My parents had an oil fired Aga that heated the domestic hot water and ran fifty weeks of the year, it was turned off when we went on holiday and serviced the day we got back.

Initially we had the Aga guy to do it, eventually I ended up doing it as well as installing some second hand Aga’s for other people. It was long before the days of OFTEC and there were few restrictions on working on oil fired appliances.

However I would not touch one these days, I have been in a couple of houses where there were small oil leaks and the insurance companies seriously considered demolishing them and removing the soil from under them to decontaminate the area.

The clean up bills were huge and the homeowners from both houses were in rented accommodation for two years whilst the clean up work was completed.

Only if it is < 50% efficient, which seems unlikely.

Peter Bernard Ladkin said:

Also, swapping out that "old gas boiler" for an energy-efficient one may well save you half the cost or more of gas.

We need a fully wall and window insulated draught proof house but without any radiators at all.

:

As there is no heating upstairs the beds will have DC electric blankets and woollen bed cloths will keep us snug.

When I renovated our house (up here in Yorkshire) I insulated everything - floors (over cellar), outside walls, roof - generally to a U value of around 0.15 - and most of the windows to 0.8. We have no radiators just 15mm PEX pipes clipped to the side of the joists to give underfloor heating - with 'stats in each room. The heating in the bedrooms I'm pretty certain hasn't come on since the day it was commissioned - sufficient heat drifts up from the downstairs rooms even during the depths of winter. For bedclothes we swap between a summer weight quilt for winter and an empty quilt cover for summer. There's 2.14kWp of PV on the roof, along with about 1.5kW of solar thermal. There is a log burner (which we use typically once or twice a week during the depths of winter) that feeds into the same thermal store as everything else and a simple heat recovery ventilation system.  Up until recently the FIT payments for the PV easily paid for all the gas and imported electricity with profit to spare - with the recent price increases we're just about breaking even.

    - Andy.