Caldera warmstone vs batteries?

anon_ymous

michaels said:

If you could replace all your gas use with electricity at the same price per unit then it would make sense - no boiler to install/maintain, no standing charge etc.

However this only seems possible if the 'low rate' for electricity is similar to the gas rate and you can in some way store enough heat to cover a 24 hour period during the electricity low rate period.

There is no certainty that the former will hold true, gas prices may fall back and low rate electricity tariffs may be withdrawn.

And that is before any of these energy storage systems come into play with their unknown efficiencies, flow temp questions etc.

Edit:  Our peak winter days we might use 170kwh of power (gas plus electric) - trying to 'download' all this power as electricity in an Octopus Go 4 hour window implies about 200 Amps!!

I'm personally betting on those cheap tariffs eventually going away, purely because it's the go to tariff for electric cars. It's off peak prices for off peak usage . If the grid then demands the same amount of energy throughout the day, I can't see why they'd continue to have such tariffs 

QrizB

Getting back to the original question:

waqasahmed said:

So this company says it's a boiler replacement and they say that their technology is worth about 7 Tesla Powerwalls, for 12K instead of 70K which is what Tesla would charge
How true is this in reality? Would I be better off just having regular batteries? (Not necessarily Tesla) 

What do you want to store, electricity (eg. from solar PV, so you can use it in the dark) or heat (eg. from cheap-rate electricity, so you can use it in the day)?
If you want to store electricity, in a domestic setting you need batteries. If you want to store heat, batteries are an expensive and complicated way to do it and a big lump of rock will work almost as well.

Do keep in mind that batteries will be useful all year round but stored heat is really only useful for 4-6 months of the year.

There are also conventional storage heaters & hot water tanks which, while not quite as sci-fi as Mixergy / Sunamp / Tepeo / Caldera, have been mass-market items for decades with a well-developed support network and competitive pricing.

Reed_Richards

waqasahmed said:
I'm personally betting on those cheap tariffs eventually going away....

Then you can forget about the Caldera Warmstone.  It is completely reliant on cheap electricity available at some time during the day/night to charge it up. 

Some of the other "competing" technologies can be heated with hot water or electricity so they act as a Thermal Store but you benefit from more compact size and better insulation that you get with a conventional Thermal Store, which is a tank full of water.  But the Caldera Warmstone gets very hot internally so can only be heated electrically.

Solarchaser

waqasahmed said:

Solarchaser said:

They say 7 tesla powerwalls because it has the ability to store 100kwh... of heat.
Same question as yesterday with the mixergy. 

Mixergy
Sunamp
Tepeo
Caldera 

They are all ways of storing hot water.
They will all be cheaper than storing the equivalent in batteries.

Ahhh. I thought it could do a bit more than Mixergi. These things are considerably pricier than Mixergi unfortunately 

Well it can store 100kwh, which is a shed load more than the mixergy, but no its still essentially hot water storage.

Tou tarrifs are here to stay imo, 4-7pm is still the peak regardless of evs, its when folk do their cooking etc, that's the peak.

Exiled_Tyke

Solarchaser said:

waqasahmed said:

Solarchaser said:

They say 7 tesla powerwalls because it has the ability to store 100kwh... of heat.
Same question as yesterday with the mixergy. 

Mixergy
Sunamp
Tepeo
Caldera 

They are all ways of storing hot water.
They will all be cheaper than storing the equivalent in batteries.

Ahhh. I thought it could do a bit more than Mixergi. These things are considerably pricier than Mixergi unfortunately 

Well it can store 100kwh, which is a shed load more than the mixergy, but no its still essentially hot water storage.

Tou tarrifs are here to stay imo, 4-7pm is still the peak regardless of evs, its when folk do their cooking etc, that's the peak.

But it can be used to run central heating as well as provide hot water? 

Solarchaser

True, my point was more its just a heat storage device not electricity,  but yes fair point, like the tepeo and sunamp it can also do central heating for its £12k price