Average house here, crappy upstairs insulation (leaky loft conversion), heatpump works fine. Radiators, no UFH.
Mine doesn't, because it's not wired - often we don't in the UK. Handled -9C with no problems. Maybe in Minnesota...
Theo
My parents still had paraffin heaters and a man in a van came around every week to fill up my parents jerry cans. Every petrol station probably had a paraffin tank/pump on the forecourt.
My aux heater isn't wired, so I can be sure it never runs. I don't think it's common to wire them in the UK, because it doesn't get cold enough to need it.
Theo
JOOI what's your plan for a failure of the heat pump (e.g. the fan fails? And couldn't the aux heater just be wired via a manual switch?
I feel much the same as you. I recall scraping the ice off my bedroom window on seemingly numerous occasions and viewing the crystal patters on the window.
I would also have had blankets and an eiderdown and not a new fangled duvet.
So it annoys me when people say they have a choice between heating and eating. If they are obese or have obese children this could be a ideal ploy, but the idea of starving to death and prioritise heating seems a daft thing only a snowflake idiot would do.
Bl;ess. The 'green solution' is all about making massive profits and enforcing expensive solutions we neither need, nor work
Nuclear electricity would be cheaper than gas, without heat pumps
I wonder how long before there are mass protests about how big
That happened a long time ago. But the gummint is being neatly two faced by 'supporting renewables' without giving them enough subsidy to make them profitable.
It is mandatory because it is the only way to get hot water to 60°C to kill any bugs
But these days they may use a high end thermal camera.
For hot water I fitted an immersion boost timer with a pushbutton, so that's covered.
For heating there is an electric immersion in the buffer tank I could wire, but it wouldn't really be a good idea to keep the heatpump running if it was faulty as the controls come from there (ie if the outdoor unit was isolated the pump and valves wouldn't get switched). If it's faulty you'd have to assume the HP would be isolated.
As it happens the boiler controls the installer fitted (and I disconnected) could be put back (drives the valves and pump itself rather than from the heatpump and just does a 'call for heat' from the HP - it operates the HP quite inefficiently) but at the end of the day you've just made yourself a complicated and expensive to run electric boiler. The backup immersion is I think also only 3kW so you don't get a lot of heat from it anyway.
We have a woodburner, and frankly using COP=1 wet heating is a bit of a faff when we could just get some £20 electric heaters to keep things going. When the oil boiler broke we did exactly that for a month (in November) - so I have a stack of those in the garage.
Theo
Wrong heater. The aux heater is in the heating circuit, and are what people talk about for use in a Canadian winter when the COP can't get high enough.
The immersion heater is in the hot water cylinder and used to boost hot water temps for legionella protection.
Everybody has an immersion heater, but that doesn't heat your house. Few installs wire the aux heater.
Theo
Here they always do. Because heat pumps to run off a single phase spur are simply too crappy to generate whole house heat
As a home owner, I don't even want to THINK about using resistive heating as an in-fill for a cold air day outside. After heating my home here, totally resistively for three days, and seeing my electricity bill for the month double in value, I want no part of resistive heating.
Of course you want a ground source.
You want a refrigerant gas for the compressor, which is cheap to refill. You could be refilling the stupid thing, every two to three years. Back when we could use R12, you could run a box for 20 years, and not have to refill it. Modern systems are crap in that regard. Some consideration should go into MAINTENANCE COST when costing a system. CO2 is a high pressure system. It could leak. The compressor will only last ten years. And so on. These are all considerations for an installation, as well as whether corrosion in the ground loop or the rad loop, is a problem.
After your install is done, if the compressor dies, the ground loop can be reused when the new compressor unit is installed. But the initial installation could be a wee bit expensive. Depends on whether the ground loop is totally horizontal, or has vertical wells.
Paul
Thanks.
Duvets are not "Newfangled". They have been used for centuries in Scandanavia - but only since WW2 have been known about in the UK
Erm, I have one (in Cambs). It's on a 32A single phase spur (the max it takes is 21A but 32A is the next size of breaker up). It generates whole house heat all winter just fine. It doesn't use the 3kW aux heater because it's not wired and my installer never wires them.
Theo
Is it known how much the whole system (including battery) cost? The battery alone is £3000+! Also, I wonder why he was continually "tweaking" the gas boiler? I've never touched my Worcester-Bosch since it was installed over 4 years ago.
Ground source is good if you have the land. But many people live in suburban houses that are maybe 200-500m2 land area (much of that built up), and that gets into borehole territory with GSHP.
The nice thing about GSHP is it doesn't depend on the outdoor weather - no icing on your evaporator, and a fairly constant temperature all year round.
In North America, how often do people refill their A/C units? I've not heard of leaks being a major issue, especially for sealed units (like window ACs and similar).
Car ACs seem to have a leak problem, but they often don't strike me as very well constructed.
One thing I'm not sure about is depletion of ground heat over the long term. For a horizontal collector the ground is warmed by the sun in the summer, so essentially you're mining the previous summer's heat. For a vertical borehole I don't know how well the heat taken out of the borehole compares with the heat flux from the surrounding crust, and whether over decades you end up cooling the ground so that efficiency declines.
(The London Underground has the opposite problem: after a century of putting hot things in the tunnels, the ground is now warmer around them than the surrounding rock)
You can probably mitigate that by using them for ground source cooling by putting hot water in the pipes in the summer. Which is another thing you don't get on a gas boiler :-)
Theo
It'll be a cold day in hell when you can get an air sourced heat pump to reliably provide domestic hot water above 60degC in England.
Quite. None, in fact.
But duvets were not common place at the time.
Don't you recall the chain Brentford Nylons? A chain dedicated to selling horrid nylon sheets.
Welcome to hell:
The unit can do up to 75C hot water (using the heatpump, not the immersion).
Of course your efficiency drops so you wouldn't want to do it all the time, which is why it's only doing that for the legionella cycle.
According to the spec sheet, it'll output 60C hot water with an outside temp down to -15C. It'll only do 75C at freezing or above.
Theo
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