Property Ladder - kitchen supplier

[IMM]

He was getting nothing free at all. It was a heat pump, and as McCloud explained it is the same as a fridge. they even use fridge compressors. Is "moves" heat from the earth into the house, as a fridge moves heat from the cabinet into the condensing tubes at the back of the fridge.

The compressor costs to run. The running costs of a ground sourced heat pump is about the same as natural gas. He has a trench (surface) ground heat pump system. The best are where you have a bore hole 50 to 60 foot deep. Surface systems can run out of available heat giving only low grade heat, not enough for hot DHW.

That church would cost a lot of money to heat as insulation was not a major part of the construction. I would have pulled the church down and built a proper eco house. The old stones could have been used to clad, or add thermal mass to a new eco house, still giving a link with the past.

[Jan Brock]

Yeah, this particular episode started in 1875 because the design was intended to appeal to factory workers who wanted to take their boots off in the parlour after a hard 15-hour shift on the looms - and it ended in 2095 when it was put on the market for the standard factory worker wage of £108,000.

[John Laird]

YMYA. Spoilsport producers. The answer is: work from home and leave the telly on after the breakfast show. To Buy or Not to Buy is on daily at the moment...

[Tim Mitchell]

In article , Mike Mitchell writes

I didn't mean that. I meant they had to get the plumbers to help them do the building work, once they had finished the plumbing.

[Garibaldi8]

[Alex (YMG)]

Although in all fairness, I (just an ordinary man on the street with a trade account) get about 40-50% off at Magnet from their BM bit (on main items like stock doors etc.), and I hardly go there. Not sure if it applies to their kitchens though..

Alex

[Pete C]

Eh? Why not leave the church alone and build your eco house elsewhere, I bet the church will stand a lot longer!

BTW was there a natural gas supply where it was? If not it might explain the use of a heat pump.

cheers, Pete.

[G&M]

Had a narrower glass bit

I think B&Q sell these now.

[IMM]

That building is environmentally a disaster. It will consume far more energy than needed. It also looked crap. It looked like a lousily designed church, of which I have seen countess better looking churches over the past 25 years demolished.

Oil and LPG would be cheaper. The capital cost of the heat pump was 10,000 euros. The extra they paid for a fad would buy a lot of oil.

[Anna Kettle]

Hurrah!

Anna

~~ Anna Kettle, Suffolk, England |""""| ~ Lime plaster repairs / ^^ \ // Freehand modelling in lime: overmantels, pargeting etc |____|

01359 230642

[Dave Jones]

In that case would have been cheaper to put in a top of the range condensing combi

[Pete C]

More mentalism...

Was the church a new house build to look like a church or and existing church? Did it have a lot of thermal mass?

cheers, Pete.

[chris French]

It was an existing church, on the west coast of Ireland, in Co. Mayo.

Small old stone church, had been burnt out (after a lightening strike, about 100 years ago. It was very sympathetic restoration. Masons rebuilt the bell tower (damaged in the strike), Inside was divided up a bit of course for practical use, but the whole internal structure was pretty much free-standing (basically wood frame). whatever happens to the internals the structure will still be there for a few more hundred years I imagine.

Thick solid stone walls, I should think so :-)

Seeing as the geothermal heat is 'free' (ok electricity is needed for the heat pump), I can't see what the fuss if it consumes more energy than needed. and if it pays itself back in 6 years seems good value to me

[Rob Morley]

Could they not have used a wind pump instead of electric?

[Ian Stirling]

But, it's not.

Let's be optimistic, and say that the heat pump takes 1Kwh to pump

7Kwh of heat. (about the theoretical maximum efficiency for pumping from 0-40C.) But, electricity is some 3-4 times dearer than gas. So, unless you are comparing it with electric heating it's not looking so rosy.

It's (eventually, assuming it lasts for ever) 7 times cheaper than electricity. But, it's only about 2 times cheaper than gas.

Payback can happen faster if energy prices rise (gas and electricity will tend to rise together unless we go nuclear), but it will never outperform adding insulation unless electricity is free.

I'll take a guess that the walls of the church are 75cm stone on average. That's a R value of around .6, or a U value of 1.6W/m^2/K. To halve the thermal loss you only need about 10-20mm extra insulation.

[chris French]

The location of the church would indicate the alternatives were oil or LPG, I can't imagine mains gas was available there.

Oh sure, but they seemed to want to leave as much stone exposed as possible, ditto exposed roof timber. I've no doubt it could have been made more energy efficient.

[Ian Stirling]

A heat pump is more than simply a pump. It's basically a refrigerator cooling the field where the coil is buried and heating the church. While in theory you could run this from wind power, it'd be a really large and complex installation to do so. (in combination with battery bank to level the load, and ...).

[Rob Morley]

I know - would you be happy if I called it a compressor rather than a pump?

Why? Wind turbine goes around, compressor goes around.

Why would they need this?

[Ian Stirling]

Don't care, it's just some may misunderstand.

Because I'm not aware of any that do it that way. It's of course possible.

To make the heating work when the wind does not. A 4Kw (mechanical or electrical) windmill is not going to be cheap or easy.

[Rob Morley]

That's when you use the electric motor. Although I imagine that they wouldn't need it much on the west coast of Ireland.

Just had a quick read around, and it seems it would need to be rather large. Oh well ... :-)