Great video. I think its fair to say that heat pumps do require a bit more thought to run than gas boilers, which most people don't think twice about. But once you've got it how you want it, you're good and it is very satisfying. The hard part is the mentality, leaving something running for most of the day while your radiators only get lukewarm feels counterintuitive after you've had a gas boiler. But it keeps the place toasty and should be reasonably cheap.
Yep. I had to forget everything I thought I knew about heating when I went from gas boiler to ASHP. It now seems strange to me that people heat water to 60-70 degrees in order to heat their homes to 20-21 degrees for a period until the home cools down and the whole process starts again... The constant heat is much more comfortable as well compared to the boom/bust fluctuations you get with gas or oil fired heating.
@@itsmrfish1 nahh, they are busy professionals who's time is worth a lot. It's an 8 HR job doing the survey and making the heat loss calcs. If they do it for free and have to quote for loads of Jobs working for free - they'll just have to charge you more for the job
The fact that you are doing this video show's that the HP manufacturers need to step up and change their control interface so it's more easy and intuitive. Just needs to be a basic up and down menu easy to reach on the controller that adjust the heat curve. Or just a wizard that asks the correct question to the user , ok for people like me who dive in and set up and commission my system but I am not the norm. Great video I hope it goes viral in the HP community.
Agreed. The future we need is better controls with decent self learning through proper feedback loops. At the moment most controls are no way near adequate, especially for technophobes.
I think the problem is, HP are much more nuanced than (say) gas boilers. A jobbing plumber can throw an oversized gas boiler and radiators into a home and the client won't care less because they can flick a switch and within minutes they feel their radiators reach a temperature high enough to maim elderly relatives. There's no finesse to it. Heat pumps require a setup which will likely take longer than the few days days the installation team are on site due to their low response rate. I do agree though, it seems like the user manuals have been written by engineers who already understand the consequences of raising (or lowering) the heat curve, knowing what weather compensation is etc. We had a fantastic install and handover but in truth, I didn't retain much of it even though I wrote it down. I learnt by studying each setting and taking my time over understanding how it worked before considering altering it. I can't imagine many people would be interested in doing that.
Be careful, just because a engineer or company's has lots of badges doesn't mean you will get a good system. Get recommendations is always the best way.
Having previous years consumption on whatever heating source is also a handy indicator. But in kWh not £ as energy prices have been all over the place.
100%, but I think most people just look at how much they're paying, not what they're using. Not really helped by the price cap being "what the average home should expect to pay" etc
I have some myenergi kit in the house and have used a harvi with a ct clamp and home assistant to get accurate usage figures. It has really helped as the ecodan has pretty well useless energy monitoring on my install.
I have HA manipulating my heat pump flow temp, creating room influence and weather compensation control, combined with API Octopus and weather data. Been installing heat pumps for 25 years already.
@@johnrush3596 Ecodan is particularly poor at that but otherwise good, especially the Room Temperature control mode which means you have a proper feedback loop and don't need to mess around with Weather Compensation curves.
We had Homely installed with our system recently and it’s been great so far! We don’t have to think about settings/weather comp etc, it’s supposedly doing all that for us. Our heat pump has been pretty cheap to run so far but I guess it’s been quite mild. It’ll be interesting to see what ours bills are like in the colder months...
Something for those who are thinking of replacing a modern condensing boiler on mains gas with a heat pump. To even be cost neutral for heat, you have to have an SCOP of 4 (assuming energy at the price cap), for hot water with a likely COP of around 2, then it costs a LOT more to heat your tank, e.g. 5kW of electric at approx £1 (price cap rates), vs 60p for gas.
DHW COP for me is 3.6. plenty of better tanks with more coil surface area can do even better. Most gas boilers, even condensing ones are probably operating at 80-85% efficiency rather than the claimed figures of over 90. A couple of tariff tricks and you can easily beat a gas boiler in running costs no sweat.
If you check out Jan Rosenow's work, you will find graphs of how heat pumps are comparable or better in cost to boilers at much lower SCOPs (around 3).
@@UpsideDownFork The COP shown on your consumer unit is only an estimate. The Energy Savings Trust did a study of installed units and found an average COP of 2.2 energysavingtrust.org.uk/sites/default/files/EST_Heat_Pump_Trials%20part%202a.pdf Really not worth it.
Good video. The learning phase at the begining of ownership is important. I hope software will do this in future. The heatpump has all the data it needs to see if it could run more efficiently. It know the energy your house needs to be the right temp and should be able to do the adjustment to self select the heat curve. Were not there yet but i hope soon. There are so many hps running ok but with potential to be way better.
Agree with this. Feels like a very solvable (soluble?!) problem and hopefully not that far in the future. I'm looking forward to telling people one day "I remember when I used to have to set up the weather compensation myself". And I'm sure I'll say it with a strange kind of pride 😂
@@UpsideDownFork that's very kind of you to say so. In case you hadn't seen, I posted a link to this video on there this morning as I was impressed with your approach. I rarely watch RUclips content but this was next to one of my mountain bike channels and I thought I'd give it a go as bald men in glasses often talk a lot of sense.
@@nicksharpin8868 😂 bald men in glasses. My wife will love that comment 😁 Up until about 6 months ago I was quite active in the groups, trying to help people over there. Especially active in the Vaillant owners group really. I'm still a lurker but have shifted my attention to RUclips for now. There's less real world help to be found on this platform at the moment. I recall you have a Mitsubishi ecodan that's working well but you had some Drayton TRVs that you thought were perhaps restricting flow. I sent you some pictures of the valves at some point. Anyway, small world. Thanks for sharing the video 👍
I use open energy monitoring equipment to monitor all my vaillant arotherm plus data it’s a excellent piece of equipment Also the new vaillant app with it’s latest update allows users easier adjustment of the heat curve and the outside temperature switch off which seams to effect quite a few people
Many people are not even aware of how much energy their gas boiler uses, but know to the last kWh how much electricity they use. Ofgem says for gas a typical 3 bed house uses 12000kWh, 5 bed house 18000kWh. A rough calculation using meter readings is to multiply cubic metres by 11 to get kWh. Eg 3 cu m provides 33kWh of heat. Also gas boilers in many cases are run very sub-optimally - 70-80% if you are lucky, so mulitply by 0.8. In 2010 I looked at my gas bill and saw it was 20000kWh for the year. Next year it was 9000kWh - better management, lower flow temperature and changed to condensing boiler. A good estimate of your electricity usage for HP simply divide you current gas usage in kWh by 3 as most HP should have a minimum SCOP of 3.0 (nearer 5 these days). Then there is psychology. Of course you electricity bill will rise if you get a HP but your gas bill will go from eg £1000 to zero. Perhaps therapy can be made available ? If you can get a good low cost heating tariff for electricity your HP should be cheaper to run than gas. Gas is 1/4 the price of electricity at standard tariff, but HP is 3-5 times more efficient so with a cheap tariff you should be quids in.
Hi. As ever, another great informative to the point video. I am thinking of getting on the Heat pump wagon. Quick question: in terms of getting an idea about consumption, if I take gas kWh and then divide by 4, would that make sense? For example, last Thursday’s gas consumption was around 150 kWh, so the heat pump consumption roughly would be 150/4=37.5 kWh? Thanks
Also interesting that Octopus have know the issue about how to set up and tune heat pumps so I think the new route of temperature sensors in different rooms and then linked to give a better understanding and control should be interesting.
@@Biggest-dh1vr We're putting a lot less heat into the property when I compare the gas consumption to the electrical consumption for the heat pump. Biggest factor is likely insulation but secondary would be the gas cooker also being removed.
I wish there was a forum like this that wasn't Facebook. I've got a heatpump with open energy monitor but I don't have Facebook and would love to know if I could make my system more efficient.
I am confused about how weather compensation works. Does it just make the water hotter in the system by using the outside temperature? My Daikin is set in Control Mode: Room Therostat, Setpoint Mode: Weather dependant.
Yes, exactly that. The heat loss from your house will be proportional to the outside temperature, so it changes the heat input to match. I'm no expert, but I'd imagine it would give poor results if your house gains or loses a lot of heat for other reasons - e.g. if you have a lot of solar gain, or a log burner, or leave windows open at times. Then you would want some input from a thermostat too.
@@UpsideDownFork From my very early heating experience, it was only installed in July, we found that some mornings although the thermostat said 20c the heating did not come on. I "think" this was related to the outside temperature being warm. We have set 5am to 7am to 22c, then 7am to 21c. It comes on, then goes off at 7am. I would like to find a video about how heat pumps combine outside and inside temperatures to decide what to do. It seems it is not a binary decision. I added a Aqara temperate sensor to Home Assistant and have noticed that it records the temperature 1c cooler than the Onecta wall thermostat.
@@bazcurtis178 Our Valliant HP has a setting that says what temp the outside air needs to be below before the heating comes on. Ours defaulted to 16, took me a while to work out why the heating was not on. The UI and the terms used are awful, not sure how a non technical person can understand it.
@ I agree. I found this video - ruclips.net/video/CAFlnuskc-w/видео.htmlsi=5cVsWq237tnr-mVw. Your heat pump is not hot enough. It explains it very well. It would be nice to have a heat pump v gas boiler how they work differently.
Subject request : If you still got some time for a.subject about number of start/stop cycles versus total run hours that would be great. I see a lot of heat pumps that are making too many start/stops compared with the run hours. In the new app you can see these numbers but only if your AI is a newer one (2023/2024). Mine ratio is round the 1, nearly the same. I installed the HP in autumn 2023. Some got HP with a ratio more than 3. This means that HP runs but lifetime will be shorted with several years. Cause: HP Installers don't know how it should works and do not take time to do their jobs well,. (It cost time and money to install a HP and doing the fine tuning is a long term process.
In an ideal world the HP installers should have set all up all more or less correctly during commissioning, with follow up checks a couple of times within the first year, one in Summer and another Winter.
@@UpsideDownFork Yes, a good home for AI or cloud controlled unit, the manufacturers already harvest every last hidden detail from their units, so adding in room temperatures, external temperatures, costs, smart tariffs etc surely wouldn't be too difficult. As one example, the Mixergy HWC (Raspberry Pi controller) is preprogramed to work with Octopuses Agile if available (Not me as yet).
My design flow temp is 45 degrees at -2. I actually have my heat curve set at 0.6 which is lower than the 45 degree design at -2. My DHW COP for 2024 is 3.4. Not too bad considering the limitations I face.
I don't do facebook so hoping someone here can advise please, I'd like to switch to a heat pump but need to work out costs and viability. My house is approx 250sqm and we have an oil boiler. The house was built in 2005 so is not terrible as far as insulation is concerned but probably not up to modern standards although I did double the loft insulation a few years ago. Can someone please confirm my numbers below. So we currently use approx 2000 litres of oil per year which has approx 10kw of energy per litre. Our boiler is not condensing so probably 70% to 75% efficient, lets say 72.5%. So 2000 x 10 x 0.725 = 14500kWh of heat energy, but this is very much approximate. Am I correct to say in the North (I'm in Northern Ireland) a heat pump gives 3 to 4 kWh of heat for 1kWh of consumption? If so that would be between 4833kWh and 3625kWh consumption from the grid. Where I live electricity is expensive but we're on an EV tariff so 30.2p kWh during the day and 14p at night. If all the heating was at full price of £0.302 it would be between £1460 and £1095 per year. Does this sound correct? Obviously the heat pump would be running through the night and not all the consumption would be at 30.2p so it should be less, plus I have a battery so some of the day time heating would be at 14p. We normally keep the thermostats at 18C downstairs and 17C upstairs so not as warm as many do and I'm hoping that will make the change more feasible Thanks in advance. 🙂
Your numbers look pretty bang on to me. My HP, installed by Octopus, was £2600 including 11 new radiators (of which only 4 were needed, but it was so cheap I got them all done). One thing I'd recommend is to get a battery, e.g. a GivEnergy All In One. Being able to timeshift your power to off peak is great - I'm on Octopus Intelligent Go, and now all our power is at 7p/kWh. So heating our house costs pennies. I love my HP - so impressed with it!
@@edwardbyard6540 Thanks for your reply, unfortunately Octopus is not available to me so 14p is the cheapest night time rate I can get. I didn't mention it earlier but I already have a battery which covers all of my day time usage unless I need to charge the car during the day. I have never monitored how much time the oil boiler is burning for so it is hard to calculate a daily consumption. Obviously it will be higher on very cold days but have you a figure for an average winter day? Just to figure out if the battery could handle a whole day of heating? Thanks again
My heat pump wasn’t well setup by the installers, as you say they were conservative in the settings, 55 flow temperature, no weather compensation, 1 degree hysteresis and the hot water was heated by immersion AND heat pump. Slowly worked my way through revising and improving all these settings and have meaningfully reduced my electricity consumption as a result
great channel and love the content..... just one thing i have plenty of solar and battery storage but the gas boiler is staying, press a button the house is warm and the water is hot when needed, we haven't had a bad cold winter yet but the boiler won't be bothered because it can cope.
fair play to you. But that's not an efficient use of a gas boiler either. Having it properly set up for stable state heating will lower running costs, and with a heat pump it will excel at it further. Solar and Battery storage would allow you to bring down the running costs further.
@@BenIsInSweden thanks for the reply, the whole aim is to reduce our usage from the grid not use smart tariffs to think that we are greener..... we don't use gas for 6/7 months of the year, the idear that charging from the grid after midnight with cheap electricity when it's night time and the wind doesn't blow is for people trying to save money.. end of
@@robin5215 If you're not using gas for 6/7 months of the year then it sounds like you're using solar divert, which with a heat pump would mean you'd use less of your solar, which can go towards using the grid less as well. Not entirely sure of your point of wanting to use the grid less though, you're still reliant on the gas network currently regardless, and having it for "instant heat" is using more gas than necessary.
@@BenIsInSweden thanks for the reply, we have two systems, the old feed in tariff at 70p per kwh what we make and a battery storage system, we are off grid since 2011 because we get paid more than we use... but.... we added the battery system to reduce our usage from the grid
I'm single so i don't need to heat the whole house, just the room i'm in. My favorite heater is a 250w heat lamp. no noise and instant heat. Try one above your kitchen table. You should be able to turn down your main system.
You can have rooms adjusted with a heat pump to have a lower temperature and have it at a comfortable temperature in the rooms you use. No point in adding in heat at a COP of 1 with a heat lamp, as you're just unnecessarily adding to your electricity bills.
The heat in that room excapes in to the unheated rooms, which is why it's not a good idea to have unheated rooms. Watch the heat geeks video about zoning, or not as the case is.
@@mattgruber3933 That just shows your ignorance, and you fail to realise that you simply can't compare by cost, lets see why not, different size house, different build and insulation, different air change rate, different climate, different energy rates. If you're happy doing what you do then carry on. Oh, my energy costs are negative, my energy supplier pays me, and that's for a five bedroom detached house in the UK. By the way, our electric standard rate is $0.34, so that's 3.4 times what you pay.
-3... Not just a dip bu maintained -3.... Lmao. Try -25 at night for two weeks of the year and -20 max on those days. When i hear scop of 4.5 with monoblock unit, makes me laugh. Tell me when you consume average 1MWh average on the heating season
@@BenIsInSweden my house has 114m² heated area, it is built in 1975, energy sertification declares 32MWh of heat input needed. Colleague has heatpump and uses about of electricity 1MWh per month, but he has about 200m² of heated area. Better insulated tho.
@@Rockall57 might want to pay attention to the video and get that sorted out. There's a million and one details that could be wrong. But firstly have you double checked the heat loss of the property is about 9kw? Is the unit running from pure weather compensation? What is the flow temperature at your design temperature? What size pipes do you have and in copper or plastic? If working well a heat pump should be cost competitive Vs a gas boiler. There's about 0% chance I'd allow a diesel heater and thus it's exhaust fumes anywhere my property or children's lungs.
You might save a few quid but the emissions will be terrible. As he says don't give up learn why its expensive and get it resolved. Heatpumps can be very ecomical to run. If they run well and still cost a mint then the house is probably the one with the issue.
@@Lewis_Standing taking notes on your comments..I'm actually getting a property surveyor to do a survey and with that get heat Geek etc to come and do a survey on how the system was set up and how to sort it out. We got an ECO4 Grant and it been a total cluster f....
@@joewentworth7856 I doubt it.. diesel is £1.40 litre but what I am doing is getting a survey to find out WFT is wrong with the system..it was fitted by a cowboy 🤠 outfit under the ECO4 UK government grant scheme.. The whole process has been a cluster F...
@@Rockall57diesel has about 10kWh of energy per liter. At 70% efficiency (which is generous for Chinese ones), that means you're paying at least 20p per kWh of heat. MSC minimum on the current price cap for a heat pump would be just shy of 9p/kWh of heat. Even a COP of 1.3 from the heat pump would be cheaper to run than the diesel heater at current prices.
So its every other device causing high electricity use and not the heat pump.... Do you listen to yourself and who is paying you to speak such BS? Gas boilers dont have these high costs and are far more efficient so why buy a heat pump that does not work as good and is very expensive to fit and maintain...... get a grip and stop lying to people 😮😮😮😮😮
I'll bite and point out that heat pumps are far more efficient than gas boilers, this is not in contention except for people who have no knowledge of engineering and no desire/ability to find out. It uses far less gas to run a generator (at the power plant) and then a heat pump to heat the home than running a gas boiler, though obviously getting the electricity from renewables or nuclear is much better. (It actually even produces less carbon to have the electricity from the most polluting source of coal and then have a heat pump than to use gas in a boiler). About the only thing worse than using gas boilers is hydrogen produced from gas, hydrogen from renewables is not as polluting as a gas boiler but would cost around 7 times as much as using the electricity directly with a heat pump.
@@MentalLentil-ev9jr Electricity is 4 time the cost of gas (and rising rapidly due to expensive renewables) so no, HPs have little to no chance of being more efficient than gas for heating...
@@manoo422 So you are specifying that efficiency is measured in terms of energy against price, okay this is a definition that goes against those that understand what efficiency is, but even within those terms heat pumps can win now and will definitely be far better than boilers in the near future. Firstly, electricity should not be 4 times the price of gas as that does not take into account cheaper overnight tariffs or special tariffs such as Octopus which are amplified even more by the use of batteries. Ovo do an all day tariff of 15p for heat pumps. Secondly, heat pumps can achieve better than an efficiency of 4 (mine is around 5) whereas most boilers fail to achieve better than .8 meaning 3.2 is a more realistic comparison. The quotes of 95% bandied for some condensing boilers only applies to very well installed and set up systems, most do not meet this goal and doing so would increase the cost of a gas boiler install significantly and likely involve radiator upgrades etc. Thirdly, have you looked at the price of an installation from Octopus? (hint, it's not very expensive). Fourthly, electricity will decrease in price compared to gas with more renewables coming online, it would be cheaper right now if the price of electricity were not based upon the gas price. It is very conceivable that within 10 years electricity will be cheaper than gas - though I would hope that in 10 years the gas infrastructure would be dismantled anyway. The above is just based upon your definition of electricity. The normal definition would be power out over power in, heat pumps typically get 4, some better some worse, whereas most boilers are in the 0.7 -.0 85 range.
My heat pump tariff from British Gas is 14p/kWh, what's gas 7.5p/kWh ? At that my heat costs 3.25p/kWh, compared to gas (assuming 85% efficient boiler) 8.8p/kWh of heat. If I were on standard electricity tariff of 25p it still works out cheaper for me at an average of 5.8p/kWh of heat over the year. Renewables are making things much cheaper, with many suppliers now offering smart tariffs that sometimes even pay us to use electricity. With current World politics it's unlikely that gas prices will drop any time soon.
A well installed heat pump is 400% efficient so uses about 5x less energy than the average gas boiler. And, it’s easy to find an electricity tariff that is much less than 4-fold the gas price.
Get yourself a smart meter and change your tariff, I'm paying 4.76p/kWh between midnight and 6am, plus charging a 10 kWh battery for use in the day when solar isn't sufficient, oh and forget the winter duvet as you don't need it anymore 🤣
Great video. I think its fair to say that heat pumps do require a bit more thought to run than gas boilers, which most people don't think twice about. But once you've got it how you want it, you're good and it is very satisfying.
The hard part is the mentality, leaving something running for most of the day while your radiators only get lukewarm feels counterintuitive after you've had a gas boiler. But it keeps the place toasty and should be reasonably cheap.
Yep. I had to forget everything I thought I knew about heating when I went from gas boiler to ASHP. It now seems strange to me that people heat water to 60-70 degrees in order to heat their homes to 20-21 degrees for a period until the home cools down and the whole process starts again...
The constant heat is much more comfortable as well compared to the boom/bust fluctuations you get with gas or oil fired heating.
Im hopefully pulling the trigger on a heat pump on Tuesday, got my local heat geek coming around 🤞
Lewis
Just about to mate have a survey from HG
Is the survey refundable if you don’t go ahead?
Cheers
Glen
Who is HG @@itsmrfish1
@@Soulboy63Heat Geek
@@itsmrfish1Almost certainly not, as it’s a lot of work.
@@itsmrfish1 nahh, they are busy professionals who's time is worth a lot. It's an 8 HR job doing the survey and making the heat loss calcs.
If they do it for free and have to quote for loads of Jobs working for free - they'll just have to charge you more for the job
The fact that you are doing this video show's that the HP manufacturers need to step up and change their control interface so it's more easy and intuitive. Just needs to be a basic up and down menu easy to reach on the controller that adjust the heat curve. Or just a wizard that asks the correct question to the user , ok for people like me who dive in and set up and commission my system but I am not the norm. Great video I hope it goes viral in the HP community.
Agreed. The future we need is better controls with decent self learning through proper feedback loops.
At the moment most controls are no way near adequate, especially for technophobes.
I think the problem is, HP are much more nuanced than (say) gas boilers. A jobbing plumber can throw an oversized gas boiler and radiators into a home and the client won't care less because they can flick a switch and within minutes they feel their radiators reach a temperature high enough to maim elderly relatives. There's no finesse to it. Heat pumps require a setup which will likely take longer than the few days days the installation team are on site due to their low response rate.
I do agree though, it seems like the user manuals have been written by engineers who already understand the consequences of raising (or lowering) the heat curve, knowing what weather compensation is etc. We had a fantastic install and handover but in truth, I didn't retain much of it even though I wrote it down. I learnt by studying each setting and taking my time over understanding how it worked before considering altering it. I can't imagine many people would be interested in doing that.
Be careful, just because a engineer or company's has lots of badges doesn't mean you will get a good system. Get recommendations is always the best way.
Having previous years consumption on whatever heating source is also a handy indicator. But in kWh not £ as energy prices have been all over the place.
100%, but I think most people just look at how much they're paying, not what they're using. Not really helped by the price cap being "what the average home should expect to pay" etc
I have some myenergi kit in the house and have used a harvi with a ct clamp and home assistant to get accurate usage figures. It has really helped as the ecodan has pretty well useless energy monitoring on my install.
I have HA manipulating my heat pump flow temp, creating room influence and weather compensation control, combined with API Octopus and weather data. Been installing heat pumps for 25 years already.
@@johnrush3596 Ecodan is particularly poor at that but otherwise good, especially the Room Temperature control mode which means you have a proper feedback loop and don't need to mess around with Weather Compensation curves.
We had Homely installed with our system recently and it’s been great so far! We don’t have to think about settings/weather comp etc, it’s supposedly doing all that for us. Our heat pump has been pretty cheap to run so far but I guess it’s been quite mild. It’ll be interesting to see what ours bills are like in the colder months...
Nice! More controls are going down the route of homely. It will help a lot of people!
Something for those who are thinking of replacing a modern condensing boiler on mains gas with a heat pump. To even be cost neutral for heat, you have to have an SCOP of 4 (assuming energy at the price cap), for hot water with a likely COP of around 2, then it costs a LOT more to heat your tank, e.g. 5kW of electric at approx £1 (price cap rates), vs 60p for gas.
DHW COP for me is 3.6. plenty of better tanks with more coil surface area can do even better.
Most gas boilers, even condensing ones are probably operating at 80-85% efficiency rather than the claimed figures of over 90.
A couple of tariff tricks and you can easily beat a gas boiler in running costs no sweat.
If you check out Jan Rosenow's work, you will find graphs of how heat pumps are comparable or better in cost to boilers at much lower SCOPs (around 3).
@@UpsideDownFork The COP shown on your consumer unit is only an estimate. The Energy Savings Trust did a study of installed units and found an average COP of 2.2 energysavingtrust.org.uk/sites/default/files/EST_Heat_Pump_Trials%20part%202a.pdf
Really not worth it.
Good video. The learning phase at the begining of ownership is important. I hope software will do this in future. The heatpump has all the data it needs to see if it could run more efficiently. It know the energy your house needs to be the right temp and should be able to do the adjustment to self select the heat curve. Were not there yet but i hope soon. There are so many hps running ok but with potential to be way better.
Agree with this. Feels like a very solvable (soluble?!) problem and hopefully not that far in the future. I'm looking forward to telling people one day "I remember when I used to have to set up the weather compensation myself". And I'm sure I'll say it with a strange kind of pride 😂
@@joewentworth7856 some will do, Mitsubishi Ecodan in Room Temperature mode for example.
Great video for beginners! Very well constructed, and clear and concise.
Thanks for the comment Nick! Are you the regular poster in some of these Facebook groups?
Yep
@@nicksharpin8868 thanks for the great work you do over there. I've seen many of your comments helping people over the last year 👍
@@UpsideDownFork that's very kind of you to say so. In case you hadn't seen, I posted a link to this video on there this morning as I was impressed with your approach. I rarely watch RUclips content but this was next to one of my mountain bike channels and I thought I'd give it a go as bald men in glasses often talk a lot of sense.
@@nicksharpin8868 😂 bald men in glasses. My wife will love that comment 😁
Up until about 6 months ago I was quite active in the groups, trying to help people over there. Especially active in the Vaillant owners group really.
I'm still a lurker but have shifted my attention to RUclips for now. There's less real world help to be found on this platform at the moment.
I recall you have a Mitsubishi ecodan that's working well but you had some Drayton TRVs that you thought were perhaps restricting flow. I sent you some pictures of the valves at some point. Anyway, small world. Thanks for sharing the video 👍
I use open energy monitoring equipment to monitor all my vaillant arotherm plus data it’s a excellent piece of equipment
Also the new vaillant app with it’s latest update allows users easier adjustment of the heat curve and the outside temperature switch off which seams to effect quite a few people
Many people are not even aware of how much energy their gas boiler uses, but know to the last kWh how much
electricity they use.
Ofgem says for gas a typical 3 bed house uses 12000kWh, 5 bed house 18000kWh.
A rough calculation using meter readings is to multiply cubic metres by 11 to get kWh. Eg 3 cu m provides 33kWh of heat. Also gas boilers in many cases are run very sub-optimally - 70-80% if you are lucky, so mulitply by 0.8.
In 2010 I looked at my gas bill and saw it was 20000kWh for the year. Next year it was 9000kWh - better management, lower flow temperature and changed to condensing boiler.
A good estimate of your electricity usage for HP simply divide you current gas usage in kWh by 3 as most HP should have a minimum SCOP of 3.0 (nearer 5 these days).
Then there is psychology. Of course you electricity bill will rise if you get a HP but your gas bill will go from eg £1000 to zero. Perhaps therapy can be made available ?
If you can get a good low cost heating tariff for electricity your HP should be cheaper to run than gas. Gas is 1/4 the price of electricity at standard tariff, but HP is 3-5 times more efficient so with a cheap tariff you should be quids in.
Hi. As ever, another great informative to the point video. I am thinking of getting on the Heat pump wagon. Quick question: in terms of getting an idea about consumption, if I take gas kWh and then divide by 4, would that make sense? For example, last Thursday’s gas consumption was around 150 kWh, so the heat pump consumption roughly would be 150/4=37.5 kWh? Thanks
Lots of variables but that may get you in the ballpark.
Also interesting that Octopus have know the issue about how to set up and tune heat pumps so I think the new route of temperature sensors in different rooms and then linked to give a better understanding and control should be interesting.
Did you find your heat demand rose with the heat pump? It's probably difficult to tell given how you added insulation too?
@@Biggest-dh1vr We're putting a lot less heat into the property when I compare the gas consumption to the electrical consumption for the heat pump.
Biggest factor is likely insulation but secondary would be the gas cooker also being removed.
Excellent, thanks
@@paulkearsley9509 thanks for watching and commenting 👍
I wish there was a forum like this that wasn't Facebook. I've got a heatpump with open energy monitor but I don't have Facebook and would love to know if I could make my system more efficient.
Renewable Heating Hub has a forum, so might be worth giving that a shot.
Openenergymonitor community forum is good.
Useful as ever.
I am confused about how weather compensation works. Does it just make the water hotter in the system by using the outside temperature? My Daikin is set in Control Mode: Room Therostat, Setpoint Mode: Weather dependant.
Yes, exactly that. The heat loss from your house will be proportional to the outside temperature, so it changes the heat input to match.
I'm no expert, but I'd imagine it would give poor results if your house gains or loses a lot of heat for other reasons - e.g. if you have a lot of solar gain, or a log burner, or leave windows open at times. Then you would want some input from a thermostat too.
It is proactive whereas a typical room thermostat is reactive.
@@UpsideDownFork From my very early heating experience, it was only installed in July, we found that some mornings although the thermostat said 20c the heating did not come on. I "think" this was related to the outside temperature being warm. We have set 5am to 7am to 22c, then 7am to 21c. It comes on, then goes off at 7am. I would like to find a video about how heat pumps combine outside and inside temperatures to decide what to do. It seems it is not a binary decision. I added a Aqara temperate sensor to Home Assistant and have noticed that it records the temperature 1c cooler than the Onecta wall thermostat.
@@bazcurtis178 Our Valliant HP has a setting that says what temp the outside air needs to be below before the heating comes on. Ours defaulted to 16, took me a while to work out why the heating was not on. The UI and the terms used are awful, not sure how a non technical person can understand it.
@ I agree. I found this video - ruclips.net/video/CAFlnuskc-w/видео.htmlsi=5cVsWq237tnr-mVw. Your heat pump is not hot enough. It explains it very well. It would be nice to have a heat pump v gas boiler how they work differently.
Well done
Thanks for commenting 🙂
Subject request : If you still got some time for a.subject about number of start/stop cycles versus total run hours that would be great. I see a lot of heat pumps that are making too many start/stops compared with the run hours. In the new app you can see these numbers but only if your AI is a newer one (2023/2024). Mine ratio is round the 1, nearly the same. I installed the HP in autumn 2023. Some got HP with a ratio more than 3. This means that HP runs but lifetime will be shorted with several years. Cause: HP Installers don't know how it should works and do not take time to do their jobs well,. (It cost time and money to install a HP and doing the fine tuning is a long term process.
In an ideal world the HP installers should have set all up all more or less correctly during commissioning, with follow up checks a couple of times within the first year, one in Summer and another Winter.
Yep, or we improve the self learning controls?
@@UpsideDownFork
Yes, a good home for AI or cloud controlled unit, the manufacturers already harvest every last hidden detail from their units, so adding in room temperatures, external temperatures, costs, smart tariffs etc surely wouldn't be too difficult.
As one example, the Mixergy HWC (Raspberry Pi controller) is preprogramed to work with Octopuses Agile if available (Not me as yet).
Your flow temp looks high, do you have microbore pipework? I can't recall from your earlier vid. And that DHW SCOP????
My design flow temp is 45 degrees at -2.
I actually have my heat curve set at 0.6 which is lower than the 45 degree design at -2.
My DHW COP for 2024 is 3.4.
Not too bad considering the limitations I face.
RUclips's auto-policing of comments is quite frustrating.
I don't do facebook so hoping someone here can advise please, I'd like to switch to a heat pump but need to work out costs and viability.
My house is approx 250sqm and we have an oil boiler. The house was built in 2005 so is not terrible as far as insulation is concerned but probably not up to modern standards although I did double the loft insulation a few years ago. Can someone please confirm my numbers below.
So we currently use approx 2000 litres of oil per year which has approx 10kw of energy per litre.
Our boiler is not condensing so probably 70% to 75% efficient, lets say 72.5%.
So 2000 x 10 x 0.725 = 14500kWh of heat energy, but this is very much approximate.
Am I correct to say in the North (I'm in Northern Ireland) a heat pump gives 3 to 4 kWh of heat for 1kWh of consumption?
If so that would be between 4833kWh and 3625kWh consumption from the grid.
Where I live electricity is expensive but we're on an EV tariff so 30.2p kWh during the day and 14p at night.
If all the heating was at full price of £0.302 it would be between £1460 and £1095 per year.
Does this sound correct? Obviously the heat pump would be running through the night and not all the consumption would be at 30.2p so it should be less, plus I have a battery so some of the day time heating would be at 14p.
We normally keep the thermostats at 18C downstairs and 17C upstairs so not as warm as many do and I'm hoping that will make the change more feasible
Thanks in advance. 🙂
Your numbers look pretty bang on to me. My HP, installed by Octopus, was £2600 including 11 new radiators (of which only 4 were needed, but it was so cheap I got them all done).
One thing I'd recommend is to get a battery, e.g. a GivEnergy All In One. Being able to timeshift your power to off peak is great - I'm on Octopus Intelligent Go, and now all our power is at 7p/kWh. So heating our house costs pennies.
I love my HP - so impressed with it!
@@edwardbyard6540 Thanks for your reply, unfortunately Octopus is not available to me so 14p is the cheapest night time rate I can get. I didn't mention it earlier but I already have a battery which covers all of my day time usage unless I need to charge the car during the day.
I have never monitored how much time the oil boiler is burning for so it is hard to calculate a daily consumption. Obviously it will be higher on very cold days but have you a figure for an average winter day? Just to figure out if the battery could handle a whole day of heating?
Thanks again
Your sums look good to me.
Coming from a non condensing boiler, you should only be winning.
My heat pump wasn’t well setup by the installers, as you say they were conservative in the settings, 55 flow temperature, no weather compensation, 1 degree hysteresis and the hot water was heated by immersion AND heat pump. Slowly worked my way through revising and improving all these settings and have meaningfully reduced my electricity consumption as a result
great channel and love the content..... just one thing i have plenty of solar and battery storage but the gas boiler is staying, press a button the house is warm and the water is hot when needed, we haven't had a bad cold winter yet but the boiler won't be bothered because it can cope.
fair play to you. But that's not an efficient use of a gas boiler either. Having it properly set up for stable state heating will lower running costs, and with a heat pump it will excel at it further. Solar and Battery storage would allow you to bring down the running costs further.
@@BenIsInSweden thanks for the reply, the whole aim is to reduce our usage from the grid not use smart tariffs to think that we are greener..... we don't use gas for 6/7 months of the year, the idear that charging from the grid after midnight with cheap electricity when it's night time and the wind doesn't blow is for people trying to save money.. end of
@@robin5215 If you're not using gas for 6/7 months of the year then it sounds like you're using solar divert, which with a heat pump would mean you'd use less of your solar, which can go towards using the grid less as well.
Not entirely sure of your point of wanting to use the grid less though, you're still reliant on the gas network currently regardless, and having it for "instant heat" is using more gas than necessary.
@@BenIsInSweden thanks for the reply, we have two systems, the old feed in tariff at 70p per kwh what we make and a battery storage system, we are off grid since 2011 because we get paid more than we use... but.... we added the battery system to reduce our usage from the grid
I hope that when it comes time to retire your boiler you'll be well prepared and ready for a switch to a heat pump.
I'm single so i don't need to heat the whole house, just the room i'm in. My favorite heater is a 250w heat lamp. no noise and instant heat. Try one above your kitchen table. You should be able to turn down your main system.
You can have rooms adjusted with a heat pump to have a lower temperature and have it at a comfortable temperature in the rooms you use. No point in adding in heat at a COP of 1 with a heat lamp, as you're just unnecessarily adding to your electricity bills.
The heat in that room excapes in to the unheated rooms, which is why it's not a good idea to have unheated rooms. Watch the heat geeks video about zoning, or not as the case is.
@@BenIsInSweden I pay $30 per month (10cents per kwh) 360/year. Post what you pay and if it is less I will be all ears.
We can't convince everyone.
@@mattgruber3933 That just shows your ignorance, and you fail to realise that you simply can't compare by cost, lets see why not, different size house, different build and insulation, different air change rate, different climate, different energy rates. If you're happy doing what you do then carry on. Oh, my energy costs are negative, my energy supplier pays me, and that's for a five bedroom detached house in the UK. By the way, our electric standard rate is $0.34, so that's 3.4 times what you pay.
'They live in Windsor Castle' who are you rubbing shoulders with?
Bonnie prince Charlie is always on the FB heat pump UK group
-3... Not just a dip bu maintained -3.... Lmao. Try -25 at night for two weeks of the year and -20 max on those days. When i hear scop of 4.5 with monoblock unit, makes me laugh. Tell me when you consume average 1MWh average on the heating season
We got down to -20C here and my consumption average for the heating season was ~2MWh. 😭 I do have an old 1920s 152sqm home though.
@@BenIsInSweden my house has 114m² heated area, it is built in 1975, energy sertification declares 32MWh of heat input needed. Colleague has heatpump and uses about of electricity 1MWh per month, but he has about 200m² of heated area. Better insulated tho.
You don't live in the UK, I'm not informed about the rest of the world but what I've stated for the UK is all true and correct.
Got a 9kw.. it's horrendous on electricity..
Got a cheap Chinese Diesel heater plus an electric 7kw electric shower amd use 10x less money
@@Rockall57 might want to pay attention to the video and get that sorted out.
There's a million and one details that could be wrong. But firstly have you double checked the heat loss of the property is about 9kw?
Is the unit running from pure weather compensation?
What is the flow temperature at your design temperature?
What size pipes do you have and in copper or plastic?
If working well a heat pump should be cost competitive Vs a gas boiler.
There's about 0% chance I'd allow a diesel heater and thus it's exhaust fumes anywhere my property or children's lungs.
You might save a few quid but the emissions will be terrible. As he says don't give up learn why its expensive and get it resolved. Heatpumps can be very ecomical to run. If they run well and still cost a mint then the house is probably the one with the issue.
@@Lewis_Standing taking notes on your comments..I'm actually getting a property surveyor to do a survey and with that get heat Geek etc to come and do a survey on how the system was set up and how to sort it out.
We got an ECO4 Grant and it been a total cluster f....
@@joewentworth7856 I doubt it.. diesel is £1.40 litre but what I am doing is getting a survey to find out WFT is wrong with the system..it was fitted by a cowboy 🤠 outfit under the ECO4 UK government grant scheme..
The whole process has been a cluster F...
@@Rockall57diesel has about 10kWh of energy per liter. At 70% efficiency (which is generous for Chinese ones), that means you're paying at least 20p per kWh of heat.
MSC minimum on the current price cap for a heat pump would be just shy of 9p/kWh of heat. Even a COP of 1.3 from the heat pump would be cheaper to run than the diesel heater at current prices.
So its every other device causing high electricity use and not the heat pump....
Do you listen to yourself and who is paying you to speak such BS?
Gas boilers dont have these high costs and are far more efficient so why buy a heat pump that does not work as good and is very expensive to fit and maintain...... get a grip and stop lying to people 😮😮😮😮😮
How are gas boilers more efficient? Have you even measured your gas boiler efficiency to find out how efficient it is?
I'll bite and point out that heat pumps are far more efficient than gas boilers, this is not in contention except for people who have no knowledge of engineering and no desire/ability to find out. It uses far less gas to run a generator (at the power plant) and then a heat pump to heat the home than running a gas boiler, though obviously getting the electricity from renewables or nuclear is much better. (It actually even produces less carbon to have the electricity from the most polluting source of coal and then have a heat pump than to use gas in a boiler).
About the only thing worse than using gas boilers is hydrogen produced from gas, hydrogen from renewables is not as polluting as a gas boiler but would cost around 7 times as much as using the electricity directly with a heat pump.
Is that your experience as an owner @kentneil7100? Or are you just exposing your ignorance?
@@MentalLentil-ev9jr Electricity is 4 time the cost of gas (and rising rapidly due to expensive renewables) so no, HPs have little to no chance of being more efficient than gas for heating...
@@manoo422 So you are specifying that efficiency is measured in terms of energy against price, okay this is a definition that goes against those that understand what efficiency is, but even within those terms heat pumps can win now and will definitely be far better than boilers in the near future.
Firstly, electricity should not be 4 times the price of gas as that does not take into account cheaper overnight tariffs or special tariffs such as Octopus which are amplified even more by the use of batteries. Ovo do an all day tariff of 15p for heat pumps.
Secondly, heat pumps can achieve better than an efficiency of 4 (mine is around 5) whereas most boilers fail to achieve better than .8 meaning 3.2 is a more realistic comparison. The quotes of 95% bandied for some condensing boilers only applies to very well installed and set up systems, most do not meet this goal and doing so would increase the cost of a gas boiler install significantly and likely involve radiator upgrades etc.
Thirdly, have you looked at the price of an installation from Octopus? (hint, it's not very expensive).
Fourthly, electricity will decrease in price compared to gas with more renewables coming online, it would be cheaper right now if the price of electricity were not based upon the gas price. It is very conceivable that within 10 years electricity will be cheaper than gas - though I would hope that in 10 years the gas infrastructure would be dismantled anyway.
The above is just based upon your definition of electricity. The normal definition would be power out over power in, heat pumps typically get 4, some better some worse, whereas most boilers are in the 0.7 -.0 85 range.
As usual no mention of electricity being 4 time the cost of gas and rising rapidly due to expensive renewables!
My heat pump tariff from British Gas is 14p/kWh, what's gas 7.5p/kWh ?
At that my heat costs 3.25p/kWh, compared to gas (assuming 85% efficient boiler) 8.8p/kWh of heat.
If I were on standard electricity tariff of 25p it still works out cheaper for me at an average of 5.8p/kWh of heat over the year.
Renewables are making things much cheaper, with many suppliers now offering smart tariffs that sometimes even pay us to use electricity.
With current World politics it's unlikely that gas prices will drop any time soon.
A well installed heat pump is 400% efficient so uses about 5x less energy than the average gas boiler. And, it’s easy to find an electricity tariff that is much less than 4-fold the gas price.
You lost all credibility when you stated that prices are rising due to "expensive renewables".
Check the facts and then come back for more. Take care!
Get yourself a smart meter and change your tariff, I'm paying 4.76p/kWh between midnight and 6am, plus charging a 10 kWh battery for use in the day when solar isn't sufficient, oh and forget the winter duvet as you don't need it anymore 🤣
My electric costs 7p and is supplemented by free solar.