Alternative to kettle for solar panels

2nd_time_buyer

JKenH said:

mickyduck55 said:

My system is listed in my sig.. I have a 2 Kw kettle which keeps the draw below the inverter and battery capacity even if I have something else on at the same time... If I'm feeling really frugal I pour the left over hot water into a steel flask.. the main issue with this is I forget I have a flask containing hot water and start all over again.  It often gets just poured into the sink to help with the washing up....

What’s happened to our signatures?

I empty the NeoStar each night into the washing up bowl then fill up with cold water and set the timer for 10 hours. If I am getting up really early I will fill a couple of flasks from the NeoStar then fill it up again while still on the GoFaster rate. 

I have heard that tea doesn’t taste as good with reboiled water but I haven’t noticed a difference myself. I do believe in warming the pot first but I do recycle that hot water. 

In winter any heat loss from the NeoStar just goes into warming the house. You could use it as a 0.64kWh heat battery. Fill it up once on GoFaster or Go and again during the day on solar and you could store around 1.25 kWh of heat. That way you could time shift 12-15p of heat which over say 100 days of winter is around £12-15. Payback on £50 cost is around 4 years which compares well to a battery.If you just used it for 1 litre of hot water at breakfast time over the other 265 days you time shift around 50kWh which could save about £5 on current electricity rates but possibly £10 next year when daytime rates go up. So that’s around 2 years payback. 

You can still save money the rest of the year by using it instead of the kettle when PV is low so you might even get payback sooner.

 (I do expect someone to pull that argument to pieces but it is man maths in action). 

Edit: I forgot to add that in summer I can turn off the hot water heating at the kitchen end of the house completely and just use the NeoStar for hot water (from PV) for washing up in the evening. (We still have separate hot water for bathing at the other end of the house). It does away with heat loss in pipe runs getting the hot water to the sink and actually saves water as you aren’t running cold water through the pipes first to get to the hot.

Thanks, that is an impressive level of techno-nerd!

I tried to have a conversation along those lines with my wife. You can probably imagine the glassy eyed indifference it received.

Magnitio

A detailed and interesting review of the Addis Thermo Pot can be found here:

www.mecs.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Thermo-Pot-Water-Boiler-Examination-and-Testing-Final-V1.0.pdf

It is not well insulated, so does use a significant amount of energy to keep the water warm.