In Another Place, someone recently asked for advice about buying an above-ground swimming pool. I suggested that, if he'd never owned a pool before, he might get a better idea of the work involved in maintaining a swimming pool as well as the posi
Happened to notice that the Leroy Merlin (formerly Castorama) near Pescara airport is selling a couple of models of generators that run off GPL. From memory, one was 3kW and one 5kW and, from memory again, I think one was around €300 and one €500 (although it's possible I'm being optimistic on those pricetags!). They were very tempting, particularly since a week or so before, we had our cheap, Chinese petrol-powered generator running for 36 hours due to a power failure caused by that horrible snow in February. The generators looked a lot more robust than the one we have and the idea of not having to mess around with filling a little petrol tank was appealing, especially since you obvously have to keep the thing outside when it's running and it's highly likely that the only time you'll need to use it is when the weather is nasty. I don't have any experience of them, but I believe that engines running on GPL are supposed to be quieter as well. Our petrol generator makes life a lot more comfortable when the power goes off, but its roar is not pleasant, particularly since it isn't a steady drone, but surges whenever there's a change to the electrical load (like a fridge compressor switching on). Another point in favour of a GPL generator is that they avoid the problem I had last month: engines don't appreciate it when you leave them sitting around unused with the same petrol in the fuel system for two years. I only managed to get the thing started after I had completely drained the fuel tank and line and refilled with new petrol. What jolly fun with the wind howling and snow flying all around. What made it even more enjoyable was the memory of how, over the last two years, I'd often looked at the damn thing and thought that I really should run it for a couple of minutes every month. Al
If your ENEL meter says that your halogen heater is using, say, 1 kilowatt per hour, then you can be certain that this is the amount of heat being output by the heater. However - and this relates to Fillide's post - there is a problem with the perception of warmth - the comfort factor - created by radiant heat sources. This applies whether you're talking about an old-fashioned British open coal fire, an antique two-bar electric heater or a state of the art halogen heater with microchip time and temperature control. Almost all the heat from a radiant source is converted to warmth that humans can perceive only when it strikes a solid object. If a halogen heater faces nothing but an external wall and if that wall is not well insulated, then the heater will be warming the wall and a lot of that heat will be wasted because it will be conducted through the wall to the outside environment. Indeed, if the heater is several metres from the wall, then the heating of the wall will be so diffuse that it will be difficult to perceive. On the other hand, if the halogen heater faces a well insulated floor, an internal wall or other objects with no thermal connection to the outside, then the heater should, in theory, be just as useful at heating the space as any other electric heater. Whether it will feel like it's doing much is another question. Because convection heaters heat the air and the warm air currents rising off the heater gently circulate air around the room, they are perceived to be more comfortable and it's understandable if they are thought to be more efficient. In the sense that they generally make you feel warmer than a radiant heat source consuming the same amount of electrical energy, they are more efficient at doing their job! But that's not to say that heaters that produce primarily radiant heat are somehow magically making some of the electrical energy that they use disappear during the conversion from electrical energy to heat energy. All the elecrictity going into the heater will always all be converted into heat, but the question is whether the heat is being emitted in a way that's useful in a particular setting. And that's why it's so difficult for anyone who isn't familiar with Donna and her flat to give her a definite answer on what exactly she should do to make her flat comfortably warm at the minimum cost and why it's impossible to put a Euro price tag on the solution. There are simply far too many unknowns. Al
Yes, some of the electricity used by a fan heater is used to turn the fan. The reason the fan will not, once started, keep turning for an infinite time is due to friction, both in the fan bearings and the friction of blades against air molecules. But friction is just the name we give to the conversion of kinetic energy into heat energy. Therefore, that electical energy which has been "lost" to friction by the fan heater has also been converted into heat. And, yes, some of the energy consumed by a fan heater is converted into sound. However, the proportion of the total energy used by a fan heater "lost" in that form is pretty trivial: consider how much noise the very limited energy stored in a couple of batteries can create if it's converted into sound in a radio or CD player. In any case, sound is just the jiggling around of air molecules and, at levels that matter only in a physics lab, that also creates friction which heats up the air of the room. While I agree with Fillide that perception of warmth is important, I think the Laws of Thermodynamics make it pretty clear that, if you take a closed, perfectly insulated box, put any sort of electrical appliance in it and then feed it one kilowatt hour of electricity, the temperature inside the box will increase by the same amount, no matter if the appliance is a fan heater, halogen heater, toaster, lightbulb, electric mixer or an iPod. Again, in the context of this thread, heat pumps are an important exception to the rule in that they take heat energy from outside the box, effectively concentrate it and then transfer it in to the box. Al
Do understand correctly that what is being stopped is the incentive - the arrangement which means the purchase price of a kWh of PV generated electricity is greater than ENEL's currrent selling price of a kWh of electricity? Will ENEL still be required to buy electricity generated by small-scale renewable plants? So, if the incentive ends, then I take it that the best you can hope for when you install a PV system is that the amount of electricty you generate over a year will exceed the amount you consume. But, while that will reduce your electricity bill to only whatever standing charges ENEL might impose, recovering the capital investment in the PV system will take a very long time. Longer, perhaps, than the useful life of the PV panels? It would be nice if the silver lining of this cloud turned out to be a significant fall in the price of panels when the subsidy is removed, but I do wonder if this will happen. Have the incentives available in this corner of Europe over the last few years really driven up the global price of PV panels? If every second house in Italy had a PV array on the roof, I suppose I might think this plausible, but that's not what I see around me. Al
Are you sure about the spelling of this? May very well be a brand name I've never heard of, but since both Italian and British Googles return nill results, I wonder if there might not have been a misunderstanding at some point. In the context of heating/cooling, "inverter" is the nearest sounding relevant word I can think of. I think that just about every domestic air conditioning unit sold these days in Italy is an inverter unit. All this means is that the output is much more controllable than old-fashioned (say, pre-1990) air conditioners which were either running at full speed or completely off. An inverter unit is able to slowly increase and decrease its speed, depending upon how much difference there is between the present air temperature and the desired temperature set by the user. This makes the devices much more efficient in terms of electricity used and more pleasant to live with. However, not every air conditioner labelled as having inverter technology will necessarily also be a reversable heat pump, which is what you'd be looking for if you want to use the unit in the winter as well as the summer. If you look at the labels on these things, it's usually pretty obvious which can be used as heaters as well as coolers: the reversable units will have figures given for both cold and hot output. Al
One of our pellet stoves (installed before I bought the place) is in a part of the house that's a self-contained flat. It was clearly designed to be a "feature" or focal point, in that it's quite colourful and has a large glass window to display the fire. In fact, it was not a particularly suitable design choice, since the flat is open plan and having a pellet stove a few metres from your bed is not all that wonderful in terms of noise. It's not like a jet engine revving up or anything, but it has a fan to force air into the combustion chamber, another motor to drive the geared mechanism and Archimedes screw mechanism that feeds pellets into the combustion chamber and another fan to cool the fire's housing. It is a noise you can get used to if it starts up when you're sleeping, but it can be pretty intrusive if you're watching TV, reading, trying to listen to music and so on. It certainly completely destroys the hush that normally surrounds our house in the wilds of Abruzzo. Our second pellet-fired device is a boiler which is very utilitarian in design: rather like your friend's big black box, Sprostoni. Again, the sound it makes is not deafening by any means, but it does have the same fans and feed mechanism of any pellet fire. We had it installed in our utility room. It's a lot louder than the gas boiler which is also in that room, but quieter than both the tumble dryer and the washing machine. Still, if laundry isn't being done and you walk by the open door of the utility room while the pellet boiler is running, you can hear that it's operating. Bottom line is that pellet stoves are not ridiculously loud (at least not the ones I've seen operating), but I don't think that the living room is the most appropriate place for them. Still, there may well be very quiet ones out there. As far as consumption is concerned, the pellets we get have a stated energy content of around 4.9 killowatt hours per kilogram. This means that one 15 kg bag has about 73 killowatt hours of energy. I believe that pellet stoves work at an efficiency of up to 90%. Assuming that best-case scenario, each bag will have an usable energy of around 66 killowatt hours. Obviously, things are very different in Italy, but to give an idea of what that means in terms that most of us can relate to, I've seen figures stating that the average UK 3-bedroom home consumes something like 25,000 killowatt hours worth of gas in a year. In order to get that much energy in pellets, you'd need 380 bags: or nearly 6 tonnes of pellets. So, on average, a little more than a bag a day, but that's all based on wild generalisations. Here's some real-world specifics: in order to maintain the eight rooms that we occupy at a temperature of 20°, we've been getting through up to three bags of pellets a day during the coldest weather this winter. Our house is pretty much draught-free, but it's a traditional construction (read: without insulation) located in the hills of Abruzzo at 550 mslm. Pellets are by far the easiest and cheapest option for heating, but by no definition is it "cheap" to heat this place to a reasonable temperature even using them. Of course, at some point during the next couple of months, our energy consumption for central heating will hopefully fall to zero killowatt hours per day, something that hardly ever happened when I lived in Scotland! Al
Donna, if your options are limited to heating by electricity in one way or another, then I think your decision on whether to use oil-filled electric radiators, radiant halgoen heaters or fan heaters simply comes down to which makes you feel most comfortable. Using one kilowatt hour of electricity in a conventional electric heater will always produce the same amount of heat, the only variation being exactly how it's delivered. A radiant heat source (like the halogen heaters or the old-fashioned British one or two bar electric heaters) will feel a lot warmer if you're in a place where you feel the radiant heat on your skin or clothing, while a fan heater might feel cooler due the breeze it produces. An oil-filled radiator will produce a bit of radiant heat, but mainly a gentle convection current of warm air rising off it. But, all other things being equal, using one kilowatt of electricity in any of those heaters in the same room over the same time period will result in the air temperature being raised by exactly the same amount. I assume Gala suggests a halogen heater in the bathroom because many people like a source of radiant heat in the space where they're often partly or totally unclothed, but she suggests oil-filled radiators because halogen heaters are not all that good at producing an evenly heated room. Oil-filled radiators, on the other hand, produce a steady, background warmth without the noise of a fan. Gala is also correct to say that this arrangement only has a chance to be comfortable and affordable if the house is well-insulated and doesn't have draughts. The bottom line is that, if you use one kilowatt hour of electricity to power an appliance in your flat, the amount of heat energy you've put into your flat will be the same, no matter how you choose to use it. That applies even if you use the electricity to run a computer, operate lightbulbs, run a fridge or watch TV. (One obvoius exceptioin that comes to mind is electric water heating, since then you're basically putting energy in water which is then drained out of the flat.) As I said above, this rule does not apply if you use a heat pump air conditioner to extract heat from the air outside and use that to warm the air inside the flat. It's not unrealistic for an air-source heat pump to produce 3 kilowatts of heat for every 1 kilowatt of electricity it consumes (obviously, normal electric heaters produce one kilowatt of heat for every kilowatt of electricity they consume). However, if the air conditioner you have installed doesn't keep your flat warm on its own, then there's not much to choose amongst the alternatives if you're considering cost of operation. Al PS: I know it isn't relevant to you, Donna, but I would strongly urge anyone considering pellet fires as a heat source to talk to several people who have experience of living with one of the things before talking to a sales person. Ideally, visit a house with one installed while it's working so you can see and hear it in operation and get the owner to show you what's necessary in terms of feeding and cleaning. We have two of the things and we've used one as our main central heating source for two winters now. I'm certain that we would get a pellet furnace if we had to do it all again, but I'm also sure we would not go for the model we bought.
I assume that when you say you're using your air conditioner to heat your flat, you have one of the modern heat pump units that can either cool or heat the air. Heat pumps are, in theory, more efficient than the more traditional forms of electric heating since they extract heat from the environment and effectively concentrate it. This means that, given a choice of using the air conditioner or a halogen or fan heater to heat an area of your house to a given temperature, it should be cheaper to use the air conditioner. However, air source heat pumps - which is what I assume your air conditioner to be - are not as efficient as those which extract heat from the ground and their effectiveness drops as the outside air gets colder. We have one of these units in an open-plan part of our house and find that it works fine to keep the area warm when it's chilly outside (say, down to 5° C or so), but that its output is not sufficient to keep the area comfortable when the outside temperature falls below that. As for how much it might cost to heat your flat over the winter, that's really impossible for anyone here to say. The answer depends on a lot of factors, some of which have already been mentioned: how well insulated the flat is, the direction it faces, the size of the windows, how warm you want it to be, whether the flat is in the middle of other flats or on the ouside corner of the building, whether any surrounding flats are being heated and so on. Al
The law is as it is in Italy. No point complaining about that here. However... I wonder what actually happens to the waste once it has been pumped out of your septic tank and you've been given a nice certificate saying that you've complied with the law? Just before I moved to Italy, there was a huge kerfuffle in the Scottish village I lived in because a local farmer had agreed to allow treated sewage sludge to be injected into his fields. As far as he was concerned, he was getting paid for his pastures to be fertilised. As far as the local authority and the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency were concerned, the disposal did not present any pollution or health hazards. As far as a vociferous group of local concerned citizens were concerned, Glasgow's shit was being dumped on the pristine fields around our picturesque little village and we were all going to die of thyphoid, cholera, MRSA or some other more obscure but equally vile disease. Of course, the sewage treatment authorities only needed to spend money on disposing of the stuff in this way because the release of treated sewerage into rivers and sea had been banned. The other alternative - burning the stuff in coal-fired power stations - was, according to the envirnomental lobby, also a terrible idea because of the deadly levels of heavy metals which would be dispersed across the county in the smoke. Naturally, having condemned every possible means of disposing of the sludge, the envirnomental groups didn't suggest a means by which it could be got rid of. As far as I could see, the unstated implication was that the "greens" hoped that everyone would simply become more ecologically aware and stop excreting waste. So what happens to the sludge from septic tanks in Italy once it has been processed by a legally sanctioned treatment plant? One thing that's certain is that it doesn't evaporate. Is it burned in one of the oil-fired power stations? Is it dumped out at sea? Does it end up in a huge stockpile somewhere like the Neopolitan rubbish, waiting for the day when an environmentally friendly solution becomes available? Or does it just magically disappear in the way that a lot of hazardous waste has been made to do over the years by companies with strong links to certain renowned southern Italian families? Al
Septic tanks do accumulate a sediment composed of stuff that the microbes working in the tank can't convert to water or gas. The rate at which this indigestible sludge builds up varies depending on several factors, but it will happen sooner or later in any septic tank that's being used. It appears that our "septic tank" was constructed by someone local at some point using very basic techniques. As far as I can tell, it did not have a soakaway of any sort, but the liquids just disperse into the ground via porous brick walls. After we'd been in the house for around three years without having it pumped, it started to overflow. This lovely event was likely due to the damp weather of late 2009 making the ground so saturated that the tank was not able to drain away. My solution was to dig trenches to make a soakaway and then knock a hole in the side of the tank to make a connection to the new soakaway. More than a year on, that solution seems to me working well. The trees growing near the trench I dug are also doing very well! Poking a stick into the tank suggests that there's a considerable amount of semi-solid muck on the bottom. We've discussed this with locals and been told that we can probably expect to pay something along the lines of the prices you quote, Babyeddiedog, if we want to have it done correctly. The cost of pumping and transporting is much less than the fee charged to dump the sludge in the local sewage treatment plant. The alternative that has been suggested is that we just buy a robust submersible pump and disperse the contents of the tank over some of our land. Our situation is such that this would be possible without any of our neighbours being bothered in any way. Since it sounds like something that has considerable comic potential, I'm inclined to take the DIY approach. Al
Comments posted
Happened to notice that the Leroy Merlin (formerly Castorama) near Pescara airport is selling a couple of models of generators that run off GPL. From memory, one was 3kW and one 5kW and, from memory again, I think one was around €300 and one €500 (although it's possible I'm being optimistic on those pricetags!). They were very tempting, particularly since a week or so before, we had our cheap, Chinese petrol-powered generator running for 36 hours due to a power failure caused by that horrible snow in February. The generators looked a lot more robust than the one we have and the idea of not having to mess around with filling a little petrol tank was appealing, especially since you obvously have to keep the thing outside when it's running and it's highly likely that the only time you'll need to use it is when the weather is nasty. I don't have any experience of them, but I believe that engines running on GPL are supposed to be quieter as well. Our petrol generator makes life a lot more comfortable when the power goes off, but its roar is not pleasant, particularly since it isn't a steady drone, but surges whenever there's a change to the electrical load (like a fridge compressor switching on). Another point in favour of a GPL generator is that they avoid the problem I had last month: engines don't appreciate it when you leave them sitting around unused with the same petrol in the fuel system for two years. I only managed to get the thing started after I had completely drained the fuel tank and line and refilled with new petrol. What jolly fun with the wind howling and snow flying all around.
What made it even more enjoyable was the memory of how, over the last two years, I'd often looked at the damn thing and thought that I really should run it for a couple of minutes every month. Al
If your ENEL meter says that your halogen heater is using, say, 1 kilowatt per hour, then you can be certain that this is the amount of heat being output by the heater. However - and this relates to Fillide's post - there is a problem with the perception of warmth - the comfort factor - created by radiant heat sources. This applies whether you're talking about an old-fashioned British open coal fire, an antique two-bar electric heater or a state of the art halogen heater with microchip time and temperature control. Almost all the heat from a radiant source is converted to warmth that humans can perceive only when it strikes a solid object. If a halogen heater faces nothing but an external wall and if that wall is not well insulated, then the heater will be warming the wall and a lot of that heat will be wasted because it will be conducted through the wall to the outside environment. Indeed, if the heater is several metres from the wall, then the heating of the wall will be so diffuse that it will be difficult to perceive. On the other hand, if the halogen heater faces a well insulated floor, an internal wall or other objects with no thermal connection to the outside, then the heater should, in theory, be just as useful at heating the space as any other electric heater. Whether it will feel like it's doing much is another question. Because convection heaters heat the air and the warm air currents rising off the heater gently circulate air around the room, they are perceived to be more comfortable and it's understandable if they are thought to be more efficient. In the sense that they generally make you feel warmer than a radiant heat source consuming the same amount of electrical energy, they are more efficient at doing their job! But that's not to say that heaters that produce primarily radiant heat are somehow magically making some of the electrical energy that they use disappear during the conversion from electrical energy to heat energy. All the elecrictity going into the heater will always all be converted into heat, but the question is whether the heat is being emitted in a way that's useful in a particular setting. And that's why it's so difficult for anyone who isn't familiar with Donna and her flat to give her a definite answer on what exactly she should do to make her flat comfortably warm at the minimum cost and why it's impossible to put a Euro price tag on the solution. There are simply far too many unknowns. Al
Yes, some of the electricity used by a fan heater is used to turn the fan. The reason the fan will not, once started, keep turning for an infinite time is due to friction, both in the fan bearings and the friction of blades against air molecules. But friction is just the name we give to the conversion of kinetic energy into heat energy. Therefore, that electical energy which has been "lost" to friction by the fan heater has also been converted into heat. And, yes, some of the energy consumed by a fan heater is converted into sound. However, the proportion of the total energy used by a fan heater "lost" in that form is pretty trivial: consider how much noise the very limited energy stored in a couple of batteries can create if it's converted into sound in a radio or CD player. In any case, sound is just the jiggling around of air molecules and, at levels that matter only in a physics lab, that also creates friction which heats up the air of the room. While I agree with Fillide that perception of warmth is important, I think the Laws of Thermodynamics make it pretty clear that, if you take a closed, perfectly insulated box, put any sort of electrical appliance in it and then feed it one kilowatt hour of electricity, the temperature inside the box will increase by the same amount, no matter if the appliance is a fan heater, halogen heater, toaster, lightbulb, electric mixer or an iPod. Again, in the context of this thread, heat pumps are an important exception to the rule in that they take heat energy from outside the box, effectively concentrate it and then transfer it in to the box. Al
Do understand correctly that what is being stopped is the incentive - the arrangement which means the purchase price of a kWh of PV generated electricity is greater than ENEL's currrent selling price of a kWh of electricity? Will ENEL still be required to buy electricity generated by small-scale renewable plants? So, if the incentive ends, then I take it that the best you can hope for when you install a PV system is that the amount of electricty you generate over a year will exceed the amount you consume. But, while that will reduce your electricity bill to only whatever standing charges ENEL might impose, recovering the capital investment in the PV system will take a very long time. Longer, perhaps, than the useful life of the PV panels? It would be nice if the silver lining of this cloud turned out to be a significant fall in the price of panels when the subsidy is removed, but I do wonder if this will happen. Have the incentives available in this corner of Europe over the last few years really driven up the global price of PV panels? If every second house in Italy had a PV array on the roof, I suppose I might think this plausible, but that's not what I see around me. Al
Are you sure about the spelling of this? May very well be a brand name I've never heard of, but since both Italian and British Googles return nill results, I wonder if there might not have been a misunderstanding at some point. In the context of heating/cooling, "inverter" is the nearest sounding relevant word I can think of. I think that just about every domestic air conditioning unit sold these days in Italy is an inverter unit. All this means is that the output is much more controllable than old-fashioned (say, pre-1990) air conditioners which were either running at full speed or completely off. An inverter unit is able to slowly increase and decrease its speed, depending upon how much difference there is between the present air temperature and the desired temperature set by the user. This makes the devices much more efficient in terms of electricity used and more pleasant to live with. However, not every air conditioner labelled as having inverter technology will necessarily also be a reversable heat pump, which is what you'd be looking for if you want to use the unit in the winter as well as the summer. If you look at the labels on these things, it's usually pretty obvious which can be used as heaters as well as coolers: the reversable units will have figures given for both cold and hot output. Al
One of our pellet stoves (installed before I bought the place) is in a part of the house that's a self-contained flat. It was clearly designed to be a "feature" or focal point, in that it's quite colourful and has a large glass window to display the fire. In fact, it was not a particularly suitable design choice, since the flat is open plan and having a pellet stove a few metres from your bed is not all that wonderful in terms of noise. It's not like a jet engine revving up or anything, but it has a fan to force air into the combustion chamber, another motor to drive the geared mechanism and Archimedes screw mechanism that feeds pellets into the combustion chamber and another fan to cool the fire's housing. It is a noise you can get used to if it starts up when you're sleeping, but it can be pretty intrusive if you're watching TV, reading, trying to listen to music and so on. It certainly completely destroys the hush that normally surrounds our house in the wilds of Abruzzo. Our second pellet-fired device is a boiler which is very utilitarian in design: rather like your friend's big black box, Sprostoni. Again, the sound it makes is not deafening by any means, but it does have the same fans and feed mechanism of any pellet fire. We had it installed in our utility room. It's a lot louder than the gas boiler which is also in that room, but quieter than both the tumble dryer and the washing machine. Still, if laundry isn't being done and you walk by the open door of the utility room while the pellet boiler is running, you can hear that it's operating. Bottom line is that pellet stoves are not ridiculously loud (at least not the ones I've seen operating), but I don't think that the living room is the most appropriate place for them. Still, there may well be very quiet ones out there. As far as consumption is concerned, the pellets we get have a stated energy content of around 4.9 killowatt hours per kilogram. This means that one 15 kg bag has about 73 killowatt hours of energy. I believe that pellet stoves work at an efficiency of up to 90%. Assuming that best-case scenario, each bag will have an usable energy of around 66 killowatt hours. Obviously, things are very different in Italy, but to give an idea of what that means in terms that most of us can relate to, I've seen figures stating that the average UK 3-bedroom home consumes something like 25,000 killowatt hours worth of gas in a year. In order to get that much energy in pellets, you'd need 380 bags: or nearly 6 tonnes of pellets. So, on average, a little more than a bag a day, but that's all based on wild generalisations. Here's some real-world specifics: in order to maintain the eight rooms that we occupy at a temperature of 20°, we've been getting through up to three bags of pellets a day during the coldest weather this winter. Our house is pretty much draught-free, but it's a traditional construction (read: without insulation) located in the hills of Abruzzo at 550 mslm. Pellets are by far the easiest and cheapest option for heating, but by no definition is it "cheap" to heat this place to a reasonable temperature even using them. Of course, at some point during the next couple of months, our energy consumption for central heating will hopefully fall to zero killowatt hours per day, something that hardly ever happened when I lived in Scotland! Al
Donna, if your options are limited to heating by electricity in one way or another, then I think your decision on whether to use oil-filled electric radiators, radiant halgoen heaters or fan heaters simply comes down to which makes you feel most comfortable. Using one kilowatt hour of electricity in a conventional electric heater will always produce the same amount of heat, the only variation being exactly how it's delivered. A radiant heat source (like the halogen heaters or the old-fashioned British one or two bar electric heaters) will feel a lot warmer if you're in a place where you feel the radiant heat on your skin or clothing, while a fan heater might feel cooler due the breeze it produces. An oil-filled radiator will produce a bit of radiant heat, but mainly a gentle convection current of warm air rising off it. But, all other things being equal, using one kilowatt of electricity in any of those heaters in the same room over the same time period will result in the air temperature being raised by exactly the same amount. I assume Gala suggests a halogen heater in the bathroom because many people like a source of radiant heat in the space where they're often partly or totally unclothed, but she suggests oil-filled radiators because halogen heaters are not all that good at producing an evenly heated room. Oil-filled radiators, on the other hand, produce a steady, background warmth without the noise of a fan. Gala is also correct to say that this arrangement only has a chance to be comfortable and affordable if the house is well-insulated and doesn't have draughts. The bottom line is that, if you use one kilowatt hour of electricity to power an appliance in your flat, the amount of heat energy you've put into your flat will be the same, no matter how you choose to use it. That applies even if you use the electricity to run a computer, operate lightbulbs, run a fridge or watch TV. (One obvoius exceptioin that comes to mind is electric water heating, since then you're basically putting energy in water which is then drained out of the flat.) As I said above, this rule does not apply if you use a heat pump air conditioner to extract heat from the air outside and use that to warm the air inside the flat. It's not unrealistic for an air-source heat pump to produce 3 kilowatts of heat for every 1 kilowatt of electricity it consumes (obviously, normal electric heaters produce one kilowatt of heat for every kilowatt of electricity they consume). However, if the air conditioner you have installed doesn't keep your flat warm on its own, then there's not much to choose amongst the alternatives if you're considering cost of operation. Al PS: I know it isn't relevant to you, Donna, but I would strongly urge anyone considering pellet fires as a heat source to talk to several people who have experience of living with one of the things before talking to a sales person. Ideally, visit a house with one installed while it's working so you can see and hear it in operation and get the owner to show you what's necessary in terms of feeding and cleaning. We have two of the things and we've used one as our main central heating source for two winters now. I'm certain that we would get a pellet furnace if we had to do it all again, but I'm also sure we would not go for the model we bought.
I assume that when you say you're using your air conditioner to heat your flat, you have one of the modern heat pump units that can either cool or heat the air. Heat pumps are, in theory, more efficient than the more traditional forms of electric heating since they extract heat from the environment and effectively concentrate it. This means that, given a choice of using the air conditioner or a halogen or fan heater to heat an area of your house to a given temperature, it should be cheaper to use the air conditioner. However, air source heat pumps - which is what I assume your air conditioner to be - are not as efficient as those which extract heat from the ground and their effectiveness drops as the outside air gets colder. We have one of these units in an open-plan part of our house and find that it works fine to keep the area warm when it's chilly outside (say, down to 5° C or so), but that its output is not sufficient to keep the area comfortable when the outside temperature falls below that. As for how much it might cost to heat your flat over the winter, that's really impossible for anyone here to say. The answer depends on a lot of factors, some of which have already been mentioned: how well insulated the flat is, the direction it faces, the size of the windows, how warm you want it to be, whether the flat is in the middle of other flats or on the ouside corner of the building, whether any surrounding flats are being heated and so on. Al
The law is as it is in Italy. No point complaining about that here. However... I wonder what actually happens to the waste once it has been pumped out of your septic tank and you've been given a nice certificate saying that you've complied with the law? Just before I moved to Italy, there was a huge kerfuffle in the Scottish village I lived in because a local farmer had agreed to allow treated sewage sludge to be injected into his fields. As far as he was concerned, he was getting paid for his pastures to be fertilised. As far as the local authority and the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency were concerned, the disposal did not present any pollution or health hazards. As far as a vociferous group of local concerned citizens were concerned, Glasgow's shit was being dumped on the pristine fields around our picturesque little village and we were all going to die of thyphoid, cholera, MRSA or some other more obscure but equally vile disease. Of course, the sewage treatment authorities only needed to spend money on disposing of the stuff in this way because the release of treated sewerage into rivers and sea had been banned. The other alternative - burning the stuff in coal-fired power stations - was, according to the envirnomental lobby, also a terrible idea because of the deadly levels of heavy metals which would be dispersed across the county in the smoke. Naturally, having condemned every possible means of disposing of the sludge, the envirnomental groups didn't suggest a means by which it could be got rid of. As far as I could see, the unstated implication was that the "greens" hoped that everyone would simply become more ecologically aware and stop excreting waste. So what happens to the sludge from septic tanks in Italy once it has been processed by a legally sanctioned treatment plant? One thing that's certain is that it doesn't evaporate. Is it burned in one of the oil-fired power stations? Is it dumped out at sea? Does it end up in a huge stockpile somewhere like the Neopolitan rubbish, waiting for the day when an environmentally friendly solution becomes available? Or does it just magically disappear in the way that a lot of hazardous waste has been made to do over the years by companies with strong links to certain renowned southern Italian families? Al
Septic tanks do accumulate a sediment composed of stuff that the microbes working in the tank can't convert to water or gas. The rate at which this indigestible sludge builds up varies depending on several factors, but it will happen sooner or later in any septic tank that's being used. It appears that our "septic tank" was constructed by someone local at some point using very basic techniques. As far as I can tell, it did not have a soakaway of any sort, but the liquids just disperse into the ground via porous brick walls. After we'd been in the house for around three years without having it pumped, it started to overflow. This lovely event was likely due to the damp weather of late 2009 making the ground so saturated that the tank was not able to drain away. My solution was to dig trenches to make a soakaway and then knock a hole in the side of the tank to make a connection to the new soakaway. More than a year on, that solution seems to me working well. The trees growing near the trench I dug are also doing very well! Poking a stick into the tank suggests that there's a considerable amount of semi-solid muck on the bottom. We've discussed this with locals and been told that we can probably expect to pay something along the lines of the prices you quote, Babyeddiedog, if we want to have it done correctly. The cost of pumping and transporting is much less than the fee charged to dump the sludge in the local sewage treatment plant. The alternative that has been suggested is that we just buy a robust submersible pump and disperse the contents of the tank over some of our land. Our situation is such that this would be possible without any of our neighbours being bothered in any way. Since it sounds like something that has considerable comic potential, I'm inclined to take the DIY approach. Al