I am in the process of overhauling my home heating and plumbing. I bought a 2600sq/ft 1980s Cape Cod in southern Maine on the coast. I've reinsulated the walls and roof and am continuing to make improvements in sealing the house. Overall, the insulation is pretty good. The house is built on a slab with a 5 ft high frost wall.
Currently I have a old noisy oil burning boiler/on-demand water heater and forced hot water baseboard heating. I also installed a Jotul Oslo wood stove and a Fujitsu 15RLS2 heat pump. The boiler is a mess, the previous owner never serviced it. It has broken down twice and I have dumped about $1500 into it within the past 18 months.
This past winter we relied almost exclusively on the wood stove and heat pump which got me thinking. Do I even need this oil boiler? Even in the summer, when it is just heating hot water, it can easily go through 60 gallons of oil per month. We do not have natural gas lines in my town.
My thought is to scrap the oil boiler, get another heat pump, and install electric baseboard as a backup. I would also install a heat pump hot water heater. In the long run I plan to install a solar electric system...
Is this plan crazy? Should I keep some sort of fossil fuel based heat source? Is the electric baseboard a bad idea?
Here are temperature statistics for the town I live in: http://temperature.weatherdb.com/l/3943/Cape-Elizabeth-Maine