Hi @Locky . Many thanks for your offer of advice.
The construction is a bit unusual here. It’s a large houseboat made out of a converted Admiralty ammunition barge.
This is her at low tide. When the tide is in she floats!
So in terms of the space heating requirements, the top bit is like a timber frame house. The bottom bit is like a boat. The feeling that I get is that, although it is insulated, it is thermally leaky. Building regs do not apply to house boats so the people who built it just did what they felt was good enough. It’s not terrible to heat but not brilliant either.
Because it is a boat and there is no vehicle access we use electricity for all our water heating, space heating, cooking etc. We are on the grid. As I said above there is no “central” heating system. Currently it is heated by a mixture of convection heaters and old-school storage heaters. This year we have also experimented by replacing the older heaters by newer electric radiators that have accurate thermostatic controls and are programmable (by Rointe) and these have reduced out electricity consumption somewhat.
What I’m trying to achieve is to use less electricity for heating. One obvious place I thought to look was replacing resistive electrical heating by air-to-air heat pumps. The reason for air-to-air is because we don’t have any “ground” for a ground source pump and also we don’t have wet radiators. Installing a wet central heating system would be a massive undertaking and something that I’m not keen to do, given the fact that water leaks on a boat are a fairly serious issue because the boat is water-tight!
However, my current thinking is that air-to-air heat pumps might not be a good option for us for space heating, due to the face that the units would have to produce quite a lot of heat in the winter to keep the place warm and that might put them in to a situation where they are actually less efficient than resistive heating. Really not sure if this is the right conclusion though as it’s more based on gut feeling than any hard evidence.
Any thoughts?