dfk41 I reckon I know you pretty well Dave and I am far from convinced that in winter months you will let the thing run continuously in favour of efficiency of savings to be made.
I have to otherwise the heat pump won’t work properly. If it’s very cold and you allow the house temp to drop to far, the heat pump can take a long long time and a lot of electricity to catch up. Now it’s not so bad with the high temp pumps, but although water could be at 60C or more to the rads, efficiency would be almost 1:1 and even if the water is hotter, it can only put out 9 or 10kW of heat.
The idea is you let the house drop by 2C at night and the heatpump is on low and slow,…using a small amount of leccy. My hope is the house will be at a constant 20C during the day and 18C at night. With my old boiler, the thermostat was set to 18C, heating for 3 hours in the morning and 3 hours in the evening.
Ando Is the issue with modern condensing boilers not more to do with the fact they are grossly oversized for every property, causing them to short cycle frequently, which leads to a short life span?
30kw size seems to be standard yet most homes won’t need a boiler anywhere near that size. If they were sized properly based on heat loss of individual homes they would condense properly and run a lot more efficiently.
This is absolutely correct, plus the efficiency of your average condensing boiler is more like 80-85% and nothing close to the 85% they supposedly achieve.
dfk41 That is as maybe but at the end of the day, Dave is hoping that for the same outlay approximately, he will be able to have a warm house for the majority of the day as opposed to ramming a bit of heat in first and last thing and freezing in between! The problem is, at some point the efficiency and savings slide rule comes out…..
I am hoping for this and when I got the slide rule out the OVO heat pump add on Tariff, is likely to be around 40% cheaper for heating than mains gas. For hot water it’s already proving to be 500%+ cheaper and in winter is likely to be 400%+ cheaper. For hot water alone (twice as much):
savings and Costs around:
- +£180 per annum (hot water)
- +£110 gas standing charge
- +£400 per annum heating and to be more comfortable
*
- £252 heat pump service, 10 year warranty and all repairs
So totting it up almost £700 - £250 a true saving of around £450 per annum and it might be more. However lets see what reality brings.
