Thermaflow - electric heating

[Owain Lastname]

Another tale of misery from all-electric "renewable" heating systems.

Thermaflow on their website

quote as a customer testimonial:

Really good with regards to efficiency and costs. Referring to over 400 boilers installed in its premises the Council?s Buildings Operations Co-ordinator said that the electric combi boilers were really good with regards to efficiency and costs. His comments were based on feedback from tenants. He added that the systems had proved so successful that several tenants who initially refused to change over, later had the systems fitted having been persuaded by tenants who already had the systems up and running. Falkirk Council.

Council tenants disagree:

A mum who has been paying £50 a day for her electricity since a price hike in October is calling for more help from Falkirk Council and Scottish Power. Despite having a brain aneurysm and kidney problems, Mary works seven days a week in a bookmakers and local bar, just to pay her electricity bill, she told the Local Democracy Reporting Service. Most of her wages go on electricity. She is one of 700 Falkirk Council tenants who live in areas that do not have gas and so have electric heating systems called Thermaflow. Even fellow campaigners from Falkirk?s Forgotten Villages were shocked to hear that Mary is paying £1,500 a month for power, heating and hot water.

Scottish Power agree:

A ScottishPower spokesperson said: ?We?re very sorry to hear of the stress Ms Quinn has been facing. As soon as these heating systems, installed by Falkirk Council, are replaced the better it will be for the residents like Ms Quinn.

The Council is now paying to install mains gas to most of those properties.

Owain

[The Natural Philosopher]

well lets assume 20p a unit, so that's 5000/20 = 250 units a day, and a day is 24 hrs, So that about 10KW average.

Cripes. My boiler is only 10kW for a 6 bed house. She must be leaving the windows open

Not heat pumps, then

[Owain Lastname]

I think it's likely the houses are poorly insulated too.

Owain

[Max Demian]

No analysis of exactly *how* she has to pay so much. Does she have Economy 7 or equivalent? Does the central heating have a (large) hot water tank to take advantage of the cheap rate?

Purely (resistive) electric heating is affordable, but, unless you can store heat off-peak you have to be careful and only heat when and where you want to, such as an electric shower and individually heating the rooms, not the "always on everywhere" approach assumed by central heating with radiators.

[The Natural Philosopher]

yes. They have to be. crap houses need something like 20w/sq ft

that would be something like 500 sq ft...

No wonder they put cladding on those tower blocks

[Owain Lastname]

Indeed. Electric wet heating really is the worst of both worlds.

Owain

[Andy Burns]

Saw another "case study" of an ASHP few days ago, got the impression it was installed, and 5 minutes later they got the customer to give a one-liner assessment of how brilliant it is and how quiet, before the installer ran away and they realised how much it costs to run.

[Theo]

From 2019:

A Falkirk Council spokesperson said: ?These Council homes are in areas with no gas supply and the previous heating systems were a mixture of coal central heating and electric storage heating.

?Ten years ago we started to replace these old systems with an electric wet radiator system. At the time of installation, the ScottishPower Economy 2000 tariff for this system was the most economical offering 18 hours of off peak electricity with a unit rate of approximately 5p/kwh.

?The Council has no influence on the costs utility companies charge and over the last few years the cost of electricity has risen significantly. The off peak rate is now approximately 15p/kwh which has impacted greatly on the fuel bills that our tenants now pay.

?As part of our investment programme cavity wall insulation/external wall insulation, loft insulation and new roofing have been installed to improve the thermal efficiency within our homes in a bid to reduce fuel costs.

Economy 2000 This tariff is intended for medium capacity storage boilers providing space heating or both space and water heating. The Economy 2000 supply is made available for periods at ScottishPower?s discretion totalling 18 hours per day, but with the proviso that no interruption will exceed 2 hours. It is important, therefore, that the boiler stores sufficient energy to supply space (and possibly water) heating requirements for 2 hours. Direct acting boilers without storage capacity are not permitted to make use of Economy

2000.

Seems like the systems were designed with a particular energy tariff in mind (like fitting storage heaters to use Economy 7 - this was effectively 'Economy 18'), but then the tariff was pulled. Leaving people now paying 4x as much for heating as they once did.

Theo

[Chris Green]

Theo <theom+ [e-mail]> wrote: [snip]

You don't impact "on" things, you impact them.

E.g. "the price increase impacted me", *not* "the price increase impacted on me".

.... but I think I'm fighting a losing battle here. :-)

[ARW]

Well it kept them warm

[Brian Gaff (Sofa]

Is this another story of the one size fits all approach that never will work for everyone. I mean I have normal storage heaters and a fuel localised oil filled and fan heaters and no way would my bills get to such a huge level. There has to be something wrong or its being used in the wrong way surely? Brian

[Owain Lastname]

Probably.

Electricity is almost always going to be more expensive than gas, except in very well insulated properties where the standing charge for gas would more than the saving on electricity consumption.

I've only had gas central heating in the last two years, and my bills have gone up a bit compared to peak rate electric heaters. The difference is I can heat my whole flat instead of just having one heater on in one room. The extra standing charge for having gas installed is quite high, but the cost per kWh is only fourpence.

£110 on gas and leccy and being warm is better than £60 a month on leccy and not being warm. I guess I'd have had to spend £200+ on leccy to be even remotely warm.

Haven't been hit with any boiler servicing bills yet, of course.

Owain

[Andrew]

Surely that is the crux of the matter ?. Nobody will ever bother to insulate their properties if they know (or think) that they can just keep on getting gas at far less than the equivalent energy of electricity.

[Owain Lastname]

But until the houses can be or are insulated, installing anything other than gas is going to cost people too much money.

I've got cavity wall and shit double glazing. Further insulation is not my choice in a flat. I had the option of storage heaters or gas boiler and obviously went with gas boiler.

Between January and March 2021, the UK had to import 56% of the gas needed for heating and power generation. Government is thwarting Cambo, Jackdaw and other developments before giving us realistic alternatives.

Owain

[The Natural Philosopher]

In many countries it is not. Sweden, with massive hydro, France, with massive nuclear...

[Owain Lastname]

Fair point, but we have gas

We do also have loads of wind in Scotland, but won't fund the interconnects to get it to where it needs to be.

Owain

[Andrew]

Which is running out and only meets about 50% of UK demand from what I gather. And it's still an ancient carbon store which has a finite life.

[alan_m]

I asked someone the other day about how their ASHP system, commissioned last spring, was working.

I was told it was working well -- then..... An additional oil filled radiator has to be used in the study. It appears that it cannot cope with heating hot water and heating at the same time so priority has to be given to one or the other. The system seems to have to be operated 24/7 in the recent cold spells.

The newly built extension has underfloor heating but the rest of the house has radiators which I don't think were re-sized when the oil boiler was replaced (with a ASHP).

[Theo]

We've had our system about 4 weeks now, and still getting to grips with it. It's a 13kW ASHP plus new rads and cylinder, replacing a 14kW oil boiler and system that was pretty knackered - we also wanted to get rid of the oil tank, and the hope is to use it for cooling (which I shall investigate when the weather is warmer!)

So far, it's ok. Hot water is great - compared with an electric shower and almost never running the oil boiler for hot water to just run the taps, it's nice to have hot water on tap. It's wired S plan to prioritise DHW over heating, but when there is a call for both it'll do the DHW for maybe half an hour and then switch back to heating once the tank is hot. It's not really noticeable that it's in DHW mode apart from it working a bit harder - the house isn't cold.

Heating wise, we're still getting used to it. The house is a bit strange - brick downstairs, timber upstairs (loft conversion). The brick part is fine. The timber part is very leaky and the walls, while in theory rockwool insulated on the back side, aren't very well sealed. I think the radiators have been specced for conductive losses but not leaks. It'll be better to fix the insulation than fit larger rads... so that's a project to be getting on with. When it turns on in the morning to a cold house it's about as good as the old boiler was in warming it up (ie it's not running overnight).

The controls are also a bit thick - installer fitted regular boiler controls (on/off) rather than anything that modulates the heating demand. So far we can set downstairs to be warm and upstairs is on the cold side, or take the wireless thermostat upstairs and there is comfortable and downstairs is too hot. Likewise if we have a log fire downstairs then the thermostat reckons everything is toasty but upstairs is cold. It needs some work with the thermostat placement and TRVs to get everything set up nicely (I did ask for a quote for dual zone, but the price was silly for a valve and a bit of piping to two rads - I might get somebody else to do that in the future). Another project on the list is better controls, which will be needed for cooling anyway.

The noise is a bit different - less rattly than the oil boiler, more low drone. We're still getting used to it, and there is still some air in the system which makes it a bit noisier until it comes out of the valves.

Consumption wise, on top of our baseload it's about 5kWh on a mild day to

25kWh on a freezing day (with no fires). Not sure what we used on oil (about 1200l/year, but I don't know what peak consumption was in winter). No idea what the COP is - I don't have a heat meter to measure it (another project?).

So it's... a heating system which... heats. Could do with some fettling and bedding in, but then the system fitted 40 years ago probably required similar.

Theo