As I write, the price of oil is nudging on $135 a barrel. It was only a few years ago that the commodity was just $30 a barrel, but we didn't realise how well off we were then or what lay ahead of us. There is currently no sign of any relief from these price increases; in fact, many are predicting that oil will reach $200 a barrel before the end of the year.

The rising price of oil has serious implications for all households. Apart from the huge increase in the cost of diesel for transport, we are now also paying a serious price for the fuel to provide heat and hot water in the home. Heating our dwellings and providing hot water with cheap oil is a thing of the past, and the sooner we adjust to this new reality the better.

Rural dwellers are at an advantage over the urban population when it comes to sourcing affordable fuel. We can still go to a nearby bog and get a trailer load of peat or grow and harvest timber from our own woodland. Peat may be a dwindling resource, but using timber, wind energy, hydro-power or fuel crops such as oil seed rape or miscanthus, are just a few of the many renewable and sustainable options. We can even harvest the heat from the ground beneath us with geo-thermal systems or produce methane from crops and manure and thereby generate electricity.

Solar panels are also proving popular and the cost of these is falling annually, making them affordable for many households.

Part of the problem is, of course, the bewildering number of options available and the difficulty in deciding what is best for each individual household.

Sustainable Energy Ireland has done a lot to promote alternatives to oil through their greener homes scheme and currently they grant-aid the purchase and installation of a number of heating systems.

Initially, they heavily promoted wood pellet systems, but some of these have had teething troubles and much of the pellet currently available is imported from abroad, which perhaps rather diminishes the benefits of using them as a 'green' fuel.

That is not to say that pellets are bad. Simply that SEI rushed into the promoting of them without assessing and accounting for the inevitable teething problems.

There are now new manufacturing plants in production and hopefully they will help provide another sustainable, homegrown source of fuel for the future.

Switching from oil

Wood chip has proved very successful, but is generally best suited to larger heating systems such as those required by hotels and larger buildings. Some hotels are saving huge amounts on fuel bills having switched from oil to wood chip.

The traditional wood-burning stove is, of course, one of the best and simplest systems of providing heat. They are at least five times more efficient than an open fire and use far less fuel. SEI do not grant-aid the basic wood-burning stove because of the fear that other fuels and household rubbish might be burnt in them. These stoves are relatively cheap to purchase and install and do not really require grant aid to encourage their use, so their exclusion from the scheme is not a major issue.

However, for anyone with a ready supply of logs they are an excellent and cost effective means of providing home heat. With a back boiler, they can also provide hot water.

Conifers such as larch and spruce can also be safely burnt in these stoves as the sparks are safely contained. Spruce is an excellent and inexpensive stove fuel, but it does burn a bit faster than the more traditional hardwoods.

A far more sophisticated system of burning logs is the log gasifier burner, which is claimed to be 98pc efficient -- compared to a miserable 15pc efficiency for an open fire. These burners are very economical on fuel but not cheap to purchase and install.

They do, however, appear to represent the best option for anyone with a reasonably large house and who has dry logs available from their own woods or in their locality. Despite initially refusing to grant-aid these systems, SEI is now having second thoughts and is close to including log gasifiers in their greener homes scheme.

This system is already well proven on the continent and following a lengthy campaign by timber growers and other interested parties, SEI has finally relented.

Hopefully this will see a rapid increase in the use of these super efficient methods of utilising home-produced logs from our woodlands.

There are many different makes and systems on the market for heating the home, and perhaps the best means of making a choice is to go and see each one in action and talk to the homeowners to see how they are managing the changeover from oil.

Time is running out for those of us who still use oil as our primary fuel, but we can now make the change, and at an affordable price.

Despite the initial cost of purchasing an alternative heating system, the low cost and availability of logs and other farm-produced fuels should quickly allow such an investment to pay its way.

- Joe Barry