How shall we heat our house?

Whenever it gets cold we start thinking again about sorting out some heating for our house. We don't have gas and want to chose a sustainable option so have been thinking about heat pumps, biomass, solar and anything else that might suit.

Our house

I am going to put our specific details we gather as it may come in use to someone. We have 129 square meters (1,394 sq ft) of living space. We have a small woodburning stove at one end of the house and have to leave the doors open throughout the house to encourage the heat to spread out. This means that none of the rooms are warm. We also have old fashioned storage heaters (one in an office, one in the hall and one in the downstairs loo), we have been removing the other storage heaters in the house as we have been renovating. We got a new heater that heats on demand for the bedroom when we had our little one. Heating by electricity is very expensive so we only use the office storage heater and the bedroom one for a few hours in the evening.

I am going to document what we find out as I go along and would welcome any comments too please.

Insullation

Obviously the first thing is to stop any heat loss. So far we have added joists in the roof space to double the height of the roof insulation. We used Eco-wool which is made from 85% of recycled plastic bottles and is non flamable and also Warmcell. We also put Matisse, which is made from 80% recycled cloth (wool, cotton and acrylic), with 20% polyester added as a binder (made by a social enterprise in France), I don't think Eco Merchant do this anymore so if anyone can point me to a supplier in the UK please let me know.

thermafleece insulation We also used Thermafleece (sheeps wool, see picture) and Hemp between the roof supports on the sloping part of the roof. We used lots of different things just to try them out.

Any time we are lifting floor boards were are filing the cavity below with more Warmcell. We have also been drylining the interior walls with Celotex as we have been decorating the house.

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