Cheap home heating
Cheap home heating? Most of the costs of maintaining a house are heating costs. Therefore, when building a house, it is worth taking care to reduce heating costs as much as possible.
There are several methods to do this. In the pages of this article, we would like to briefly present them.
First, you need to ensure that the house consumes little heat. So that it has low heat loss. That is, simply that it should be well thermally insulated. A thick layer of insulation (Styrofoam or mineral wool) on the walls, on the roof slope, on the basement walls and so on will be useful. Insulated doors and modern windows (with an energy-efficient profile, with glass covered with a layer that reflects thermal radiation into the house, filled with noble gas) will come in handy.
It is also worth investing in a modern ventilation system. Gravity ventilation is a relic. It costs a lot (the biggest cost is the construction of chimneys), it only works when it’s cool outside (there must be an adequate temperature difference between the inside of the house and the air outside for there to be a chimney draft). In summer it doesn’t work and still requires unsealing the windows. On the one hand you buy airtight windows, on the other hand you have to unseal them or install ventilators over them to let fresh air into the rooms. You can also glaze yourself and suffocate from the humidity inside the house. So you need to invest in mechanical ventilation. And if you do, it’s still best with a recuperator, which allows you to recover the heat that escapes from the house along with the used air.
Secondly, you need to make sure that the heat can be produced cheaply. By this I mean a heat source that runs on a cheap energy carrier (burns cheap fuel) or runs on a slightly more expensive energy carrier, but works with high efficiency. In the former case, it can be an eco-pea or wood boiler (e.g., a so-called gasification boiler), supported by a solar collector that produces domestic hot water in summer, spring and autumn. In the latter case, for example, it can be a gas condensing boiler. He burns natural gas or propane and cools the flue gas very much, so he uses almost all the chemical energy contained in the fuel. An even better example of such a device would be a heat pump. Such a device is powered by electricity and is used to transport heat from a low-temperature source (e.g., it draws heat from the ground) and return it at a higher temperature, such as to an underfloor heating circuit. By drawing one unit of electricity, a heat pump gives up 3-4 units of heat!
Unfortunately, most often cheap heat is produced by sources that are expensive in terms of investment, and vice versa. The cheapest in terms of construction cost is heating with electric heating mats, sunk in the floor. They produce very expensive heat. A wood boiler, on the other hand, requires the construction of the entire central heating system, so already a greater expense. A heat pump, on the other hand, needs the entire heating system and a dug heat exchanger in the ground (or drilled wells), otherwise it produces heat more expensively than in the example given above.
