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Electric Heaters in new build home and lack of insulation
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ProDave said:Just to add to this thread, my own real world experience from my self built low energy house, EPC A94
My house is 150 square metres, and a proper heat loss analysis says at +20 degrees inside and -10 outside (worst case but realistic here in the Highlands) the heat loss from the building will be about 2.2kW I verified this early on in the build so the prediction was accurate.
I heat the house with a 5kW Air Source Heat pump and under floor heating. Annual heating use is about 1400kWh of electricity or roughly 4200kW of delivered heat. Annual heating bill under £400 for a detached house in the Highlands.
I don't claim it to be a passive house, it is not, it is built using a lot of passive house principles that is all.
I don't believe any house in the UK can run truly without any heating in the winter, I don't think the passiye hause institute say that.
One characteristic of my house with a lot if insulation everywhere, is it heats up very slowly and cools down very slowly. If the heating stopped working it might be a day or 2 before you notice. It relies on a steady low level of heat input to keep it warm. I wonder if the OP turning on panel heaters for 2 hours then complaining it cools down again quickly, has only heated the air and not the fabric of the building? Google the term "decrement delay"
Panel heaters is a poor choice, but what else do you expect from a builder? At least they tried harder than many. A heat pump would have been a far better choice. To put that into perspective my annual sub £400 heating bill would be more like £1200 with panel heaters and I would not be very impressed with that figure.
The OP should have got a full SAP with the EPC, what does it say about expected annual heating demand?
About 6 years ago we purchased a new 2 bedroom bungalow EPC B near Stafford gas combi boiler central heating, our heating is programmed to 22 degrees C in the day, we are retired so home most days, it requires approximately 8,000 kWh to maintain our level of comfort., considerably more than our large 4 bedroom environmentally house.
We have fitted a 4.4 kWh solar array and 5.8 kWh battery all our appliances are A rated, lighting all LED. Electric panel heaters are not a good option12 x 370 Watt J A panels Solis 3.6 invertor. Solax AC invertor and 5.8 triple battery0 -
I looked at the numbers again and i think they would only be £100 over the Jan price cap average with the numbers from the EPC/SAP.
So i think it is mostly bill shock with no credit built up going into winter.1 -
ProDave said:
And just to add to that, I use about three times as much electricity on "everything else" as I do on space and water heating. Reducing the use of "everything else" is proving much harder. But it shows heating is a small part of my energy bill.Reed0
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