Recommended settings for efficient heating and hot water with a heat pump? How to reduce energy use.

Hi @Bev I also have all the controls in the loft, a right pain ! However, I also have a LAN adapter which is connected to my router via an Ethernet cable, so I can use the Daikin Residential Controller app. If you trawl through the COP thread on here I’ve explained more.

Ooh thanks @juliamc, off to read that thread! Thank you

Mine was a £7.50 day yesterday  Radiators came on twice and bath used once.

How’s everyone else doing?

Sounds like those Heat Pumps are working extra-hard with the arrival of winter-temperatures this week, @Bev and @mrmojorisin04. 

Not sure if you’ve spotted it but there’s a bit of an ASHP energy cost/usage comparison going on in this public thread:

 

Be great to see you there! 

@Jess_OVO sorry I’m quiet at the moment Jess, it’s Christmas and we run our own shop, I’m happy to say we’re manic so this has all taken a bit of a back seat. Will be back soon, especially as I’ve just heard we’ve got a grant to help finance a battery pack which could be fitted as early as January :) Sorry for the radio silence

How did you get that grant @Bev ?

This topic is now in the public Smart Home category and ready to help anyone interesting in decarbonising their home’s heating with a heat pump. 

Please be advised, some comments in this thread refer to trials that OVO are involved in, with households of a trialist getting an air source heat pump. We have a private forum area for trialists to discuss their heat pump. If you’re a trialist and you want access, let us know here:

Also, @Bev, what about that grant? 

:)

Hi @Tim_OVO , sorry I keep apologising for not being here,  as I’ve said before it’s December and I run a retail shop, I am up to my eyeballs. Yes we got the grant, hoping to get a battery pack fitted in January thanks to that, and I’ll update all about it in a couple of weeks when it slows down in the shop, thanks for your understanding. 

@Tim_OVO  sorry I’ve just realised I never updated as I promised I would! So…

We live above the shop, so our business runs from our building, a house which is over 100 years old. We are situated in the South East of England and were able to secure a business grant of 40% of a battery pack installation through Locase (Low Carbon in the South and East) to enable our business to reduce its carbon footprint but, of course, it helps the house too.

We went ahead and had a 5.8kW AlphaESS Smile battery installation in December. It’s a modular system, so we can add more batteries later if we want, it’s simple to do after the main install is in place and we will probably end up doing that. As I’ll have mentioned before, we’ve had a 3.32kW Solar Panel installation for 9 years. But we had a combi boiler before the heat pump trial (our installation was July last year) so we haven’t been able to have an IBoost before. We’ve now got one of those too. And we’ve just had the MEL Cloud fitted to monitor the Heat Pump, we were struggling because all the gear was in the loft but now we can see exactly what’s going on… or we will once we’ve got our heads around it!

The reason for all this sudden action is because, if I’m honest, the cost of running the heat pump shocked us a bit. Whilst we have to look at our energy costs across the year to really see the difference, the winter costs of running it are very high. So we’d thought about doing all this things, and the heat pump plus the sudden energy price rises focused our minds on getting everything in place.

The battery pack enables us to charge at Economy 7 rates overnight and then use that energy to run the shop and house during the day, which obviously dramatically decreases the heat pump’s running costs. The IBoost will automatically heat the water in the tank when the battery storage is full, rather than exporting that energy to the Grid, so enabling us to store more ‘free’ energy in effect. We are going to try to not use the battery for part of the mornings so the IBoost heats the water after we have showered - obviously the sun will need to be shining for that to work - and see how that goes. Without boring you to tears, there can be issues when you have a battery pack and an IBoost with a conflict over which device gets the solar, but we think we understand how to avoid that problem.

We love the heat pump, it works well for us, the running costs were a bit of a shock but the things we’ve done mean those costs are now dramatically reduced. Obviously we’ve shelled out cash now for all this work, but the energy costs have gone up massively since we started all this and continue to climb in a very scary way with no end in sight.  We should get these investment costs back as the installation costs haven’t (yet) gone up at the same rate as energy costs.

So in short: after 9 years of investing in this technology (plus being lucky enough to get on the heat pump trial of course) we now have solar panels, battery storage, an electric car, a heat pump and an iBoost. So if this environment stuff doesn’t work (as a couple of my friends are still saying): we’re in deep trouble :) Shout if you want to know anything, if I can answer - I’m not so technical, as some of you will already know - I will. 

Awesome news, @Bev - congratulations on adding energy storage to your arsenal of green tech! Then there’s that EV (what model do you have?) - last time we heard from you about that I think you were looking at options. Heads up you’ll have a few emails from the forum to notify you that you’ve got the energy storage and EV badge!

I did have a few questions about how your battery integrates with your home actually: 

I’m still a novice with energy storage so excuse what might be a silly question: you mention charging the battery at night (off peak E7 rates), and using that energy to run the shop and house during the day. But you also say that you’re going to try and not use the battery in the morning.  

Is that because you don’t expect the solar generation to end up charging the battery? It will go to power the house and shop and heat the water via the IBoost? Otherwise it sounds like you might have a fully charged battery right at the point that you want to store some excess solar energy? 

Also a more fundamental question: how do you decide when the battery exports to the house, when it charges and when it does neither?