It was reported on the BBC East news today that a school in Cambridgeshire has removed it oil-fird heating system and installed a Ground Source Heat Pump System, of necessary size, bilk and complexity. It is said to have cost £3.2 million, and is expected to save £50,000 per year. So after 64 years, assuming zero running and maintenance costs, it might pay for itself.
Wow, I bet the salesman got a big bonus!
It's probably the different buckets of money bullshit.
The £3.2 million came out of a building/maintenance bucket and doesn't have to paid back by the individual school.
The heating bill for the school comes out of their yearly budget.
Much like my local council building some new pathways in a local park but to get to these new pathways you had to use the older pathways which had degraded to ankle deep mud. Asked why the old pathways had not been fixed the answer was that there was no money left in the repair and maintenance budget. The money for new projects probably had to be spent before the end of the financial year or be "lost".
do they work in cold weather....mostly
....the air source ones do.
do they
Is that part of a community system also heating 160 homes ?
£3.2 million sounds like enough heat for five schools.Paul
I had one where the outside unit froze up. That is when I discovered that they need to be specified for UK air temperatures, which not all units were.
We don't know if the oil system was knackered and what the cost to replace it would have been. Judging the size of the building, I'd guess the heating output for building the size of a school (Comberton VC also has a heated public swimming pool) would be quite substantial: wouldn't surprise me if the replacement plant cost including installation would be quite a chunk of cash.
The point of the extra government pot is to make tech which is currently unaffordable cheaper, by increasing demand and by training up installers. So in that sense it's an investment in low-carbon industry.
Theo
They all have ice buildup, that's how getting heat out of cold and damp air works. They have defrost cycles to melt ice that's formed on the unit, and they run automatically in cold weather, maybe for a few minutes an hour.
If the unit is primarily an air conditioning unit designed for cooling, it may not be winterised in places like Texas, where they don't expect to get freezing weather (but they did, in 2021).
If somebody fitted a monobloc outdoor unit and didn't add either glycol antifreeze in the water loop, or antifreeze valves, that's a faulty installation.
Ground source use water with antifreeze so they don't freeze up.
Theo
The company that came to sort it out, the original installers no longer being in business, simply told me that it had not been properly specified for use in the UK. The outside unit they fitted instead continued to work well for many years.
The air source ones struggle. This one is ground source.
Still a stupid waste of money. They interviewed the headmaster, and he was wearing a jacket and shirtsleeves. No jumper in winter. They could just turn the heat down a bit!
Andy
The air source ones dont, mostly. ground source might
Did you actually believe a word of that? Low carbon industry! That will be an aluminium smelting plant then
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