Would love to hear from anyone with experience, either professionally or as a customer, who can help me get my head around a few aspects of this.
Please don't worry too much about the cost and subsidy angle as we live outside the UK and things will be a bit different. It's more about the tech aspects. What works with what.
Our 4-bed house with smallish garden currently has traditional gas CH, while electricity powers everything else. The roof is south-west facing and according to the potential supplier, very well situated for solar panel installation. Sunshine hours here are somewhat (about 15%) higher than London, but I suspect slightly more concentrated outside winter months. However we somewhat naively assumed that solar could take over from the gas CH and he thinks not. This is where we need to understand our options, as we'd like to get away from gas for both cost and anti-Putin reasons! (And our CH boiler is 16 years old)
The solar guy started talking about a heat pump as the alternative for powering the heating. A neighbour (guy hails from Kent actually) has installed one for his newly reconstructed house. Says it requires a lot of deep digging if the garden is small. We don't like the sound of that, but if needs must. I've also read that a heat pump CH system may not find the existing radiators to be compatible so we might have to change them too.
After our meet last week with the solar guy I cam across an ad in the local freesheet. I won't bother you with too much detail until we understand better but it seems to talk about converting gas boilers to work with "foto-voltaic electricity". Like I said, I can't yet get my head around what they are offering, alhtough I'm aware that an electric pump powers our gas CH system.
I guess the main question is, what are our best options for ditching the 100% reliance on gas for heating (inc. hot water). ?
0
Comments
I decided to do nothing: on the basis that I would be dead before there was any chance the kit would pay for itself.
Yes its me lol
Solar PV is a no brainer imo. I'm not sure on the install costs out there but here in the UK we install 3.85kw of solar for £3,340.00. I know there are quite a lot of people out there with negative views on solar buy if anyone has that cash in an ISA or deposit account they would be mental not to use it to pay for Solar, the ROI out weighs anything investment wise for such a small outlay.
You mention your heating, your neighbour is talking about Ground Source Heat Pumps, unless you have a really large property dont even consider that as the install costs are mad plus the disruption of the digging. Look at Air Source Heat Pumps. The install is far less disruptive and the cost far lower. They are really efficient and if installed by a decent fitter should return a minimum of 3.4 meaning for every 1 kw electricity used to run it you will get 3.4 kw of heating out of it.
They come in varying sizes as you will need a heatloss on your home to calculate the size of unit it will require
For air source I looked at and spoke to a few people who have it, their main criticism is how slow it is,
This is a good video
My company is based in the NW and do not install outside of the area. We mainly carry out work for Local Councils and not one off properties. However Im sure there are plenty of installers down there that would be able to assist you mate. Get a few quotes though because there is quite a large price difference in installers basically some of them take the P.
But I will say that anyone getting new boilers or new sources of energy for the home is basically buy g a new shinier sieve. If you house is old and single skin brickwork it loses most of its heat.
So I am going to sound really thick, here. Let's say we have a heat pump (air source by the sound of it, I'll have to ask my mate why he opted for ground source).
The heat pump would power the central heating so we dispense with the gas boiler, goodbye Gazprom.
Right; so the electricity that powers the heat pump...is the idea that the solar panels might produce enough to power it, but when they don't, in deep dark winter, we revert to mains electricity to power the CH system? Or is that too much to ask of the solar panels, and we'd have to run the heat pump off the regular electric supply?
And what about the radiators we have now with the gas system? They are all relatively modern, installed with the gas boiler as part of our reconstruction of the house (but already 16 years since we moved in). Will they be OK with the heat pump?.
I'd endorse what @Greenhithe says about insulation though. This house was built in the 50s, pretty solid walls designed for colder winters than UK but when we bought it to re-construct and extend we didn't skimp on insulation and double glazing and that really paid off. I notice it most when I come back to London in winter. Wherever I stay, the rooms feel somehow...draughty. Not this house. So I suppose that's good news for the heat pump to work effectively. And until this crisis, the gas consumption has been very reasonable for a house of this size.
What you say about 40 degrees would worry me, could you really heat a large house with the rad water temp at 40? what about your domestic hot water? You need that at more than 40?
I think that's why people tend to leave their heating on 24/7 with heat pumps (air) at 19/20 degrees minimum as otherwise it takes hours to heat your house to a decent temp.
We want to move quickly on this, because this country, like most of mainland Europe, has suddenly realised that it's Russian gas powering their CH systems and they really don't like it. There was already a newspaper report that there is a run on supply heat pumps, and everyone is suddenly driving less and more carefully.