Craic On

You would nearly need a bank loan to afford to buy your heating oil it’s got to such a price. I got 500 litres of heating oil on January 12th which cost me €460. It ran out on February 23rd. That’s 42 days. However, it is worse as I was away for 5 days in Budapest and had the heating off.

That means that €460 lasted me 37 days. That means that it is costing me around €12.50 a day for heating. That’s a weekly cost of €87.50. If I used oil at the same rate throughout the year it would be costing me €5,520 a year. I know you don’t use so much n summer but summer is getting shorter and shorter ans so I probably spend maybe €4,500 a year just on heating the house.

Poisoned

I used to heat the house with coal when I first came here but gave up on that as we were all coughing from the fumes from the old stove. It turned out when we had it removed that the air was blocked at the back of the house so the carbon monoxide was coming straight back into the house and was giving us all coughs. It’s just as well that we got rid of it.

I decided not to bother about the fire after that as well. We have a problem with it in that unless we kept a door or a window open then the smoke would come out into the room – and people were always forgetting and closing the door.

Coal

I did decide to light a fire recently when we ran out of oil again but found the grate was bust. I think that with heating at such a price I’ll need to look into buying a new one from the co-op. We stay mainly in one room in the house anyway and we’re heating the whole house when we are only in one room.

I wonder what a bag of coal costs now. Anyone know how to get in touch with Seamus Harkin?