Well angelaew sounds like you have a plan! Its such a hard decision to make. Would you believe we are still deciding. We have 8 solar panels installed (construction pv) a company in Dublin and now pricing our plumbing and deciding our heating system. I was adamant that we were going underfloor heating/ rad/ stove with back boiler and oil condensing as back-up but our plumbing is trying to convince us otherwise. PLumber thinks we should go underfloor throughout GF with aluminium rads upstairs and air to water system. His logic is that we are producing electricity which will offset the usage by the a2w system. We considered this and went back to him and said no and we'll stick with our plan but he sent us away again to consider as he thinks we're mad! Pro's and cons are causing so many problems! Instant heat v ambient constant heat Oil/ back boiler v a2w maintenance costs etc supply of turf and having to get this every year ...cutting/ getting it in etc capital cost outlay (approx. 5K extra for the a2w) simplicity of traditional system and basic system v fairly new technology and fear of unknown. cheaper running costs potentially with a2w etc... etc.... I'd love to hear any more thoughts as at the moment whilst we were so adamant we're back to going round in circles!

As said ... it all depends on the heat loss of your building / room. A passive house (with near-zero heat loss / with actual gain) can be "heated by a candle", and it's actually a problem in such places getting the heat from, say, cooking "out" of it (don't get an Aga if you have a passive house !). On the other end, a drafty 1890's victorian terrace with an EPC E will leak heat so badly - floors, walls, roofs, windows - that no efficient heating system replacement will get it warm. That the old cable-based electric underfloor heating "cooks" your feet is true (my parents "upgraded" their 1980's electric UfH to radiators around 20 years ago ... because of that as well as the running cost). That carbon-film-based electric underfloor heating with its nice and even heat distribution is a much more comfortable "feeling" is also correct. But if your heat loss notably exceeds the ability of of your heating system to introduce heat ... it won't get warm. "Wattage" ... is just a measure of heat loss / gain, Energy-per-time. If you loose heat at a rate of 1kW then you need to introduce heat at that rate to keep the room temperature the same. My advice is: Get a heat loss calculation done first, before you embark on installation of underfloor heating. The manufacturers are usually rather willing to help with that, to make sure what gets installed is suitable for purpose.

Just a cheap but effective solution. We also have a kitchen / diner in an L-shape with a small lounge area attached.................all open plan. We have one large radiator that was heating it. Firstly, I notice that you have no curtains on the window in the middle. All the curtains ( including the window ) should be thermal backed and as thick as you can get to stop the heat going out of the glass. Secondly, the little radiator in the middle of the double doors doesn't look like it is large enough to have an adequate heat output for the size of the room, so I would change that. There are charts on line to work out the size you need, or if you enquire at any decent plumbing merchants, they'll work it out for you. Adding a good depth window sill to under the window will help prevent heat loss up and out of the window too. We bought a ceramic radiator to plug in, in the conservatory as a back up to our larger radiator and it works a treat! Really slimline too. However, the biggest saving on the heat loss is our curtains, which are really, really thick, make sure they cover the sill.

I looked into air source heat pumps for a house that I didn’t buy in the end. I concluded that if a gas boiler is possible then it’s initially an easier and cheaper option but an ASHP is a better option long term because although there is a higher acquisition and installation cost the grants reimburse this and long term the running costs will be much less than oil. Grants pay out for 7 years- most people claim to have clawed back the set up costs after 5/6 years and then enjoying lower fuel bills are much better off. There are a couple of things to bare in mind- that the initial cost is high, that the grants reimburse people without gas better than those with gas, to get a grant you have to have a wet system which means radiators or wet under floor heating (so you can’t have a hot air system as they would have in lots of other cold countries). You would lose a bill for oil but gain a bigger electricity bill..... overall it will be cheaper by some margin. You might have to upgrade your electrical fuse board. People who have an ASHP complain that it doesn’t get radiators as hot as a conventional boiler which means that they have upgraded radiators too which is an extra cost although possibly one you would be considering if the whole system is old (it does seem that you can get new and smaller radiators that give out more heat than a big old one). You need to have somewhere for the ASHP outside (they are about the size of a fridge). And lastly it seemed to me that an ASHP provides hot water at a lower temperature than a conventional boiler which is why so many people also put panels on their roof in order to offset the cost of boosting the hot water- again this is an extra acquisition cost. My research is now a year old and possibly out of date so if you like the idea of an ASHP you need to find an engineer who specialising in this type of installation to talk you through how it would work for your house.