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This winter, warm your cockles with the best in energy-efficient heating.
Weather happens, like it or not, but you’ll enjoy the colder months ahead a lot more if your home is warm and welcoming – a haven at the end of a chilly day.
The type of heating you choose will depend on whether you want instant heat or slow heat, central heating or local heating, constant heat or heating you can turn on and off.
Wood-burning fires
 There’s simply no match for the ambience of a wood-burning fire. “Water and fire have appealed to our basic instincts since we were cave dwellers,” says Christina Cairns from The Fireplace. Because of this comfort factor, wood-burning fires are particularly well suited to living areas, though you may choose to combine yours with a fan and ducting system to transfer extra heat into the other rooms of your home.
Wood fires come in three types – free-standing, wall inserted or with a wetback water heater for extra power savings. Before you buy a wood burner, check that it meets the national environmental standards for air quality. Since 2005, all new wood fires installed on properties of less than two hectares must discharge less than 1.5g of particles for every kilogram of dry wood they burn and have a thermal efficiency of at least 65 per cent (for a list of nationally authorised models, visit www.mfe.govt.nz).
Some local councils have even more stringent requirements, so you should also check that the model you are considering has been approved by your local authority or you won’t be granted consent to install it.
Although wood fires have been labelled environmentally unfriendly in the past, the new fireboxes burn far more efficiently than the traditional brick open fire and give off up to three times the heat of gas fires. Christina believes they are an environmentally friendly option because the fuel comes from a renewable source and because, while they are growing, trees give off oxygen and absorb carbon dioxide.
The most environmentally friendly wood-fire option is the pellet burner, which is designed to burn pellets made from recycled sawdust and wood shavings, creating almost no emissions. Because you can use a timer and a thermostat to control the rate at which the pellets are automatically fed into the fire, you have more control over the ferocity of the fire than you do with ordinary cut wood.
Gas fires and heaters
 If you love the idea of a naked flame, but just the thought of carting all those logs around makes your back ache, a flame-effect gas fire may be a better option. Fed by reticulated natural gas from the gas mains, some of these look so much like wood fires it’s hard to tell the difference.
Christina Cairns says the hot news in gas fires is the balanced-flue fire, which vents the by-products of combustion outside so they have no effect on the air quality inside your home. Unlike unflued gas heaters, they won’t make the air damp or release nitrogen dioxide into the air, so they are a healthy option for asthmatics.
David Waters from Rinnai New Zealand says flued gas heaters can be wall-mounted, floor-mounted or set into a masonry fire surround. They can be installed in just about any room (even on internal walls) and they come with a timer so you can set them to fire up half an hour before you get up in the morning.
Some portable unflued gas heaters can be carried from room to room and plugged into a floor socket to receive a supply of natural gas. Other portable gas heaters are fed by bottled LPG. However, it is important to ensure sufficient ventilation when using an unflued gas heater.
Plug-in electric heaters
Of all your heating options, a portable bar heater, fan heater or convection heater is probably the cheapest to buy, but the least efficient to run.
To find out how many cents it will cost you to run a plug-in heater for an hour, multiply the capacity of the heater (in kilowatts) by 20. So a 2kW heater will cost 40c an hour, which works out to $2.40 a day, or $72 a month if you are running it for six hours a day.
For a free calculator to work out how big a plug-in heater you will need to heat your room or house, go to www.consumer.org.nz and type “choosing a heater” into the search line.
If possible, look for a heater with a timer and a thermostat so you can control the temperature. Heaters with a fan will heat the room more swiftly but they can be noisy. Because they are at floor level, plug-in electric heaters can also be dangerous if you have children in the house.
If you are often at home during the day, consider a night-storage heater, which heats up during the night when off-peak electricity is cheaper, then releases its heat throughout the day. These cost about 12c per kilowatt to run.
A heated towel rail serves double duty by taking the chill off the air in your bathroom while at the same time keeping your towels fresh and warm. But it’s not necessary to have them on 24 hours a day, so install a timer or remember to switch it off each morning and on again at night. This simple act could save you up to $100 a year for each heated towel rail in the house. To calculate the savings you will make if you use your heaters more efficiently, visit www.energywise.org.nz/calculator/.
“Fire has appealed to our basic instincts since we were cave dwellers”
Heat pumps
As much as a third of your power bill goes on heating – more than $660 a year in most New Zealand houses – so it makes sense to look for the most energy-efficient heating solution.
There’s been much discussion about whether heat pumps really do result in a lower power bill. The simple answer is yes, as long as you don’t get carried away and run them day and night – a temptation when they multi-task as air conditioners, dehumidifiers and air purifiers. By pulling the heat from the air outside and transferring it into your home, heat pumps can produce up to 5kW of heat for every 1kW of electricity used.
For maximum efficiency, choose the right-sized heat pump for the area you want to heat (go to www.consumer.org.nz for a free calculator). Set the temperature at 18-22°C and turn the heat pump off when you’re sleeping or not at home.
Heat pumps with an inverter system that slows down and speeds up as necessary to maintain the desired room temperature will be up to 30 per cent more energy-efficient than those with a fixed-speed system. Panasonic’s latest inverter models go even further, using e-scroll compressors for more efficiency and combining this with an environmentally friendly refrigerant.
Nicole Williams from Mitsubishi Electric says it’s important to check that a heat pump is quiet. Mitsubishi’s quietest model, the MSZ-FB25, makes only 20dBA (frequency-weighted decibels) of noise on a low fan speed at maximum operating capacity.
If you live in a colder area, make sure your heat pump will continue to operate when the temperature outdoors sinks below zero. And, for maximum power savings, look for a heat pump with an Energy Star ( www.energystar.govt.nz), which will provide up to $4.50 worth of heating for every $1 you spend; a less-efficient model may give only $2.50 for your $1. You can choose from floor or ceiling-mounted models, or a split system that uses one outdoor unit to drive heat pumps in different rooms. For more buying advice, visit www.smarterheating.co.nz .
Central and underfloor heating
 Central heating is a big-picture heating system that delivers warmth to every room of the house. It’s usually set up to operate on a thermostat, with the house divided into a series of zones so you can turn the heat on when you need it.
Central heating can be powered by water or air. In the most energy-efficient modern systems, the air or water is heated using either a gas or wood-pellet boiler or using a heat pump water heater. The air is then fed into the rooms of the house through a series of ducts, or the water is used to heat radiators in each room.
Alternatively, water heated in these ways can be used to heat the floors throughout your home. Because heat rises, underfloor heating is one of the most efficient and pleasant forms of heating. There are no wires or appliances, so it’s also one of the safest.
Although underfloor heating can also be powered by electricity, water is commonly recommended because it is four times more efficient than electricity at transporting heat. The water pipes are embedded in the concrete floor slab as it is being built – just make sure the concrete is well insulated underneath or you’ll end up heating the earth below your house.
Our thanks to Wendy Millar for the location and our model Peri Izzard.
Please see the photo gallery for more images from this story.
Story: Isabella Reynolds & Tracey Strange
Photographs: Jackie Meiring
Stylist: Claudia Kozub
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