Installing our heatpump

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Image of the day – 144

What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye. I’m posting an image every day or so.

At the end of January our heat pump was installed, and before long we had warm radiators and underfloor heating, something we’d missed since our gas boiler developed a fault in October. At the time our first thought was to get the boiler repaired, the part would cost £500 and the labour would be a similar amount and at the end of the process we’d still have a seven-year-old boiler and we’d still be burning gas. We wanted to avoid using gas if possible because we want to reduce the amount of carbon-dioxide we produce.

There is a substantial government grant to make heat pumps a more attractive idea, so we thought it made sense to take advantage of it. After discussing it with our energy supplier, Octopus Energy, one of their surveyors visited, made a plan of the rooms, specified the required changes to our radiators, planned for pipe runs and siting of equipment, and we were ready to roll.

It all took longer than we expected and some changes had to be made to the design as events unfolded, but by the beginning of February the new system was in and working.

A different kind of heat

Our old heating system used a gas boiler, it could produce a lot of heat quickly on demand, so we had a series of thermostats to turn radiators and heated floors on and off as required to keep rooms at the right temperature. At night and during the middle of the day a time clock turned the system off entirely to save money, then came back on half an hour before we arrived home after work and half an hour before we woke up in the morning.

The new system is on all the time. A room thermostat increases or reduces the flow rate to keep the house at whatever temperature we set, and starting from cold it can take several days to achieve the set temperature. We’re beginning to like this way of working; the house stays at the temperature we prefer, around 19 C, and it only rises higher if the outside temperature is high. In that case the heat pump stops heating the house and just provides hot water.

Energy bills

It’s still early days to assess how our heating bill will change. The heat pump is an electrical system so our electricity bill will rise, but our gas bill will now be zero. The heat pump cools down outside air by extracting energy from it, and pushes that energy into our radiators and hot water tank. One kilowatt of electricity can push about four kilowatts of heat into our home, and as we have solar panels on our roof and a storage battery, some of that energy can come from the roof even at night. There is no environmental effect, we’re not producing carbon dioxide and the heat we steal from outside leaks back out again over time. The better our house is insulated, the slower it will leak and the less electricity we will need to maintain the temperature difference between the cold outside and the warm inside.

When we buy electrical power from the grid to pump heat (mainly in midwinter), that grid power is more than 50% green as well; so even that is far better than burning gas to keep warm.

Image of the day 144

This is the 144th ‘Image of the day’ I’ve posted. That is what we’d have called a gross when I was a child. Ten eggs in a box was ten, but twelve eggs in a box was a dozen and six was half a dozen. We still use those terms. A baker’s dozen was thirteen, a dozen with one extra for good measure. And a dozen dozen also had a special name – a gross. 12 x 12 = 144. So today there is a gross of ‘Images of the day’ on the Journeys of Heart and Mind website!

I wonder if I’ll ever reach a great gross, ie a dozen gross, or 1728 ‘Images of the day’?

See also:

• Baker’s dozen – Wikipedia
• Dozen – Wikipedia
• Great gross – Wikipedia
• Gross – Wikipedia
• Heat pump – Wikipedia
• Just Have a Think – Dave Borlace (great videos on green energy)
• List of UK energy suppliers – Google search
• Octopus Energy – Company website
• Octopus Energy – Wikipedia

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