A few days ago I drove past a newly built house out in the country, a tasteful Regency style bungalow with a Laurel perimeter hedge. Everything was grand. And then I saw it. Stuck to a gable at the driveway end up on lintels supported on 4 inch solid blocks the awful eyeful of forest green PVC; the oil tank. How incongruous it looked given the measured nature of everything else, how old fashioned and just plain wrong. Appended to the end of the house like that it might as well have been a donkey & cart. It seemed to belong to another era. And of course it should.
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| It’s Only Green In Colour |
The domestic oil tank should by now be a thing of the past with new construction. It seems to have very little going for it. It is not attractive and represents the worst kind of regressive thinking in the area of energy and how we consume it.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that you can be fairly sure that everything about the interior of that house is bang on trend. Feature walls; check, five en-suite bathrooms; check, travertine tile; check, marble countertops; check, stereo surround sound; check. It’s a pity the same diligence wasn’t carried into the discussion of how to heat the place. The heating system is also bang on trend, for 1970.
I would have thought that ground source heating would at this point be the default setting for once-off houses in rural settings. The initial installation cost may be more but surely the consumer is sufficiently educated on these things by now to know that it’s an investment worth making.
The ground source system takes advantage of the constant warmth of the earth approximately 1 metre below the surface. This means that the heating solution maintains a consistently high temperature at all times and just needs to be raised an incremental amount electrically when the homeowner calls for heat via the thermostat. The solution is drawn through the heat exchanger in the heat pump which raises its temperature the requisite amount and then distributes it to every corner of the house via the looping network of pipes which are set into the 75mm thick sand and cement floor screed. The mass of the screed acts as heat storage which gives off heat even long after the system has been turned off.
It is possible to run the system in conjunction with a dual tariff electrical meter and only turn on the heat during night rate hours. The heat storage capabilities of the floor ensure that heat continues to dissipate throughout the following day and is then topped up again that night.
It is more palatable to receive the electricity bill every couple of months knowing that it includes your heat and hot water. It makes further sense in light of where our national energy policy needs to go over the next couple of decades in order to meet internationally agreed targets. By 2020 two fifths of the electricity we consume will need to come from renewable sources. In Ireland this is primarily wind. Realistically, no matter how committed an eco-warrior you are a regular household heating bill is a fact of life. It makes sense from every angle that it be a bill for power which ever increasingly is going to come from renewable sources.
The whole issue of once- off houses in rural settings is an emotive one. Many make the point that county councils grant permission for far too many of them, that they are an inefficient means of providing accommodation as well as being a blot on the landscape. Historically those concerned with the environmental impact of unfettered once-off rural development would cite the proliferation of a different kind of tank to prove their point; the septic. Oil, it seems, is next.
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