Solar Panels

[Bostonhibby]

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Heat pumps hopeless when the weather gets colder in the UK.

I've a friend who has installed them in the past and he says some of them are good ways not to save money!

Doesn't do it anymore so the current versions might be better.

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[Callum_62]

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How many in total will that give you Callum and do you feel it's a big disadvantage being East/West? From what I'm reading it seems I'd need double that of a South facing roof to catch both the morning then afternoon sun.

That will give me about a 6kw system (11 panels on the west roof and 6 on the east roof)

"apparently" East/west loses about 20 percent over a true south facing roof

Based on my usage and rates I'd make my money back in about 6.5 years

East / west isn't perfect but its not a deal breaker at all from what I understand it

West roof is slighter better than East

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[Moulin Yarns]

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Heat pumps hopeless when the weather gets colder in the UK.

You realise that a heat pump is like a fridge in reverse!



With an air-to-water heat pump system, heat energy warms water for your hot water cylinder and radiators. Traditional central heating systems use a boiler to warm water and radiators, often using high temperatures. Air-to-water heat pumps are more energy efficiency at lower temperatures. They therefore offer slower heat release over more extended periods; perfect for underfloor heating and larger radiators

[Ged]

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Has anyone on here got experience with the benefits of solar panels and batteries etc..?

Reason I'm asking, is we had someone out to price up a job for us. 10 Panels and a 6kwh (I think) battery, which comes in around £11,500. Now the energy saving trust are offering £11,000 in an interest free loan, which is repayable over 10 years, so £92 a month.

What I'm trying to figure out, is will my bills drop by enough to cover that £92 a month, or am I going to have to cover the difference somewhere?

For anyone thinking about the Home Energy Scotland interest free loan, it has to be a recommended improvement on an Energy Performance Certificate for you to be eligible. The £11,000 figure is made up of £5,000 for the Solar PV and £6,000 for the battery.

There are differing opinions on whether the battery is actually worth it. If you have an electric car it might be better to use the excess electricity produced to charge that.

If you go for Solar Thermal, which is water heating, the loan is £5,000 but there's £3,750 cashback available so you only pay back £1,250. Because this is for water heating only you can't add a battery to this set up.

[Ged]

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Heat pumps hopeless when the weather gets colder in the UK.

Heat Pumps are very efficient but you have to have your house fully insulated to get the benefit, so that's loft, walls and underfloor insulation, double glazing, draughtproofing, the lot. There is funding available for most of that but it's still going to be a bit of an outlay.

Funding for the heat pumps is quite good though. You can get a £10,000 interest free loan over 10 years and there's £7,500 cashback available so you're only paying back £2,500. Again, it has to be a recommendation on an EPC before you're eligible for the loan and you have to carry out any insulation measures on the EPC to get the heat pump loan. That's going to eat into the £7,500 you might think you're saving!

[Callum_62]

That isn't quite true about the EPC recommendation

It either needs to be recommended on the EPC or on a home energy selector report sent by home energy Scotland

Hardly any epc recommendeds solar or battery so most(incl myself) need the 2nd option

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[Ged]

Which bit about the EPC is untrue?

[Callum_62]

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Which bit about the EPC is untrue?

I mean if it does not recommend it on the EPC that isn't the end of it

Most EPCs don't recommend panels or battery storage

In which case you need an energy selector report provided from Home energy Scotland to attach to your loan application

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[Jones28]

Well I'm pleased to say that my system has been up and running for a week now.

Having some peaks and troughs in production, 17.9kw being the record so far, lowest day being 5kw.

Cannot fault the guys at R B Grants for their services.

Ended up going for a 4.9 PV system with a 6.5 kw battery and inverter made by Growatt.

Also got an iBoost system which turns excess generation in to hot water by controlling the immersion heater on your hot water storage tank.

[Ozyhibby]

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Well I'm pleased to say that my system has been up and running for a week now.

Having some peaks and troughs in production, 17.9kw being the record so far, lowest day being 5kw.

Cannot fault the guys at R B Grants for their services.

Ended up going for a 4.9 PV system with a 6.5 kw battery and inverter made by Growatt.

Also got an iBoost system which turns excess generation in to hot water by controlling the immersion heater on your hot water storage tank.

Do you have a south facing roof? My roof faces east/west so not sure how efficient that would be.


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[Scouse Hibee]

Next door has them, the space underneath them has become a permanent home for pigeons! A right pain in the erse.

[Ozyhibby]

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Next door has them, the space underneath them has become a permanent home for pigeons! A right pain in the erse.

That should be netted off so they can’t get in.


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[Moulin Yarns]

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Do you have a south facing roof? My roof faces east/west so not sure how efficient that would be.


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I'm the same and I believe that there's a 20% reduction in efficiency.

[Scouse Hibee]

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That should be netted off so they can’t get in.


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Well they aren’t, they were installed several years ago, the pigeons are a recently new resident.

[Ozyhibby]

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Well they aren’t, they were installed several years ago, the pigeons are a recently new resident.

Sounds like poor maintenance from your neighbour.


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[Ozyhibby]

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I'm the same and I believe that there's a 20% reduction in efficiency.

That doesn’t sound too bad. Maybe a 6 year payback instead of 5?
Motivation for me would be environmental but to get it approved by my wife it will need to be financially worthwhile.


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[Hibernian Verse]

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That doesn’t sound too bad. Maybe a 6 year payback instead of 5?
Motivation for me would be environmental but to get it approved by my wife it will need to be financially worthwhile.


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Get a loan with Home Energy Scotland and pay back £70 a month for 11 years.

If anyone is interested in a quote let me know. I work in electrical wholesale and will look after you and work with you and one of my customers who is MCS registered.

PM me.

[Scouse Hibee]

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Sounds like poor maintenance from your neighbour.


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They bought the house with the panels in place and don’t seem to be bothered about it.

[Jones28]

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Do you have a south facing roof? My roof faces east/west so not sure how efficient that would be.


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I have a south facing roof with 4 panels and a west facing roof with 8.

[Jones28]

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That doesn’t sound too bad. Maybe a 6 year payback instead of 5?
Motivation for me would be environmental but to get it approved by my wife it will need to be financially worthwhile.


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The big pay-off is after the loan is paid back. But my fag packet maths on the system so far means we wont lose any money, and in the summer with the new tarriff on Octopus (flux) we will hopefully start to actually make money. Once we get to the 10 year (or earlier - you can pay back the HES loan whenever you want) stage it will start to pay real dividends financially.

[speedy_gonzales]

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Get a loan with Home Energy Scotland and pay back £70 a month for 11 years.

If anyone is interested in a quote let me know. I work in electrical wholesale and will look after you and work with you and one of my customers who is MCS registered.

PM me.

Aside from Solar, do you have any dealings with air source heat pumps? I'm looking to do this in the next couple of years. I know the tech is getting better all the time and the other half (who's a building services mech eng) is pushing to get a pump installed but I'm baulking at the install upheaval. The install of wet underfloor heating is quite off-putting to me just now.

[nonshinyfinish]

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Aside from Solar, do you have any dealings with air source heat pumps? I'm looking to do this in the next couple of years. I know the tech is getting better all the time and the other half (who's a building services mech eng) is pushing to get a pump installed but I'm baulking at the install upheaval. The install of wet underfloor heating is quite off-putting to me just now.

Do you know for sure that you need underfloor heating? The internet is full of "certainties" about heat pumps – for example I read online (and was told by a plumber) that microbore pipework ruled out a heat pump and you'd have to replace it all. Guess what – our house is now heated by an air-source heat pump using our existing radiators complete with microbore pipes.

There is useful information out there if you can wade through the nonsense, but ultimately every house is different and the work that you do or don't need comes down to the heat-loss calculation for each room. Best thing you can do is contact some companies for quotes and find one that will do the heat-loss calculation up front for a small (or zero) fee. (Some will ask for big deposits etc before they do that.)

[speedy_gonzales]

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Do you know for sure that you need underfloor heating? The internet is full of "certainties" about heat pumps – for example I read online (and was told by a plumber) that microbore pipework ruled out a heat pump and you'd have to replace it all. Guess what – our house is now heated by an air-source heat pump using our existing radiators complete with microbore pipes.

There is useful information out there if you can wade through the nonsense, but ultimately every house is different and the work that you do or don't need comes down to the heat-loss calculation for each room. Best thing you can do is contact some companies for quotes and find one that will do the heat-loss calculation up front for a small (or zero) fee. (Some will ask for big deposits etc before they do that.)

Thanks for the info. I haven't personally waded through all the information that's available. My wife is the engineer and she does heat loss calcs for her job. Our house is an older house and although we've added a lot of insulation to the attic space, it could still be better. Our floor area is above average too, so if we didn't go down the underfloor heating route, we'd have to get much larger than average radiator panels.
To be honest, we've still got a year or two before we pull the trigger, mainly due to the need to save up for it as she reckons it could cost £10-15K at the moment.

[Sergio sledge]

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Do you know for sure that you need underfloor heating? The internet is full of "certainties" about heat pumps – for example I read online (and was told by a plumber) that microbore pipework ruled out a heat pump and you'd have to replace it all. Guess what – our house is now heated by an air-source heat pump using our existing radiators complete with microbore pipes.

There is useful information out there if you can wade through the nonsense, but ultimately every house is different and the work that you do or don't need comes down to the heat-loss calculation for each room. Best thing you can do is contact some companies for quotes and find one that will do the heat-loss calculation up front for a small (or zero) fee. (Some will ask for big deposits etc before they do that.)

Microbore can certainly be made to work for heat pumps, but it requires a bit more design work and calculations to ensure it is correct. It may also require additional radiators added to a room to make it work (but you may have this with traditional pipework as well depending on the size of the radiators).

I would say it would be unusual for someone to find your situation where all the pipework and existing radiators were adequate to heat the house with a heat pump rather than a boiler. Having said that, it does happen especially if the initial calculations were done "rule of thumb" by a plumber or were done by an engineer who allowed plenty of leeway in their calculations. As a former design engineer it was pretty common for radiators to be 50% - 60% oversized for the space once allowances were made for the errors in calculations and then taking the next available size up to be on the safe side....

To answer a previous point, underfloor heating is not a requirement for air source heat pumps, but it does mean the efficiency of the system can be maximised. The main downside of using existing radiators and pipework is that as the heat pump is at its most efficient at lower temperatures, the radiators may not be able to put out enough heat to heat the room. You can compensate for this by increasing the temperature of the heat pump, but this leads to a drop in efficiency. Heat pump technology is developing all the time though and a lot of the modern heat pumps are really efficient even at 50 - 60 degrees rather than the 35 - 40 degrees of a few years ago.

In a new build I would definitely say that using underfloor heating with a heat pump would be a wise choice, the additional costs of underfloor heating installations are able to be swallowed up in the house build a bit and it does offer a nicer more comfortable heat in the house. However in a retrofit, I don't know that I would be going for underfloor heating, the cost and upheaval of it would be pretty significant when you could (worst case) just replace some radiators with larger ones or add an additional radiator or two to get the heat pump to work.

We've got an ASHP on our house (no mains gas up here) and have had no issues with it, but we are a new build with excellent insulation and underfloor heating throughout. Where people have had issues with heat pumps is where they have put them into old houses with radiators which were too small, potentially a heat pump that was too small and haven't improved the insulation levels of the house before fitting it. They then find that the heat pump is running at full load and higher temperatures for long periods just to try to keep the house warm and the bills start racking up.

[nonshinyfinish]

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Microbore can certainly be made to work for heat pumps, but it requires a bit more design work and calculations to ensure it is correct. It may also require additional radiators added to a room to make it work (but you may have this with traditional pipework as well depending on the size of the radiators).

I would say it would be unusual for someone to find your situation where all the pipework and existing radiators were adequate to heat the house with a heat pump rather than a boiler. Having said that, it does happen especially if the initial calculations were done "rule of thumb" by a plumber or were done by an engineer who allowed plenty of leeway in their calculations. As a former design engineer it was pretty common for radiators to be 50% - 60% oversized for the space once allowances were made for the errors in calculations and then taking the next available size up to be on the safe side....

Yeah, I'm sure our situation is a little unusual and it would be more common to have to replace a few radiators with double-thickness ones. However my point was just that we could easily have been put off altogether by someone we thought had some degree of expertise – the plumber I mentioned didn't do any calculations or similar, he was working on something unrelated and I mentioned in passing that we were considering a heat pump. He said it was impossible with our pipework – no caveats, nothing about changing radiators, just "you won't be able to have a heat pump."

[Onceinawhile]

I have an east-west roof.

10 panels and a 6kw battery.

Since installation on 22 January, we've generated 342.7kw/h. Of that 203.8kwh has been this month.

Our current daily record is c19kwh.

I'd imagine in the April - October time, we won't need to draw from the grid and will probably sell a relatively decent amount back. But the October - March time, we've probably about 1/2d our consumption.

Apparently we've reduced our CO2 by 381Kgs as well. So that's nice.

[Jones28]

Gary Does Solar is an excellent Youtube channel that covers a lot of the usual questions in excellent detail.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8d1iqnhuek&t=1s

The above is a video about the new tariff from Octopus called Flux which is custom made for Solar Panels owners.

[hibeg]

I’m interested in air source heat pumps. Does anyone have any recommended companies to speak to ?

[Callum_62]

Really seeing the benefit now the weather is getting better

We have the electric car that we exclusively charge at home

Our electricity bill for the last month was £38 (£15 of which is the standing charge!)

Considering that it covers the car 'petrol' and our house is really pretty good

Its meaning the panels and battery are probably paying for themselves just about

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[Kato]

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Really seeing the benefit now the weather is getting better

We have the electric car that we exclusively charge at home

Our electricity bill for the last month was £38 (£15 of which is the standing charge!)

Considering that it covers the car 'petrol' and our house is really pretty good

Its meaning the panels and battery are probably paying for themselves just about

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That's amazing. How long till they have paid for themselves if you don't mind me asking, Callum?

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