Reverse Air con

Yes, I DIY fitted one in my living room 5 or 6 years ago, which also serves as my office during the day if I'm working at home (which I usually do, unless I have a customer or meeting to attend). It allows me to heat just the living room, and it is very efficient and cheap to run. Also allows me to cool it in the summer, but to be honest, there are usually just a few days of cooling required, verses several weeks of heating through the winter.

For heating, it works well except for an outside temperature range between 0C and 5C, where the outside evaporator will ice up with condensation, requiring it to run through defrost cycles, at which point it becomes inefficient. Once the outside temp drops below 0C, it works fine again (although I didn't realise this for first couple of years).

I have it plugged in to a power meter, and ISTR it used about £15 of electricity all through one winter.

So, very pleased with it. Mine came from B&Q when they had £200 off. B&Q only did them for about 2 years, but were it not for the £200 off, specialist suppliers would have been cheaper, plus they go to the effort to do the paperwork for 5% VAT on air-sourced heat pumps, which B&Q didn't.

The other thing I looked at is these units were much cheaper if you can drive down to some of the warmer parts of Europe and buy them there, where they aren't seen as luxury items. Don't know if that's still true today.

The DIY fitting isn't particularly easy (that's why B&Q stopped doing them). You can get units professionally fitted too (a colleague had that done), but the installation cost is several times the equipment costs, so that works out much more expensive.

There are some rules on what you can and can't do with refrigerant if you don't have the relevant C&G, but the rules do allow you to fit preloaded aircon units with self-sealing connectors (although bizzarely they don't allow you to check for leaks).

Reply to
Andrew Gabriel
Loading thread data ...

I think I must be losing the plot a little ...

250w x 8 hours =2kwH so 60kwH/month £72/year at 10p/unit quite reasonable for multiple family pets but .... so 3% of monthly bill would imply 2000kwh per month (3/100*2000 = 60) which is about 2000/30 =67kwH/day or about 24000kwH per year !!! at 10p/unit thats £2400 OMG I thought our 7600KwH was high :-(
Reply to
Ghostrecon

Correct and still the case I think.

No. Only a requirement for separate controls.

The situation was due to change on the 1st October 2010 (hence why I started construction on 28th September, so as to keep BC out of it as once construction has started you are locked into the old regs and exemptions). However, I think that the change was abandoned after the new government came in.

SteveW

Reply to
Steve Walker

It's a heat pump

Reply to
Rick Hughes

Yeah, up in the great frozen north :-) It gets pretty chilly here (-30 not unusual) and the cold season usually lasts 5 or 6 months. We've got about 15kW of electric baseboard heat in the house, backed up by a propane furnace.

I looked at last Feb's bill and it was a shade over 2700kWH - about

2000kWH of that was heating (I can't be exactly sure, because the water heater and tumble dryer run from the same meter as the baseboards).

The baseboards are all on a load-controlled setup so the power company can switch them off remotely during periods of peak demand (to avoid the need to buy in extra power from elsewhere at great expense) - the theory being that the propane furnace picks up the slack when they're off. In return, we get charged about 5 cents per kWH for the baseboards; the regular tariff is just over 8 cents.

cheers

Jules

Reply to
Jules Richardson

thanks for that I was wondering if my logic was wrong - can I plug my extension lead into your baseboards - I'll pay you 10cents/kWH :-) umm on second thoughts the voltage drop would mean I would need a big cable several thousand miles long :-)

Reply to
Ghostrecon

HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.