Which is better and more economical, a gas boiler or gas-oven heating

Our subscriber shared his story with us.

More than 15 years ago I bought an old house in the Poltava region (Ukraine), built in 1954. It was a standard post-war hut, consisting of an oak lattice frame covered with a mixture of clay and straw. The ceiling is reed, also coated with clay. The thickness of the walls fluctuated around 20 cm. Later, the previous owners laid the house in half a brick. The thickness of the walls increased to 40 - 42 centimeters (18 - 20 cm - adobe part, 5 - 10 cm - air gap, 12.5 cm - brick cover).

This house was heated by stoves. At first, they burned solid fuel, and when they brought gas to the village, they converted it for blue fuel. The result is the so-called gas-stove heating.

In the first years after the purchase, I did not make any major changes to the structure of the house. Gas consumption was 2200 - 2500 m³ per year. My parents, who knew the Soviet KChM boilers firsthand, insisted that gas-stove heating is the most economical. But, as it turned out, they were wrong. After all, modern boilers in terms of efficiency cannot be compared with the old Soviet ones.

Several years later, having saved up some money, I completed the completion of the house. The walls of this part have the following construction: half brick + half of the Crimean yellow shell block + plasterboard sheathing; there are air gaps of up to 5 cm between the layers of shell and brick, shell and drywall); total wall thickness reached 45 cm.

I also changed the heating system to a gas boiler. And since I have a garden and, accordingly, a little firewood, I installed in parallel, just in case, a solid fuel boiler, which I have never used for 7 years. Therefore, he did not affect the purity of the "experiment".

And here are the results I got.
With gas-stove heating, the area of ​​the house along the outer perimeter was almost 53 m² (I don’t consider the small extension, since it was unheated), and the gas consumption was about 2350 m³.

After completion, the area increased to 74 m² (almost 40%), and gas consumption dropped to 1,800 m³ in the first year. And when I replaced the old rotten wooden windows with metal-plastic ones with two packages (three glasses) and a reflective coating, I began to consume gas in the range of 1300 - 1500 m³. That is, it reduced the consumption of blue fuel by 40%.

If earlier 1 m² of my house "consumed" 44 m³ of gas per year, now it is 20 m³ (55% less). Of course, these calculations will be incorrect, because the larger the area of ​​the house, the less “costly” one square meter will be. But even the actual consumption of gas fell by 40%.

And this was achieved only by replacing the heating device and windows. And since the cost of gas, appliances, building materials, installation services is different everywhere, it is difficult to calculate the payback period of the modernization. But I'm happy.

Now, in the future, I have external insulation of the walls and ceiling from the attic, which should also have a positive effect on the energy consumption of the house.