High Temperature Air Source Heat Pumps for Domestic Heating

Found it! or at least a brochure from a potential installer. I can e-mail it if you want.

The Monoblock units are small and cheap so more suitable for our house, LG do split units too.

https://www.lg.com/uk/heating-awhp

Its a fast-moving field so I expect to repeat my investigation.

One of the important things I learnt was that you can't get a grant without a proper energy survey by a qualified engineer. All the salesmen would quote a lot and hope that the survey didn't come up with any problems.

It might be worth both of us getting a consultant to do a survey to lubricate negotiations.

News - we worked out that wood smoke was irritating our Covid-scarred lungs, so we are heating everything with oil-filled heaters on max-price electricity. The house smells better but I dare not look at the meter.

Imagine today is in the year 2030+.

Wind is producing 0.52% of electricity demand.

That ole heat pump isn't keeping you warm.

True the wind isn't blowing hard today, but Solar is contributing more than Nuclear, and far more than coal, hurrah.

Nonetheless I agree interesting times ahead when gas runs out or if the Russians turn the tap off! Whatever the answer to the UK's energy problem is, it's not fossil fuels. Urgent attention required to both energy efficiency and storage methods or we will be caught with our pants down!

Dave

Ah! but the sun wiil set while nuclear soldiers on.

Following up on the original post re ASHP:

After many hours of research and trying to contact technical people I got nowhere further forward with this project. I feel that the UK renewables industry is overselling the capabilities of the performance of ASHP's in the UK environment. Not one company would get back to me with real-life performance data on UK installations.

I am now convinced that actual UK performance data is well below that quoted by the manufacturers - who all quote a DIN standard that tests the units in low humidity lab conditions. I believe that the constant icing up of the units, due to the high UK humidity, is what is causing the problems. The air temperatures that we experience in the UK are not the issue I think that as soon as the units form even a small layer of ice on the heat exchanger fins the COP falls off a cliff due to the inability to draw energy from the surrounding air. Ice has a low thermal conductivity??

Anyway, I shall continue to use my LPG boiler (we are out in the country so do not have easy access to natural gas). As it is we use such a small amount - less than 300kg/year.

In terms of the way forward on the climate I think the government should be funding carbon capture research and development. I do not see CO2 levels going down anytime soon and unless something is done to remove it from the air I feel the doom merchants may be right regarding our future. An interesting, although worrying thing is that in 1950 our co2 in air was about 300ppm it is now above 400ppm. According to research and ice core samples of air going back more than 800,000 years CO2 levels were always below this 300ppm level.

For info see: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide

There are many other independent reports supporting this level of CO2 increase.

Makes me think that capturing and reducing the CO2 in the air should be as high a priority as trying to reduce emissions.

My thoughts exactly SS , the problem is, there appears to be no-one ' in authority ' for the past three decades

who has the slightest interest in a practical solution using coal.

Steve, have you asked for information on the Navitron forum? About 10 years ago when no suitable data was available someone on there publshed a year's real data from his solar system of daily output, so you could see the good and bad days in winter, and how things gradually improved in spring.
Chances are someone there is doing some detailed monitoring of his ASHP now.

The outside units are able to detect ice build up and go into de-icing mode. Mine iced up once this winter when I left it on overnight due to the predicted low temperatures with wintry showers and you could hear the change in the pump when it went into de-ice mode at about 07:30. Returned to normal after about 10 minutes. I also have an app on my phone that controls the unit so I can set schedules for how I want it to work. There is also an energy consumption report that does days, weeks and years so you can compare day to day or year to year as well as telling you what the consumption of electricity has been in the selected period. Yesterday it used 13.8kWh. Last week it used 117.3kWh. I do not have a full year's figure yet. The highest month was January when it used 855.9kWh, by March it was down to 508.7kWh. I use the scheduling to switch it on at a high temperature in the morning when off peak rates apply then back the temperature back down when normal electricity rates apply. This was the only source of heat used, about 170m², no back up required but I do have 2 electric towel rails. Hope these figures help.

Martin C

Edited By Martin Connelly on 13/04/2021 14:02:33