Anyone used Rointe heaters?

gemini4378

lohr500 said:

If you plan to stay in the property for many years, then my advice would be to remove the Rointe heaters.
They will cost a fortune to run as they will be using direct peak rate electricity which is currently the most expensive way to heat the house 

Depending on the size and location of the wood burner, it will provide some heat around the house. But unless you have access to free/cheap wood and somewhere dry to store the wood, they are expensive to run. Newly felled timber also takes months to dry out well enough to burn effectively.

Storage heater technology has moved on and I understand the newer models are able to store heat more effectively during the day so you have more heat in the evenings. But they work on the same basic principle of heating up on an Economy 7 or similar tariff overnight. Many of the newer models ideally also need two electrical feeds to them. A permanent live feed to power the controller and built in circulation fan and a secondary feed which is energised during the off peak period to "tell" the heater when to charge up. The secondary feed can be eliminated by using a local timer for each storage heater but this gets messy as you need to keep checking the timers to make sure they haven't drifted from the Economy 7 hours!
From a disruption point of view, depending on the wiring gauge and condition you may well be able to utilise the existing Rointe wiring points to connect Storage heaters, but without the secondary off peak signal wiring you would need to rely on local timers.
A qualified electrician could advise on this. And if the house doesn't already have an old style Economy 7 or smart meter, you would need to get that changed to access the Economy 7 tariffs.

Other options include Heat Pumps (Air to water, Ground to water or Air to air), liquid gas, oil, biomass.

Anything other than air to air heat pump, will need radiators and the supporting pipework installing as I am assuming the house hasn't got any radiators already. So a costly install but then cheaper to run once up and running.

Biomass isn't mainstream and again requires storage space for the pellets and a higher level of maintenance as the ash needs frequent removal (I believe weekly, but I could be wrong). And currently I have read that biomass pellet prices have rocketed.

After looking at Air to water heat pumps last year for our old farmhouse, rightly or wrongly I concluded that they were not cost effective as a replacement for oil. And that was when there was a £12k grant available, as opposed to the £5k grant now.
Partially this was because nearly all the radiators in the house would have needed changing for larger ones to support the lower operating temperatures from the ASHP. But also I was sceptical on the claims that an ASHP would reliably give me 3kW of heat out for every 1kW electricity used. Especially in the depths of winter where I understand ASHP efficiency drops with colder weather outside.

However, with a new installation you could fit the larger radiators from day 1 so the difference in cost of an ASHP install vs oil or LPG would not be as great as retro fitting ASHP into an existing system. The benefit of larger radiators on an oil or lpg fired system is that you can run the boiler at a lower temperature which improves the efficiency through improved condensing.

I know you don't like oil, but if it was me, I would look seriously at oil or LPG, but specifying larger radiators so the system was future proofed for conversion to ASHP in the future. Modern oil boilers an be located on an outside wall of the property, freeing up space inside and keeping any noise out of the house. We did this with our replacement oil boiler last year.

The difficulty is predicting what will happen to electricity and heating oil/lpg costs over the next 5 years + and which heating method will be most cost effective with the movement in prices. 

I know very little about Air to Air heat pumps, but these are similar to split air conditioning units, with one unit typically on the inside of an external wall and another outside. From an installation point of view, perhaps less disruptive than installing pipework and radiators throughout the property. But how many would you need to ensure good heating throughout the house? And I don't think they qualify for the £5k grant. Someone with more knowledge may chip in with more info on them.

To try and put some numbers on running costs : 

Every kWh you use on the Rointe heaters will cost you around £0.34 at the new capped rate.
A heat pump, IF it can provide a real world conversion factor of 3, will cost £0.11 per kWh.
A litre of oil at £0.89 with a boiler efficiency of 94% will cost £0.09 per kWh.
Storage heaters, see below : £0.16 per kWh.
Don't know about LPG or biomass.


The new capped Economy 7 prices seem all over the place depending on supplier and region, but the EDF off peak rate in our region (Yorkshire) is £0.16 if paying through a fixed monthly DD. So in our region storage heaters would cost around £0.16 per kWh, assuming no additional peak rate electricity was used to boost their output during the day. Possibly a little higher as the modern units have an electronic controller and I believe a circulation fan which will use a little electricity.

Not sure if this helps or confuses!!

Thank you for this, it's really helpful, especially the prices, I can clearly see how much more expensive the Rointe heaters are. This is definitely a big issue. My main issue with oil is that it's not environmentally friendly and I absolutely despise the smell which would either have to go into our front garden or back garden at this house. I think we could potentially put at air source heat pump in with underfloor heating which I think would be more efficient? Bit confused by air source heat pumps and whether this would involve installing a wet system or not?

Also don't really fancy having a loud fan on the front on the house which I think its probably what it would be like to have an air source heat pump.....?

I can't seem to find anywhere where you can actually see a heat pump in action.

Really helpful advice. Thank you

matelodave

Do your sums - work out the cost of installing an oil system from scratch (tank, pipes, boiler, rads etc) and then work out what it would cost for a heatpump system. We had a similar dilemma 12 years ago and excluding the costs of the rads and plumbing, the ASHP came out around £3.5k more expensive, however we did get around £5k back in RHI payments.

It's not easy to calculate the overall COP as our system hasn't got any monitoring, but based on our EPC and the energy consumption of the heatpump (both for heating and hot water), I reckon we are pretty close to around 3 over the year (it's bound to be less in the winter but probably a lot better in the summer) I'd guess that a more modern unit installed to the latest standards should be able to achieve a COP of 3-3.5

We've also managed to keep ourselves on the cheapest tariffs (meaning that we did end up with five failed energy companies) but the costs were almost comparable with gas and over the period cheaper than oil or LPG. Last year (2021) our total leccy bill (heatingm hot water, cooking, washing etc) was just under £1000, this year it's going to be around £2000 and with the new cap in place I anticipate that next year will be around £2500 for around 7200-7500kwh a year 50% is for heating and 50% for hot water and all the other stuff.

However, the situation is a bit different nowadays - leccy is a lot more expensive but so is gas and who knows what will happen with the cost of oil or LPG but as lohr500 says, using rointe, fischer or even B&Q's best will cost you 34p/kwh as will electric underfloor heating so it's a recipe for bankruptcy, so almost anything else should be cheaper.

Decent storage heaters may be a solution, but they are pretty expensive and although you can get E7 which gives you lower costs during the night, its much more expensive during the day.

We did instal wet underfloor heating in conjunction with the heatpump which may help improve it's COP, but we are at home all day and it probably runs for most of the time at a low flow temperature, but we are warm and cosy, we dont have squadrons of LPG or oil tankers coming to us like others where we live and maintenance is minimal to non existent and I dont think our cost are excessive.

gemini4378

matelodave said:

Do your sums - work out the cost of installing an oil system from scratch (tank, pipes, boiler, rads etc) and then work out what it would cost for a heatpump system. We had a similar dilemma 12 years ago and excluding the costs of the rads and plumbing, the ASHP came out around £3.5k more expensive, however we did get around £5k back in RHI payments.

It's not easy to calculate the overall COP as our system hasn't got any monitoring, but based on our EPC and the energy consumption of the heatpump (both for heating and hot water), I reckon we are pretty close to around 3 over the year (it's bound to be less in the winter but probably a lot better in the summer) I'd guess that a more modern unit installed to the latest standards should be able to achieve a COP of 3-3.5

We've also managed to keep ourselves on the cheapest tariffs (meaning that we did end up with five failed energy companies) but the costs were almost comparable with gas and over the period cheaper than oil or LPG. Last year (2021) our total leccy bill (heatingm hot water, cooking, washing etc) was just under £1000, this year it's going to be around £2000 and with the new cap in place I anticipate that next year will be around £2500 for around 7200-7500kwh a year 50% is for heating and 50% for hot water and all the other stuff.

However, the situation is a bit different nowadays - leccy is a lot more expensive but so is gas and who knows what will happen with the cost of oil or LPG but as lohr500 says, using rointe, fischer or even B&Q's best will cost you 34p/kwh as will electric underfloor heating so it's a recipe for bankruptcy, so almost anything else should be cheaper.

Decent storage heaters may be a solution, but they are pretty expensive and although you can get E7 which gives you lower costs during the night, its much more expensive during the day.

We did instal wet underfloor heating in conjunction with the heatpump which may help improve it's COP, but we are at home all day and it probably runs for most of the time at a low flow temperature, but we are warm and cosy, we dont have squadrons of LPG or oil tankers coming to us like others where we live and maintenance is minimal to non existent and I dont think our cost are excessive.

Thank you for this, really helpful. I've actually been wanting an air source heat pump for a while as I like to be eco so would be willing to go through the faff and cost of it if we could get the house for a good price. I had thought about a wet underfloor system and air source heat pump but I think I'm a bit confused as to why am air source heat pump is cheaper to run? I'm not sure I fully understand how they work! Electric powers the fan and then the energy created from moving air heats the water so then you're only paying for turning the fan as opposed to heating individual radiators?

How do you find the fan being on the outside of your house? Is it noisy?


Thank you

Swipe

If you place eco principles as priority you will always be out of pocket

matelodave

The reason they produce more energy than they use is because they can extract heat from the outside air (even if its very cold). Think of it as a bit like a refrigerator but with the cold side outdoors and the warm side inside the house. It's really just lan airconditioner which instead of moving heat to the outside from your house, it's configured to move heat from outside to indoors instead.

There is a compressor in the unit which does the magic. It is possible get a COP (coefficient of performance) of between 4-5 under the right conditions.

Our EPC reckons we need something like 15,000kwh a year for heat and hot water and I reckon our heatpump uses around 4000kwh a year in electricity to provide it. Rointe heaters would be using around 12-13000kwh with another 2-3000kwh for our hot water.

Lots of info on t'interweb on how they work - have a shufti at this

 - https://www.bing.com/videos/search?&q=how+does+a+heat+pump+work+in+winter&docid=608032125384741676&mid=26191C00E3A5717C85CF26191C00E3A5717C85CF&view=detail&form=VDRVRV&ajaxhist=0

Regarding noise, yes you can hear the fans running but they aren't very noisy, I probably wouldn't want one outside a bedroom window if it was open, but we cant hear ours indoors and the unit is next to the dining room window. In fact I can hear the oil boiler from the house opposite, across the road, over the sound that our heatpump makes.

BTW our wet underfloor heating is an overlay system, which means its sits on top of the existing flooring, like this - https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=polypipe+overlay+underfloor+heating&docid=607988174982509846&mid=3EFE6146CAB910B83F583EFE6146CAB910B83F58&view=detail&FORM=VIRE

The main thing about them though is to ensure that they are installed correctly and part of a whole system design and that you understand how to operate them properly. They dont work like a conventional boiler and so need a bit of understanding to get the best out of them.

lohr500

Without getting too bogged down in the technicalities, a heat pump is a very clever device that is capable of extracting energy from the low temperature heat in the air outside and converting it into much higher temperature heat that is used to feed the central heating/hot water heating circuits in the house. It does this using a compressor and coolant that changes phase from liquid to gas and back. A bit like the system in most fridges and freezers.

ASHP specifications will refer to something called a SCOP which is the laboratory measured conversion factor that the pump will achieve. In reality most people who have them seem to be reporting a figure of between 2.5 and 3.
So this means for every kWh of electricity the unit uses, you get between 2.5 and 3kWh of energy fed into the heating/hot water system.

The vast majority of ASHP are used with a wet heating system, including radiators or piped underfloor heating.
They typically run at lower circulation temperatures (50 deg max) hence the need for larger radiators if retro fitted to an existing gas or oil/lpg system.

There are some air source heat pumps that convert the colder air outside into warm blown air for inside. These don't use central heating pipework and radiators/underfloor water heating. I don't know much about them, but I am told they too can deliver a COP figure of 3. I'm not sure how practical they would be if you needed a blower unit in each room, but might be worth looking into.

Sadly, I fear Swipe is correct. On your daily running costs, the greenest mainstream solution (ASHP) will more than likely work out more expensive than oil with current energy costs.
The extra cost of an ASHP installation may be marginal though if you are starting from scratch with no existing wet radiators or wet underfloor heating. The extra cost of the ASHP and control elements unit over say an oil boiler will probably be covered by the £5k grant that is available. As a guideline, a bare 17kW Grant ASHP unit costs £5000 from PlumbNation. A 15/21kW Grant external blue flame oil boiler from the same supplier is £1700. 

It is difficult as you aren't already in the house, but would it be possible to get a few quotations from reputable installers for various heating options?

As mentioned by myself and others above, if you plan to stay in the house for some time, those Rointe or any other peak rate direct heat radiators are going to cost a fortune to run. Putting in a central heating system will probably increase the value of the property anyway for the future. Especially if electricity prices remain high. If I was looking at an all electric property today, unless it was below market value, or it was in such a great location that I would struggle to find anything else like it, I would look elsewhere.

It is only a very rough guide but what Space Heating (kWh per year) is shown on the EPC for the property?
If you take that number and multiply it by the per kWh rates I posted earlier it would give you an indication of the different annual cost for heating the property. Obviously, it is totally dependant on how often you want the heating on and how hot you like the house, but it would give an indication.

gemini4378

lohr500 said:

Without getting too bogged down in the technicalities, a heat pump is a very clever device that is capable of extracting energy from the low temperature heat in the air outside and converting it into much higher temperature heat that is used to feed the central heating/hot water heating circuits in the house. It does this using a compressor and coolant that changes phase from liquid to gas and back. A bit like the system in most fridges and freezers.

ASHP specifications will refer to something called a SCOP which is the laboratory measured conversion factor that the pump will achieve. In reality most people who have them seem to be reporting a figure of between 2.5 and 3.
So this means for every kWh of electricity the unit uses, you get between 2.5 and 3kWh of energy fed into the heating/hot water system.

The vast majority of ASHP are used with a wet heating system, including radiators or piped underfloor heating.
They typically run at lower circulation temperatures (50 deg max) hence the need for larger radiators if retro fitted to an existing gas or oil/lpg system.

There are some air source heat pumps that convert the colder air outside into warm blown air for inside. These don't use central heating pipework and radiators/underfloor water heating. I don't know much about them, but I am told they too can deliver a COP figure of 3. I'm not sure how practical they would be if you needed a blower unit in each room, but might be worth looking into.

Sadly, I fear Swipe is correct. On your daily running costs, the greenest mainstream solution (ASHP) will more than likely work out more expensive than oil with current energy costs.
The extra cost of an ASHP installation may be marginal though if you are starting from scratch with no existing wet radiators or wet underfloor heating. The extra cost of the ASHP and control elements unit over say an oil boiler will probably be covered by the £5k grant that is available. As a guideline, a bare 17kW Grant ASHP unit costs £5000 from PlumbNation. A 15/21kW Grant external blue flame oil boiler from the same supplier is £1700. 

It is difficult as you aren't already in the house, but would it be possible to get a few quotations from reputable installers for various heating options?

As mentioned by myself and others above, if you plan to stay in the house for some time, those Rointe or any other peak rate direct heat radiators are going to cost a fortune to run. Putting in a central heating system will probably increase the value of the property anyway for the future. Especially if electricity prices remain high. If I was looking at an all electric property today, unless it was below market value, or it was in such a great location that I would struggle to find anything else like it, I would look elsewhere.

It is only a very rough guide but what Space Heating (kWh per year) is shown on the EPC for the property?
If you take that number and multiply it by the per kWh rates I posted earlier it would give you an indication of the different annual cost for heating the property. Obviously, it is totally dependant on how often you want the heating on and how hot you like the house, but it would give an indication.

Right, this makes a lot of sense. Thank you for explaining it.

I will look into quotes but as you said, people seem reluctant as I'm not in the house, just doing research.

I have worked out annual costs based on our electric and oil usage at the moment and it's a whopping £3600 more expensive with the Rointe heaters. Eye watering really. It is a beautiful property though and great location, we've been looking for 9 months hence why I'm doing so much research into this.

Oil seems cheapest to run and install (sadly) however I have concluded that installing a wet underfloor system with oil boiler would ultimately mean we could be ready to take up any future incentives for more eco options. The EPC of the property we're looking at is D but done in 2014 and it has floor to ceiling windows across the whole back of the house so this seems to be a bit optimistic to me. We had our EPC done this year and we're E. So it is a potential improvement. 

Thank you again for your help, I feel so much more informed.

lohr500

If you do decide on oil, then you are 100% doing the right thing to make sure it is future proofed to convert to ASHP or similar in the future. On a new install this should be relatively easy to do. As well as wet underfloor heating, any radiators in the smaller rooms need to be oversized to allow for lower flow and return temperatures. You can also then run the oil boiler with lower flow and return temperatures which improve the condensing efficiency of the boiler.

If I understand it correctly, many ASHP installations use a large water heat store tank in place of a traditional immersion cylinder. Again with a new oil installation it could be worth investigating the use of a heat store tank from day 1 to minimise any future conversion to ASHP. 

Key to the installation will be finding a firm who really understand these things and aren't a bunch of cowboys. That in itself could be a bigger challenge than deciding on what house to buy!!!

gemini4378

lohr500 said:

If you do decide on oil, then you are 100% doing the right thing to make sure it is future proofed to convert to ASHP or similar in the future. On a new install this should be relatively easy to do. As well as wet underfloor heating, any radiators in the smaller rooms need to be oversized to allow for lower flow and return temperatures. You can also then run the oil boiler with lower flow and return temperatures which improve the condensing efficiency of the boiler.

If I understand it correctly, many ASHP installations use a large water heat store tank in place of a traditional immersion cylinder. Again with a new oil installation it could be worth investigating the use of a heat store tank from day 1 to minimise any future conversion to ASHP. 

Key to the installation will be finding a firm who really understand these things and aren't a bunch of cowboys. That in itself could be a bigger challenge than deciding on what house to buy!!!

Oh gosh on to the next hurdle! 

I just want to clarify what you said about radiators in smaller rooms? I was imagining with underfloor heating that would be throughout the whole house? The house is currently all electric with no wet system at all, apart from the immersion heater for hot water.

Thank you

matelodave

We've got a heatpump and with underfloor heating and hot water from the heatpump, can still only achieve a D on our EPC because (as far as I can see) its based on the energy requirements of the building (in my case some 15,000kwh) but not on the energy consumption of the building which in my case would be around 4,000-4500 kwh. Absolutely stupid.