Immersion heaters

You can get dual element immersion heaters

There are many ways to reduce immersion heater power. What's sensible depends entirely on the reason you want to do this.

- simmerstat

- capacitor

- choke

- triac dimmer

- diode

- 2 elements in series

- smpsu

- transformer

- connecting the neutral end of the element to the water instead of the mains neutral (usually not a good plan, but can be)

- series lightbulbs (not often a good option)

- wind your own external element

- and others

NT

Actually, they don't seem to be cheap. I spose you could always hang a BT139 in place of the triac in a normal 500w dimmer with appropriate heatsink ( if you find one which uses a triac instead of a quadrac). Just a thought.

harry expressed precisely :

In message , Harry Bloomfield writes

Don't know about the grammar. Everything keeps jumping around on its own before you have time to read it! I hate sites like that.

Which explains precisely why the scammers for "Green" solar PV energy can get 10x more money for something that is only 30% as good. It is completely insane to generate high grade electrical energy and then use it to heat water when you can heat water directly in a solar panel with far greater efficiency.

The only problem is that the latter does not attract enough misguided bribery to make it cost effective. Our energy policy is a farce!

You are behind the times. Yes it does attract grants. (RHI)

Thanks for the link but it doesn't actually specify what the rating of each element is. Just says 3 kw for the unit.

Thanks for making my rusty electrical knowledge appear anything but adequate.

These days I wouldn't attempt to build anything requiring electrical skills beyond those needed to wire a house.

By f*ck, they know how to charge. Those 11" elements are 20quid from my local stockist.

You missed the goto /stop buttons.

Thanks to all those who have replied to this thread. I will be investigating and perhaps investing in items highlighted here as already on the market.

I had forgotten how time consuming reading this ng was so I will withdraw back into the woodwork to perhaps surface briefly in another 9 months or so after another 79000 unread posts. ;-)

Goodbye for now.

You could always wire two 3kW heaters in series. That would give ~750W. Opps he's missed it!

Arrrgh! Aren't you going to tell us *why* you need a low wattage immersion heater before you go??

Tim

He wants to use the "free" electricity from his solar panels to heat water as a low grade storage system. After all a true "green" doesn't want anyone else to benefit.

Or perhaps he wants to run his immersion heater off bell wire. 750w on 1A wire is 3x rated current, so he'd need about a 10% duty cycle to make it work ;)

NT

"attract enough" the proposed levels for domestic installations are not =

great. Oh and there is the small matter that the RHI scheme is not in place.

The only thing currently available is the RHPP. =A3300, one off, for qualifying solar thermal systems.

ember.org...

Waste of time. It would never be economic to build a store big enough to hold all that heat. A normal hot water cylinder only holds around five or six Kwh. A couple of hours output from the PV. Even more difficult is to prevent heat from having leaked out of the store by the time you need it.

You can buy a gadget that turns down the heater to match available power from the PV but I have looked into this, the savings don't warrant the expense.

Starting next year. I have a plan to take advantage of it. The rep is coming tomorrow. Apparently payments are to be made over the next seven years as well as the =A3300. =A30.17/Kwh (as assessed). Dunno whether it's inflation linked & tax free as per the FIT payment. My initial calculations come to around 8% return on outlay. But we'll see when the rep comes.