as I'll be living on my own but anticipate having sporadic visitors - thus water is only heated as needed. If your household is fairly constant in number, it may be cheaper to run an electric storage heater, that is if you can work out the correct size so that you don't run out!

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu, 05/04/2006 - 03:13

We had the same dilemma and in the end opted for the elctric hot water tank. They aren't the most attractive of items but with 4 of us so far it has provided lashings of hot water and no was has had to suffer a cold shower yet!

We leave it on all of the time we are in residence so there is hot water on tap (oops excuse the pun!) and just switch off before we leave. Our plumber advised us to drain it down when we aren't there to avoid the build up of lime scale. The whole think was just a couple of hundred pounds. We did look at the small instant electric heaters but they reminded me of childhood holidays in dodgy cottages where it took all day to run a bath!

Don't know what the electricity bills were turn out as but as a quick solution it works.

jackie

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu, 05/04/2006 - 04:51

You can get quite small instantaneous gas water heaters. You can get them for both mains and bottled gas. Our place, before we changed to mains gas, had one of these heaters - it was more than adequate for all hot water needs [including bath/shower].

Only suggestion I would make is that if you use bottled gas, keep a spare gas bottle. [They always run out on a Sunday evening/night, when you can't get a replacement! - although you can sometimes, like my son did, "borrow" next door's bottle if they are away]