Replacing oil fired central heating with storage batteries and off peak power - is this possible without solar panels?

Neighbours… I don’t suppose those adjacent properties are also historic/listed by any chance, are they @Chisi1 ?

If so, then it opens up further possibilities.

Thanks again, I have a lot to work with now and have a better understanding of the possibilities and difficulties than just a couple of days ago.

Good to hear about the minimum noise levels of your unit but location of a unit in ours will be a problem if it needs to be a metre away from the property boundary for Permitted Development.  However, it could be sited within the metre (with planning) if it’s quiet enough and not upset the neighbour.  I will check.

An alternative is to locate it a couple of metres away from the house and run pipes to the house if this is possible.  Again, I will check.

Unfortunately, the adjacent houses are not historic.

Thanks again for your help.

If it’s within a metre of the boundary then it’s likely that any fence or hedge might prevent it getting adequate through-flow of air.

Positioning a unit up to 5m from the house isn’t a problem. There are such installations on the Zero Carbon Heating trial which OVO are currently running. Several members of the Forum here will have 1st hand knowledge of what’s required.

In general the experiences of the 250 trial participants have revealed widespread failures in the installation process itself. We now know what to look out for and which parts of the installation are critical to get right. You can of course call on us to help you decide on the right Installer and the best design for your particular site.

Here, for example, is a photo of the correct sort of pipe for an underground link to your house:

This this Rauthermex from Loco-2-Heat and is ready-insulated to the required level.

Feel free to do the general research that you want. But please continue to come back to us for clarification of anything which needs detail.

I’m just going to tag @briannolan in case he wants to add anything because he probably doesn’t yet know this discussion is happening.

Thanks @Transparent I hadn’t seen the discussion.

@Chisi1 well done for taking on the project and looking at getting rid of the oil. No more tank to get filled or to check with the dipstick! Plus, it’s greener.

It sounds like an air source heat pump with radiators could work for you, because your setup wouldn’t need to change much, and it sounds like you don’t want a major building project. You might be able to keep your hot water cylinder, your pipes would be unchanged, and you might be able to keep some of the radiators.

My pump is 8m down my back garden, with pipes running underground into the house to the unvented cylinder. Like you, I’m thinking about getting a battery, without PV panels, because I recently started getting 5p electricity at night. Note that some batteries can go outdoors but they’re normally wall mounted, so your concrete slab might need another use. Once you calculate your summer and winter energy needs, you should be able to figure out if batteries make sense.

The placement of a heat pump would partly depend on whether you need planning. I might be wrong, but I believe for a listed building like yours, permitted development doesn’t allow heat pumps and you would need planning. Heat pumps are incredibly quiet - it’s like a fridge. But the regulation treats them strangely. So, you need to do a relatively complicated noise calculation that takes into account things like your neighbour’s nearest window. You would need to submit a noise calculation as part of planning, but I believe you wouldn’t have the 1m boundary constraint.

I don’t think anyone has mentioned domestic RHI yet - definitely look at that and factor it into the costs. It’s a big plus for a heat pump compared with some of your other options.

Thanks again for the information.  At my age I’ve never been into blogs and forums so the last few days has been an enlightening experience.

I will, as suggested, do general research and come back to the forum for detailed clarification as there seems to be so much practical experience available here.

It’s good to see that air source pumps can be located a couple of metres away from the house connected by insulated pipes.

Taken note of RHI, I’ve seen it mentioned and I will check and build it into my calculations.

When I started looking at this I was against air source pumps because of what I’d been told in the past but will now take an open and unbiased view.

We currently pay the standard rate of about 16p/kWh and I can see a rate of around 5p is available at night.  Excuse me for being a bit cynical but will this price differential be maintained once the power companies have us all hooked into overnight charging?

Now . . . . to the drawing board and I’ll be back.

Great to have you here @Chisi1 . It’s always good to share experiences. I’ve learned a lot from the posts in the forum.

As your property is listed I think it will require planning for an ASHP. Not sure if the same applies for other options.

If you can accurately predict what the electricity prices will be in the future then I think you could make a lot of money advising companies! It’s a point I’ve raised before about whether there will be levelling off of prices in the future. If so, then the cost calculations for home batteries completely change. Is it worth relying on them if you can’t use or export electricity at significantly more expensive times? It may be that overnight electricity becomes 10p/kWh and daytime becomes 25p/kWh or it could all become the same price with balanced demand, or perhaps it’ll all be free apart from admin charges! 

Agree about predicting electricity prices but it would be good to have OVO’s view on their medium to long term policy on this issue. 

I can answer a fair bit of that question @Chisi1 because I had the opportunity to discuss it in January with Stephen Fitzpatrick, CEO of OVO Group Ltd.

Although there’s no immediate plans to withdraw the ‘Economy 7’ type tariffs, they will need to be modified in some fashion because of the increased ownership of Electric Vehicles. Charging these overnight is quickly going to eat up the available night time capacity on the Distribution Grid.

Having recently bought an EV, I had to apply for consent to install a home charge-point. As you’ll be able to see from the explanation in the topic on Energy Supply, Demand and Flexibility, this increased the power required for my house by 2½ times

There are constraints on the capacity of each substation transformer providing that power, and also the feed cables which deliver it to our properties. The energy required for night-time EV charging will overheat underground feed cables, thereby causing insulation to fail and the circuit trips to cut off the power.

The solution is to employ two new techniques:

a: change customers onto a Time Of Use tariff which supplies electricity at differing price points for each half-hour of the day. Octopus have offered such a tariff for many years already, and their website describes the calculations used to operate it.

OVO are developing their own Billing System which supports half-hourly price points for customers with Smart Meters, but this functionality is not yet available.

b: use Smart chargers which are controlled by central computer. That ensures each EV owner gets the charge they specify by the time they set, but the computer decides how and when to deliver that charge according to grid-demand.

OVO already offer a Smart charger, which is described on their website. Their Kaluza division is also busy creating a matching computer system called the Flex Platform. In about 6-weeks time, Flex will take over control of my PowerVault Storage Battery, which is part of another trial.

I’m going to stop here @Chisi1 because I realise that this is a lot to take in!

But let me point out that these innovations are not being thrust upon us by the government or the Energy Suppliers. This is just as much a consumer-led strategy because there is widespread public demand for energy systems which better use renewable resources and help us to combat Climate Change.

Whether you understand the technology I’ve mentioned doesn’t matter that much. It’s more important that we get the message out and let people know of the possibilities which will shortly be available. We don’t need to know how an internal combustion engine works in order to drive a car.

So in similar fashion please tell everyone you know (in the pub!) that the energy equivalent of the automobile is being developed here in the UK and it’s time for everyone to start reading about it here on the OVO Forum!