Aircon

[Andrew Gabriel]

I think it was 3 summers ago I fitted a split aircon unit in my living room. It's 12,000 BTU (3.5kW cooling and a bit more heating, 3.8kW IIRC). This was after fitting a similar unit for my parents, and being very impressed with it.

I've had a power meter on it all this year. Started using it in the early spring to heat the room when I didn't need to heat the whole house. Through the summer, it did some cooling, although not as much as in previous years as it wasn't very hot. Used it again for heating this week. Just checked the power meter, and it's clocked up 60kWhrs, which comes to about £6.50, which is much lower than I would have guessed had I not measured it.

[www.GymRatZ.co.uk]

Blimey!

I have considered fitting on in our underground bathroom (if that's "legal" ) to replace the KW electric wall fan thing which never really gets used.

Trouble is I have too many un-finished projets to start another one. :¬)

[Andrew Gabriel]

Should say last week (and today0.

If you don't use the fan heater, why do you need one? I don't think I would use one for that purpose. Aircon which has a reverse heating feature is useful for supplementing heating at certain times of year, but it doesn't work when outside temperature drops below around

5C, as it will spend more time (and likely power) deicing the outside unit than it would heating indoors. So I would not rely on it for primary heating.

Also beware that if installing in a basement, some units which require the outdoor unit below the indoor unit may not be suitable.

[Tim..]

Very interesting to know that.. I've always known Inverters are pretty good at heating, but not how they compared with energy use to say oil / gas etc...

What brand did you fit / have fitted?

Tim..

[Andrew Gabriel]

Airforce (B&Q own). They were £100 off when I bought them. They should be only 5% VAT, but B&Q hadn't done the necessary paperwork to charge reduced VAT on them. With the £100 off, they were cheaper than all the suppliers charging 5% VAT at the time, but that may well not be the case now -- I haven't looked recently. I installed the self-fit ones. (They also did the same models as professional fit at the time.)

[tony sayer]

In article , Andrew Gabriel scribeth thus

Heat pumps which is what that is are quite efficient and are getting more so ..

Some interesting reading here on that sort of thing...

[Chris J Dixon]

I have worked in offices with such a system as the only heat source. It appeared to operate quite well through the winter. There are, as you say, defrost cycles, but not to the extent that it compromised heating performance.

Chris

[Chris J Dixon]

Just a cautionary thought - if it is the popular plug-in meter, it appears to reset if there is momentary loss of power. Did it also show the expected number of hours?

Chris

[Terry Fields]

Not on EON's whopping 33p per unit Primary Day Rate = of which there's

225 per quarter!

[Andrew Gabriel]

Mine's Southern Electric, which is 10.65p for first 685 units, and 10.10p thereafter. Actually, just noticed that went up to

12.59p for the last few days of the billing period.

[Toby]

Wow, that's like a £45 odd standing charge per quarter!

What is the rate after that?

Is it E7?

[dawoodseed]

In our school the I.C.T rooms relies on the split system for heating, to keep the outdoor unit at the right temperature a separate unit called a crankcase heater stops the outdoor unit icing up.

[Terry Fields]

About 12p, then 4.8p or so night rate.

[Andrew Gabriel]

Crackcase heater is just to stop the refrigerent condensing in the crackcase (compressor outer case) when the unit isn't operating for some time and cools right down in cold weather, and also keeps the crankcase oil thin. It's not used when the unit is operating (cycling on and off in normal operation) as the compressor gets more than hot enough to prevent this.

[Andrew Gabriel]

3580, which sounds about right.