Replacing Dry Central Heating with electric air conitioning?

[qwerty123]

We currently have a dry central heating system powered by a furnace unit which has eventually packed in. It heats the house through a series of vents which go into all rooms. I can't imagine it being the most efficient system in the world. The house also has an old school tank boiler upstairs with water tank.

We have had quotes for replacing this with a radiator system powered off a combi boiler which takes away the need for all the other gubbins, but there are downsides. It's getting quite expensive, especially when we have to factor in the price of pulling up parts of the floor etc. It also means we have to install radiators which reduces the size of the rooms, which also means we have to rearrange a lot of stuff around the radiators.

One alternative that I've looked into is having an air conditioning installed in the larger rooms and just having a simple electric radiators in the smaller less used rooms. The air conditioning systems quote 1kwh of power produces 3kw of heat and maybe even more. This is compared to the regular electric heaters which produce 1k of heat to kwh of power. I've seen some pretty cheap air conditioning unit on Ebay but not sure how reliable they are.

As far as just cost of usage goes, what are the differences in the two systems. Is a gas combi boiler with radiators still going to be that much cheaper that electric (even if it is based on the 1:3 ratio.)

[caziques]

Using air conditioning units for heating is very popular in New Zealand.

Advantages: good units are reasonably cheap to run - cooling in summer.

Disadvantages: Really only heats one room, can be draughty. Trying to do multiple rooms means multiple indoor units OR you could use your existing ducting with a single large unit.

Single units would be about a thousand each to install, a single large unit could be five thousand.

Note that heat pumps used for heating will NOT be 3:1 efficient in cold weather.