Baxi ecogen

chella71

Does anyone have or know someone with this boiler,any comments on price or general use would be appreciated.

zeupater

chella71 wrote: »

Does anyone have or know someone with this boiler,any comments on price or general use would be appreciated.

Hi

From the looks of what I've read to date, if you're looking at using them to generate in the winter you could save a little on your electricity bill due to the generation of around 1kW, but the generation is very inefficient in terms of the power to heat ratio. If you have no use for the heat generated by the CHP system there's no point in using it as the electricity generated would be far more expensive than using mains. I believe that a system will cost somewhere in the region of £6k installed.

A better technical solution would be the fuel cell technology units being developed by Ceres (http://www.cerespower.com/) which have a better generated power to heat ratio and could therefore (according to the specs available) be economical to run outside the heating season. The problem with these units is that BG have dabbled with the development and pushed the unit towards being a combined CHP/standard condensing boiler unit (similar to the way the Baxi has been developed), my guess is that this has been done to preserve energy sales revenues ..... why ..... well if they got their act together, the Ceres system could be integrated into a combined CHP&Heat Pump unit and really become efficient at converting gas into heat with an efficiency of somewhere around 250% to 300%, good for the environment, bad for revenues, but a cynic would certainly expect them to be released once everyone has bought a CHP system.

HTH
Z

Ben84

Electric generation in any device or power plant is typically very inefficient with a lot of waste heat, hence the advantages of generating some electric at home where this waste can be used to heat radiators and hot water, so giving a very high overall efficiency. As far as I can tell it's not intended to be a stand alone electric generator, the majority of it's output is intended to be hot water. However, with the significant difference in price between gas and electric in most areas, being able to turn some of your gas in to electric during the heating season is economically and environmentally appealing.

I think they're a good idea, but of course they are still more expensive than a regular high efficiency boiler, as well as a lot more expensive than your existing system if it still works well. I'd have to ask critical questions about the house itself before installing this type of boiler as the same money may be better spent on upgrading the insulation to cut total energy use. It's often more efficient and economical to reduce energy use before bringing in new energy sources. It's important to consider not just if an investment is going to make economical sense, but also consider it against several other investments you could make. I suspect a lot of people are not comparing new energy producing equipment against energy conservation options which often are the best investments. My discovery that some people have solar panels but haven't filled their cavity walls was worrying.

Ken68

Hi Chella...lots of info in Wiki/Google under Whispergen and also discussed on MSE a while back.

georgemac_2

I had a look at this today. The website makes it look quite attractive. I could save quite a bit of money by replacing my 10+ years old Potterton boiler, but is £6K is the installtion price for the ecogen, not sure this would be a good investment in terms of getting my money back. It does apparently qualify for FiT payments, but given the low power generation this is likely to be quite small?

Anyone have any experience with one?