In my BCO days I visited a house on Coombe Hill Kingston - a 1960s Grand Design, built on this basis with electric underfloor heating. It was then (25 or so years ago) costing the owner £2K a year for heating. The real problem was that it had been built with solid ground and first floors to take the underfloor cables and so the only way to install wet central heating would have been surface pipes everywhere .... which would scarcely have looked good on a house like that
In practice this would mean converting some form of internal combustion engine to run on gas and drive the generator and you'll not get that sort of efficiency from it in everyday use.
So you do work at B&Q?
Not designed for constant electricity generation. The electricity is a by-product of the heat.
External insulation, triple glazing and air-tightness will probably drop that by half.
... and the value of the property.
Matt, you made that up.
And you clearly work at MacDonalds.
So, tell us, how does comparing a kettle boiled on an electric hob against an electric kettle give a comparison between gas and electricity?
MBQ
Depends what you mean by 'conventional' Roger?
We have some slimline input_time_delayed / managed storage heaters and they have been in there 15 odd years, are switched on 365 and just look after themselves.
No changing thermocouples, fans, risk of water pouring out, poisoning anyone or blowing the side off the house. Also, *all* the heat stays in the house not lots going up the flue. They are also virtually silent.
Ok, they are no good for instant heat needs nor manageable via a wall stat on an instant basis but some of us can live with that for all the advantages. Plus they are fully zoned. ;-)
Ours are very different beasts to the things you used to see in offices etc though.
All the best ..
T i m
Were you born thick or did you have to work at it?
I had in mind anything which uses electrical heating elements to heat up a load of bricks. I accept that modern ones are better than the original sort, and give you *some* control over the rate of heat discharge. But they can only give out the heat they have stored, and when it's gone it's gone - until the next off-peak boost. And if you fail to anticipate a cold spell . .
I wouldn't give them houseroom! A couple of years ago we had to sell my father-in-law's bungalow in which the only heating system was storage heaters - and the valuation, and ultimate selling price, was a lot lower than if it had had a 'proper' central heating system.
Water stores 4 times as much heat as masonry. Why they do not have tanks filled with water (filled by hose) is beyond me.
Masonry doesn't leak.
BTW electricity may well be cheaper than gas with a good heat pump to help it out.
How about jelly? Doesn't flow as fast as water. Maybe even self-sealing jelly...
Mainly because that's not really true.
Water has about four times the specific heat capacity of bricks, but bricks are about twice as dense as water, so the volumentric heat capacity is about a factor of 2. (High density bricks are probably better than than this per volume.)
However, water has a couple of major drawbacks...
You can only heat it about 80C hotter than room temperature, whereas you can easily manage 3-4 times that difference with bricks, thus enabling bricks to store up to twice the energy.
Water corrodes, risking leaks and failures of the heating circuit. Bricks have no such problem.
Heat pump? Not as cheap as natural gas yet. The best of them is extracting from running water, and few have a stream in the garden.
So, with all this air-tightness don't we suffocate? After we hermetically seal the house we have to fit more air bricks?
Are there any 'domestic' Air-to-air heat exchangers that are actually worth installing yet (both from their payback and functionality) and from a d-i-y pov?
All the best ..
T i m
And water can only be heated to nearly 100 °C unless you resort to an expensive pressure vessel. OTOH storage heater bricks can be heated to several hundred degrees.
Doubtless true for fuel costs alone, but what's the answer when you factor in the capital cost of the heat pump and its source, and maintenance...?
Technically domestic (because it is fitted to a house), the Grand Designs house built into the ground up in the Lake District for a vet and her family had one. (Reshown in extended form just a few weeks ago.) The *claims* were that it is staggeringly efficient and wonderful...
But as to fitting it to an existing house, I doubt it.
Probably cheaper that gas CH to install and maintenance is on a per fault call, no need for regular checks like gas is supposed to have. I might install a heat pump AC unit as heating in the house conversion I am doing, heat has a bad effect on his breathing so some AC may be a good thing if we have hot summers. Not that it would be on much as he likes about 75F anyway.
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