Help!! Air source heat pump costs

MrsBeee

Evan3020 said:

As I say, check your meter every couple of hours until you see where it's going.
What about how you heat hot water?.
16 kwh a day in summer takes some doing.

I will do this tomorrow when I’m home to see if there is a pattern. If there’s not I will check on Saturday when I’m home all day. 

The hot water is a tank, heated by ASHP topped up with an immersion where required. 

I agree 16kwh a day is a lot, we would love to be able to reduce. 

Evan3020

Is the immersion or ashp constantly heating water? And what temp is the water set to?.

Spoonie_Turtle

We have an ASHP too, 3-bedroom house, me home all day, devices charging, heating set to 18℃ (I'm still chilly even with layers at that point), hot water at 50℃, and our annual usage is ~10,000kWh.  I'm a complete energy novice so have nothing helpful to add, but I really don't understand why your usage is half again of ours. 

We're in the middle of the country and of course we've had mild winters, but still.  Summer usage has been 6-700kWh (without heating) so I don't understand how you have less usage than us in summer yet so much more annually.  Intriguing.  Is it your estimated annual consumption or actual consumption from previous meter reads?

[For anyone shocked at those figures, we are going to try to understand our heat pump much better before the price rises!  But don't want to derail the thread.]

Evan3020

I have solar but I use 1.7 kwh a day and am just reading up on whether I can save another 5w an hour during the night by switching off my router.

MrsBeee

Spoonie_Turtle said:

We have an ASHP too, 3-bedroom house, me home all day, devices charging, heating set to 18℃ (I'm still chilly even with layers at that point), hot water at 50℃, and our annual usage is ~10,000kWh.  I'm a complete energy novice so have nothing helpful to add, but I really don't understand why your usage is half again of ours. 

We're in the middle of the country and of course we've had mild winters, but still.  Summer usage has been 6-700kWh (without heating) so I don't understand how you have less usage than us in summer yet so much more annually.  Intriguing.  Is it your estimated annual consumption or actual consumption from previous meter reads?

[For anyone shocked at those figures, we are going to try to understand our heat pump much better before the price rises!  But don't want to derail the thread.]

Hello, 
Thank you for your reply. It’s lovely to hear from someone in a similar situation. We have never had this system before and do not know of any friends with it. Our neighbours, yes but their usage and home is very different to ours so we can’t really compare.
 

Thank you for commenting about your costs too. It’s very odd how your usage is so different to ours. All of our figures are actual use, not estimates. We have been here two full years and our energy usage sadly has been consistent! More than happy to anyone replying to provide comments to help you too! 

15 degrees was freezing, but we were just too scared of the costs. We only heated the lounge/ kitchen (one open room) consistently through the winter, the rest was off the majority of the time and only turned on when hideously cold. Apart from anything else, it’s not a comfortable environment to live in, as much as we adore the house. 

BUFF

I can't really help with your heatpump settings as I don't have one but there are more users in the https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/categories/green-ethical-moneysaving forum so you may want to post there (or get an admin to move this thread).

However, as a reference point my (& only me) daily electricity usage at this time of year is ~3kWh in a 3 bed Edwardian terrace so you are somehow using 5x what I do (admittedly I have gas for dhw)..

markin

Users that have set hot water to only 30min a day have got the usage down to around 1kwh for the heat pump.

If your getting a cop of 3 then you are using 36k kwh for hot water and heat, Can you describe the house, size, style, age, windows, walls ect.

Coffeekup

I maybe not much help either as I don't have and ASHP/GSHP/(or the other 2 types).

16kwh's a day does seem quite a bit tho. So in the meantime till someone with more knowledge comes along like @QrizB could you list the name of the system?

Do you have any of the following and use them frequently? Tumble dryer, hot tub, pond pumps, pond lighting, exterior lighting.
It maybe just easier to tell us exactly what you have in you house i.e. 2 TV's with 2 TV decoder boxes, 1 fridge freezer etc... Also remember what's plugged in to the garage outdoor spaces.

It's possible you're American fridge freezer has had it's day, I was reading earlier that someone else's old one was using 3 kwh's a day so they changed it.

Mstty

I call myself a novice at ASHP only having taken control(I use that word lightly) for the last year.

Is the ASHP a retrofit (added to the property not installed when built)

What's the make and model of the ASHP 

Are you aware of weather compensation settings for your ASHP and do you have those set

We only heat our water once a day, it's a choice and works out well for us as we only have showers and set the temp to 45oC. With the weekly legionella burn it works out at 7-9kWh a week depending on the weather outside (for gas user reading at this time of year the COP Coefficient of performance can be as high as 4 with the hot weather but a good average for the year would be 2.75-3 meaning for every kWh of electricity you put in you are getting roughly 3kWh out)

It is not unusual for an installation setup to leave your system with a high flow temperature set permanently. This is because it works more like the old gas central heating it sometimes replaces and provides very warm radiators quickly but at a big cost a COP of 1 so expensive. 

If you can give us some more info I will try and help and others with a few more years knowledge will soon see the post👍

I won't lie you are going to have to get friendly with your ASHP controller system but once you have cracked it you can get a system to work as cheaply as a gas central heating system it just takes time.

QrizB

Does your heat pump have its own electricity meter? Many do. Of it does, this will let you confirm they it's the heat pump that's using the energy not any other appliance.

If your heat pump is using 16 kWh/day just for hot water, I'd be inclined to switch it off entirely for a few days and only use the immersion heater for hot water. Depending on how much hot water you use, direct electric heating might only need 5-10kWh.

There are a few well-seasoned heat pump users on the forum; Mstty (who replied immediately before me) is one of them. They should be able to help you improve the effectiveness of your system.

Edit: for comparison, were a family of four and, with gas CH, our hot water demand is less than 10kWh a day. I would expect yours to be less than this.