If you have a stone house in Portugal and want to live in it during the colder months this is exactly what you want to know “Stone house how to keep it warm”

There are 5 things that you must do to make your Portuguese home warm and economical to live in.

1, Insulate
Stone house usually have no insulation at all so it is important that you add insulation to your home as it will help to keep the warm in and the cold out.

What kind of insulation and where to put it?
Heat rises so the first thing to insulate is the roof or ceiling. Secondly the walls and then the floor.

Local Cork insulation

Stone house how to keep it warm

Insulated Plasterboard is very effective if installed correctly

 See for further information Roof/ceiling, Walls, floor

WWW.casteloconstruction.com

English speaking builders in Portugal

External insulation. Fixed to the outside walls and rendered over.

2, Sufficient heat source properly located.

When you have finished your insulation work the stone house will probably not be insulated perfectly like a new built house because it is impractical and expensive to do this.  Some of the effects of poor insulation can be mitigated if you locate the heat source or multiple heat sources properly.

Take for example a wood burning stove either pellet or logs they both achieve heat the same way. We recommend that you have a stove which is fan assisted (blows hot air into insulated tubes to rooms around the house or the room that it is in) We prefer stoves that blow hot air into tubes because these can be directed into cold parts of the home and provide very nice background heat. They are also very efficient to run. Simply pushing hot air into a single room will make it hard for the warm air to make its way into other rooms and make the room that the stove is in too hot.

If you decide on multiple log stoves then make sure that they are big enough to take the same sized

logs or you will have to have two different wood stacks and spend a long time filling them with the correct sized firewood.

 Gas or oil fired heating is a popular option. If you have a uninsulated stone home it is just too expensive to run these heating systems.

3, Cure drafts
Seal external doors, windows and access to the loft space so that your hard earned heat doesn’t leak away and the home feel like it is full of cold drafts. Use a vent tube that brings air from outside the home positioned close the log burners so that they can breath properly and not pull air from across the room.

4, Use a readily available, cheap to run and reliable heat source

In Portugal that means either logs, pellets or an air source heat pump.

5, Run the heat source properly and distribute the heat

When you are looking to buy your heater for your house you will look at the output rating so that you can access if the stove or heater will have the capacity to make your old stone house warm.

This gauge shows when your stove is burning correctly and mounts on the flue pipe

For some reason the vast majority of us run them at too cold a temperature which means that they are running inefficiently and that makes it more expensive. Check to see what the makers recommend should be the normal operating temperature and use it.