Alternative energy

I could do with an alternative energy source for my own personal use, but that is not what I am thinking about today. Having browsed through the brochures that we got at the weekend last night, I simply cannot understand how we can simply put a box outside our house and magically take enough heat from the outside air to warm outr house and hot water when the air temperature is down to -20C. If it were that easy, then everyone would do it. I can only suppose that it uses a lot of electricity. The next option is the ground heating whereby you busy enough piping in the ground around your garden to take heat from the earth. In our case that apparently mean about 400m which will not fit in unless we make 4 holes, each 120m deep straight down in the garden. Again, I suspect that this will be very expensive to install and not that cheap to run. Finally we have the solar option, this will not provide all of the heating that we need, but can, at best, provide 70% of our hot water and 30% of the heating. The rest has to come from oil, gas or I suppose electricity. I have a feeling that we will have to go for the oil as there is no gas and the cost of connecting to the local heating is prohibitive.

All this consideration of upgrading the heating system is actually something that we are considering along with the posibility of making some changes to house. We are considering adding bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs or at least making some changes through the house and whilst we're making a mess, it may as well be a big one...