Our heat pump (two 90 metre deep boreholes) outputs water to the floor heating at about 20 degrees C & the house is warm in winter: ~22 degrees. But as others have said, insulation is everything. Our walls have a foot of wood fibre insulation panels in them, and polystyrene panels under the render outside.
2 Likes
You’ll have to explain how 20 degree water can heat a room to 22 degrees…
If you said the 22 degree room was warming up the water that would make sense
We are wondering what to do in our drafts solid wall 1890 shit box
In 25 degree heat of summer it’s still cold most of the time and in half the rooms. Too crafty I fear for ground source heat or air, solar restricted as conservation area and limited light due to large trees.
The community heat thing looks interesting but plan a currently is to create three roooms downstairs that we can insulate properly as at the back of the house
Might have to sell up but it’s my wife’s business and we love it here plus would miss the space. Plan b is. To save a bigger pension to pay the higher heat bills and hope for a tech solution like heated clothes
2 Likes
Just had the Sunamp plumbed in and turned on, eddis are apparently in short supply now so we are waiting for that bit of control.
Bloke who fitted it reckoned that our house and currentradiators could live with a 45° heat pump given what heat losses we will have with properly fitted windows.
That’s the key.
My last place was a new build but had a conventional boiler.
It did have heat recovery on the boiler and was a sealed house with forced air re-circulation. I was spending an average of £6 a month on gas over the course of a year and the house was at a constant 21c. The bonus was that even when it hit the 30’s in a hot summer the inside was still 21c. The air system would switch to an external feed to heat if the outside temp was above 21c and the inside lower and the same if the inside was above 21c and the outside below to cool.
It really was quite surprising how a well insulated house can save energy, especially now in this draughty 90’s house where the boiler is going pretty much constantly in Nov to maintain 20c.
2 Likes
EWI and internal are the new gold rush that pv was in 2012
But this time PAS 2035 will stop all the klondikes
… hopefully
That’s Bulb Energy gone tits up, 1.7 million customers.
1 Like
Looks like Bulb have collapsed.
Oh joy.
I expect I’ll hear something telling me what to do to find a new supplier?
Or not?
From their press release
We’ve made the difficult decision to support Bulb being placed into special administration. This process is designed to protect Bulb members, ensuring there’s no change to your supply and your credit balance is protected.
Special administration is designed to allow Bulb to continue to operate as usual so you don’t need to take any action. Your tariffs are not changing, and the price cap applies to all consumer energy tariffs.
Hopefully it will all work as planned…
Oh fuck!
Happy days 
Looks as if the Gov will run it for a while (hopefully with the same staff). Nothing could go wrong, surely?
Certainly the privatised utilities like energy & water are proving to be a great success offering an unbeatable combination of terrific value and unimpeachable customer service.
1 Like
If you’re with bulb don’t try and do a switch now, it will fuck you up in getting any account credit back soon.
They’ve made a lot of Tory donors very rich. Mission achieved.
1 Like
Protected from what? I dare say my £250 winter credit balance with Bulb will have lost 50% of its gas value by the time it is reallocated to a new provider.
Probably too obvious to need saying, but some simple insights here into how bad things can get in the all-electric world when the electric goes off
People whose whole heating system is heat-pumps are vulnerable to single-point failure.
We once spent three days on the trans-Siberian express. We would pass the occasional settlement, all but the tiniest of which had arrays of large-bore piping connecting the buildings. Apparently these were communal steam heating systems. On the rare occasions when one failed in the winter there was an immediate risk of people freezing to death. The train itself was entirely electric, except at the end of each carriage was a solid-fuel (coke or, in extremis, wood) samovar which provided boiling water for tea, porridge etc. If the leccy went off there was at least that.
You and yours Radio 4 have been covering the storm elec issues.
My inlaws in Sweden had an air source heat pump, hot air blow only, installed above the entrance to their small house.
Even in middle Sweden winter temps, it was heating their small single story, house pretty well. Down to minus 10 degrees C!
They had the original elec boiler to top up and do water.
Operative words here were, small and well insulated.
It’s a standard build Swedish House 1971.
So probably about as good insulation and draught proofing as a UK new build 
Other neighbors there with more money had borehole ground source. The trick is to pay enough up front and get something that adequately provides enough even for the minus 15 to minus 25 deg C they get.
Some skimped and were always having to top up with direct heat elec £££’s.
This was all about 15 - 20 years ago.
The houses they are building over there new are much better of course. Hardly require any heat.
It can be done, there is the knowledge, it’s just in the wrong places, i.e. not UK.
Our heating engineers face a big scaling problem. Usual too little, too late, have to suffer a Dunkirk before something gets done.
We bought a ready built one off new build 5 years ago.
It’s pretty warm and well insulated.
Usual spec insulation, + insulating fire barrier + 16" of water reed.
Underfloor heating everywhere.
Boiler only supplies 40 deg C water to it, it’s on a couple of hours in the morning, storing heat into the floor and that just gives heat back all day and evening.
You can have the front door open, loosing heat for half an hour, shut the door and the floor just returns the temp to what it was!
I asked the developer, at the time, why not install ground source at build?
Of course no need! They could install gas boiler, current known tech, cheaper and no prospective buyers were thinking alternatives back then…
Will we be here long enough to make ground source worth while / boiler will last a fair while yet. Maybe?
I do fancy a solar farm at the end of the plot. Behind a hedge it would be unseen. Battery too.
Any move we made in the future would have to have underfloor heating and low U value, as must haves.
2 Likes