Share your heat pump experience

Hi yes happy to do written ? 

Fine, just a note that I am away from 1st September until 14th September. I have a Grant Heat Pump and it was installed 5 years ago.

Very happy to “talk Heat Pumps” following 12 years experience with a Ground Source heat pump.  Also very aware of improvement in Air Source HP design from the early days when icing-up was a serious problem.

Old Timer

Yes happy to help...

I’d be happy to help.  We have a had a Mitsubishi EcoDan ASHP since March 2021.  It copes really well with our 30 year old home even through the really cold snap we had last winter.

I have been lucky enough to get off fossil fuels completely when I got an EV in 2020, then had the gas disconnected in 2021 and closed the loop by getting some solar and storage fitted earlier this year.  The electric bills were pretty expensive looking last winter but when you take into account its ALL my mileage and heating its not too bad at all (I used to fill up my tank once per week) .  I’m looking forward to the storage allowing me to offset those expensive peak rates with cheap night EV tariffs on the days the sun doesn’t shine, this winter as all these investments start to pay for themselves.

Just moved from SSE to OVO.
Hoping OVO can champion new opportunities of smart management of customers HP energy demands, although perhaps initially offer attractive electricity tariffs which suit these demands.
As a retired engineer - interested in encouraging domestic appliance designers to embrace totally new frameworks for electrical energy distribution in homes. - more to follow!
 

Yeah I am happy to be used as a case study 

Very happy to be part of this too. Either Film or written about our experiences. 

I am almost 3 years into my install, and trailing different ways each year to see what works best for winters. 

Not sure my experience is going to be much help to others, except that I have shown it probably costs less than you think to get started.

A couple of years ago I added a small ground floor extension to the living room of my 3 bed semi and one wall was almost 100% glass and south facing so I knew the heat gain was going to be too much, and Air Con was going to be a must have. I have used portable units in the past but these are expensive to run, noisy and inefficient. and take up room

Nearly all AC units these days are actually air to air heat pumps so the unit I had installed could do heating and cooling. I still had my traditional gas boiler/water heating extended and treated the heating function of the AC unit as a bonus.

Its proved to be a great success, so much so that I had another unit installed in our bedroom.

The downstairs unit consumes 1KW of electricity, when it needs to and provides about 5KW of heating and cooling capacity. When I bought it there was still VAT on such items and it cost about £2500 and half a day to install. 

The upstairs unit is about 2.5KW and cost about £1300 and again took less than half a day to install.

Both units are on outside walls, so getting rid of condensate is easy and the outside units are on my garage roof. 

The downstairs unit is able to heat or cool the area in a few minutes, however, it does not heat the fabric of the house in this time so its best for a quick warm up or cool down.

Changing to a full heat exchange system for hot water and radiators is going to be inconvenient and costly, but for a small area, especially if its open plan, what I have plus a water heater is worth considering. 

Tony

I realise looking at other replies that I may not have given enough information.

I have 24 solar panels of 375W giving theoretically 9Kw, 

They go through a7.5 KTLM G2 invertor

That feeds the house and 2 GivEnergy batteries of 8.5 and 9,3 Kw. 

The car charger is a Indra Pro.

These above all fitted in the Autumn of 2022.

The house was built in 2018 with underfloor heating on ground floor and wet radiators 1st floor. All heated by an Air to water heat pump a Grant Aerona3 HPID 16 this has now been running 5years and 6 months.

Air conditioning has been fitted on the ground floor and master bedroom all by Daikin.

They are extremely cheap to run and very necessary with a modern build and insulated house with double and triple glazing.

Our EPC is 95 A+

No gas is available in our area so we are totally reliant on electricity,

We had to fit a sealed wood burning stove under local building regs. We lit it a couple of times but it drives us out of the rooms!

Hope this helps to understand our system , the house is 3,300 sq, ft. 

Thank you to everyone that’s left a comment and put their name forward for getting involved. 

I’ll be reaching out to you all via a forum private message shortly to get some details. 

Is that the finished insulation on your pipe work @christianedward or has it been improved since? Those bare lengths of copper and valves shouldn’t be like that. I’ve been looking at a much improved version of outside insulation from @Primary Pro Definitely worth looking at !! I’m hoping to get mine upgraded sometime.

Yes it has been improved a bit (great spot) after advice on here, I threatened the installer with a complaint and they came back and added a bit to the valves but it's not great to be honest. I'll have a look.

We’ve had our heat pump for nearly two years, with a few changes along the way as we’ve been part of an OVO/BEIS trial. I’m very happy to talk about our experience with the heat pump.

HI Everyone 

I am here to help and advise 

over 40 years in the heating industry, have had an ASHP plus PV and thermal  solar on my home for around 12 years

owned a heating company with a team ( second family ) of over 150 fitting more than 5000 gas boilers and just over 100 ASHP a year until i sold in 2017 

I had a few months off, then started my journey to improve external insulation to stop condensate freezing and provide a quality external insulation that will keep the moisture, wet OUT and heat in to provide maximum efficiency 

Under the Smartovations LTD umbrella, we have Primary Pro and Condensate Pro 

products and Tools  that provide a total solution 

On heat pumps, EVERY WATT COUNTS  to provide the highest C.O.Ps S.C.O.Ps 

To achieve this, it has to be correctly 

• Designed and specified 
• Installed 
• Commissioned 
• Services 

If any one of them is not carried out correctly, then the heat pump and system will not work efficiently. 

This is why so do cost the end customer more and why there are some who say they dont work 

The  100% do and why do, and other countries are far ahead of us 

We have to get this spot on to get to the target of  600,000 efficient heat pumps fitted a year 

More importantly, we have to do this for our KIDS KIDS KIDS, and the heating industry has a massive part to play. and why I am so passionate 

There to help in any way I can 

If I may, I am very dyslectic, so please forgive my spelling, grammar  

Always happy to help. Sorry I’ve only just answered but I was travelling to Portugal yesterday.

I have had my Daikin heat pump since February 2021 (and an EV since December 2020).

I’d definitely like to share my heat pump experience btw Tim. 

Hiya @Tim_OVO 

Happy to share my experience with the heat pump if you haven’t heard enough from me already. I’ll try not to mentioned the early experiences on the trial, hopefully that is behind us now… 😂

Hi Tim, Happy to be  heat pump guinea pig.  Our house was custom built in 2019-2020 and ASHP home heating and exhaust air DHW heating (essentially a mini ASHP for hot water provision using warm air from wet rooms) was designed in to the build (UFH throughout and dedicated siting of ASHP).  The house (off grid) has 100% electric energy source and no other renewable technologies.  In any discussions I'd like to highlight the madness of the current SAP/EPC regime that undermines ASHP energy performance in favour of natural gas heating due to supply cost bias.  Take a look at my EPC summary which underscores this point.  My new house is currently rated as "C" (score 78) due solely to the use of ASHP technology as my main source of home heating and DHW.

Agreed. My epc states the hot water is ‘poor’ though it’s heated using the ashp at an efficiency of at least 2.8 If it was done with gas the efficiency would be less than 1.0

I also think the epc should change 

Although while electric is currently over 4 times the price of gas per kWh on the basic standard variable rate, any change needs to be carefully managed so the average consumer isn't still confused. 

Fascinating post, @Corgimajor.

Are you off the gas grid but connected to the electricity grid? 

Novice question alert but why would an EPC rating score ASHP hot water badly? What’s the criteria for deciding if it’s not kWh’s? Is it price based? 

My colleague has been collecting names and has now got heat pump customers lined up. That said we’d love to host any of your thoughts on this on the forum. Why not create a new topic and we can see what other heat pump owners think?

Hi @Tim_OVO,

Thanks.  The following comprehensive answer to this issue (given by Yorkshire Energy Systems - see attached link) hopefully clarifies the problem.  The SAP system is flawed in terms of its treatment of ASHPs.  Only a Govt required review of this failure in SAP calculation methodology will correct the situation and given Rishi Sunak's announcement yesterday one worries that this may no longer be a priority!

https://www.yorkshireenergysystems.co.uk/epcandheatpumps/

PS.  I'm off grid for natural gas, but on grid for electricity.  That said our DNO (Western Power) limited our electrical demand such that we could have either an electric vehicle charger or an ASHP - not both!  NB.  This was  new build home and as such their ability to control what we did (i.e. they wouldn't connect us if we didn't meet their electrical load conditions!) in this respect was far greater than if we were making these changes to an existing property.

This opens up a whole new can of worms when it comes to rural power networks ability to meet the demands for increased electrical loads that will be required to achieve net zero in home heating.

Had 2x 10kw Grant aerona 3 system installed alongside a 4.32 pv panel installation to replace ageing and ever increasing cost of oil central heating and delivery of.

It's still a learning game and still demystifying some of the controls but happy with it so far apart from the winter months when the electricity usage spikes (but we are now fully electric with 2 EVs so can't complain)

It's just had its first service as there was a lack of trained specialists and COVID etc, and also went with the manufacturer to void going out of warranty as it was over a year before we could get the first service done.

Overall really impressed, there is a debate whether hive or nest wireless thermostats are needed versus just using the units controls.

I'll hoping the units will still be going strong to 15-20 years by which time who knows what'll be warming our homes!