Anyone replaced central heating with air to air in bungalow?

wrf12345

Now the planning constraints have gone it will be interesting to see if there is a big increase in A2A as fitting a single unit, where layout allows, is cheaper than fitting a new gas boiler, so might end up with lots of older gas systems as back up and for hot water, whilst getting "cheap" heating from the A2A unit, which is a lot easier to control than the usual heat pumps (I know people here have mastered them but it is a lot of effort and still costing many thousands to install).

barker77

wrf12345 said:

Now the planning constraints have gone it will be interesting to see if there is a big increase in A2A as fitting a single unit, where layout allows, is cheaper than fitting a new gas boiler, so might end up with lots of older gas systems as back up and for hot water, whilst getting "cheap" heating from the A2A unit, which is a lot easier to control than the usual heat pumps (I know people here have mastered them but it is a lot of effort and still costing many thousands to install).

I thought still needed planning ? 

zxzxzx

wrf12345 said:

Now the planning constraints have gone it will be interesting to see if there is a big increase in A2A as fitting a single unit, where layout allows, is cheaper than fitting a new gas boiler, so might end up with lots of older gas systems as back up and for hot water, whilst getting "cheap" heating from the A2A unit, which is a lot easier to control than the usual heat pumps (I know people here have mastered them but it is a lot of effort and still costing many thousands to install).

Exactly. 

I had oil ch that needed to go for a new kitchen, plus a log burner fortunately my plumber son in law had a year old combi that he converted to calor using 47kg bottles so a cheap fix. 

Looking for ‘shoulder’ month heating when logs would be too much heat/effort the A2A option seemed ideal. In actuality having multiple options is working really well for us with on demand hot water year round and reducing amounts of gas being burned.

Installed cost £1500, scop 4, solar & battery along with Octopus Agile in the summer and Cosy in the winter makes house warm and relatively cheaper. 

Regarding ease of use, hit the remote and within 3/5 minutes out comes the warm air plus using an app you can switch on from anywhere.
Seriously considering a second unit or a trunking system to the rest of the bungalow if I can run it off the existing HP which I will find out shortly when the service engineer arrives.

Not even mentioned the cooling factor when we get our summer day!

wrf12345

"Not even mentioned the cooling factor when we get our summer day!" Solar and air-conditioning are the perfect match!

silverwhistle

zxzxzx said:

 In actuality having multiple options is working really well for us with on demand hot water year round and reducing amounts of gas being burned.

If you are using gas cylinders to replace oil I take it no gas supply? (Sorry, haven't gone back to check.) 

Removing my gas would save me £100 p.a. although I'd go cheap overnight leccy for water on Intelligent Octopus (as I have an EV) if I went A2A. I've been on Agile but can't make it work at the moment but a few more wind farms coming on-stream this winter might tip the see-saw for a bit.

I've a terrace house and not a bungalow but hardly heat upstairs: when the wood burner is on there's enough heat in the fabric of the house not to need it.

zxzxzx

silverwhistle said:

zxzxzx said:

 In actuality having multiple options is working really well for us with on demand hot water year round and reducing amounts of gas being burned.

If you are using gas cylinders to replace oil I take it no gas supply? (Sorry, haven't gone back to check.) 

Correct

Removing my gas would save me £100 p.a. although I'd go cheap overnight leccy for water on Intelligent Octopus (as I have an EV) if I went A2A. I've been on Agile but can't make it work at the moment but a few more wind farms coming on-stream this winter might tip the see-saw for a bit.

Horses for courses, Agile working for me atm but will go back to Cosy later. No EV yet.

I've a terrace house and not a bungalow but hardly heat upstairs: when the wood burner is on there's enough heat in the fabric of the house not to need it.

2 bed semi-bungalow, well insulated & double glazed so c.h., log burner or A2A all can warm the house, it’s just a judgement call on any given day. 

I need to write 10 characters, can’t just insert like I did so that shortcut was pointless!

QrizB

QrizB said:

Martyn1981 said:

I know that Tepeo are holding their breath, hoping the scheme will be widened. They have an excellent solution for small properties, or those that need little heating, with their 40kWh heat battery.

It's frighteningly expensive, though, compared to two large storage heaters (which would store the same amount of heat).
A pair of Quantum 150s would store 46kWh at a cost of £1800 plus fitting. The Tepeo heat battery is closer to £9k, I think - although that might include fitting?

Coming back to this, I don't want to disappoint @Martyn1981 but I think Tepeo might have missed their chance.

Why? Well, you can buy a "real" battery - not a heat battery - for about £100 a kWh. See:

https://www.bimblesolar.com/fogstar-house/fogstar-48v-32kwh

If you can store 32 kWh of electricity for £3500 (plus another £2k for an inverter) and use that to produce heat via a cheap electric flow boiler (or even a £20 fan heater whenever and wherever you want) the market for £9k boxes full of clever heat storage bricks is going to shrink to insignificance.

£9k would buy you two 32 kWh batteries and that same £2k inverter, and you'd never have to buy full-priced electricity again.

Martyn1981

QrizB said:

QrizB said:

Martyn1981 said:

I know that Tepeo are holding their breath, hoping the scheme will be widened. They have an excellent solution for small properties, or those that need little heating, with their 40kWh heat battery.

It's frighteningly expensive, though, compared to two large storage heaters (which would store the same amount of heat).
A pair of Quantum 150s would store 46kWh at a cost of £1800 plus fitting. The Tepeo heat battery is closer to £9k, I think - although that might include fitting?

Coming back to this, I don't want to disappoint @Martyn1981 but I think Tepeo might have missed their chance.

Why? Well, you can buy a "real" battery - not a heat battery - for about £100 a kWh. See:

https://www.bimblesolar.com/fogstar-house/fogstar-48v-32kwh

If you can store 32 kWh of electricity for £3500 (plus another £2k for an inverter) and use that to produce heat via a cheap electric flow boiler (or even a £20 fan heater whenever and wherever you want) the market for £9k boxes full of clever heat storage bricks is going to shrink to insignificance.

£9k would buy you two 32 kWh batteries and that same £2k inverter, and you'd never have to buy full-priced electricity again.

Thanks QrizB, I think the same, but Tepeo is hoping that their product (and similar other non-HP solutions) might get grant support too. That was the point of my original post, mentioning Tepeo simply as an example:

Too late for me, but I'm still hopeful that the subsidy scheme will be expanded to cover other solutions. I know that Tepeo are holding their breath, hoping the scheme will be widened.

They seem to feel that only offering support via the one option is slowing down the rollout, and I totally agree from the A2A angle, that I think can be just as good a solution.

Of course, you can equally argue that installing batts to store cheap rate leccy for house heating (and storage heaters doing the same effectively) is the same. But again, no current subsidy support.

I'm a big fan of the ASHP idea and the Gov grant support, but it does seem to be less than ideal for many properties. I was quoted nearly £7k for an ASHP install (over £14k total), but just my contribution was more than the cost of the two A2A units* and a HW tank install.

On renewable/green sites there are lots of discussions for alternatives to an ASHP, as that singular (supported) solution does not suit all.

*The A2A units were already in place.

Martyn1981

QrizB said:

If you can store 32 kWh of electricity for £3500 (plus another £2k for an inverter) and use that to produce heat via a cheap electric flow boiler (or even a £20 fan heater whenever and wherever you want) 

Been pondering this some more. How much do you think an electrician / company would charge for installing all this kit, plus perhaps a low power leccy boiler?

If a grant was applied, then it too should be cost competitive against a full wet ASHP system. And your mention of fan heaters actually matches what I did - my plan was to run the two A2A units all last winter, and see how much GCH I still used/needed. From there the plan was to replace the combi with a small leccy boiler, like a slimjim or similar, for any necessary top up.

But ..... I had a giant DOH! moment, and realised I could just use some oil rads for top up, and negate the need to keep the wet system. In reality the three small oil rads weren't needed much, and they pop away nicely on a shelf in the garage, unlike wet rads.

The result was no GCH nedeed at all, and my 20kWh* batts only ran short on three days over the whole winter, and even then only a few hours of dayrate import before the cheap rate kicked in.

*Edit - but that's running the A2A units with a COP, rather than all resistive heating which would need bigger batts.

QrizB

Martyn1981 said:

QrizB said:

If you can store 32 kWh of electricity for £3500 (plus another £2k for an inverter) and use that to produce heat via a cheap electric flow boiler (or even a £20 fan heater whenever and wherever you want) 

Been pondering this some more. How much do you think an electrician / company would charge for installing all this kit, plus perhaps a low power leccy boiler?

If you've got a spare way in your consumer unit, and said CU isn't an antique, the electrical works is "hang inverter on wall - install RCBO - run twin and earth - connect inverter - plug in battery". What's the day rate for a sparky, £500 or so? Plus £100 in parts? It's a bit less work than fitting an EV charge point, and that seems to run to £500 on top of the charge point itself.

I've factored that into the £2k inverter cost already, since you can source a 6kW single phase battery inverter for half that. Or for a bit more, if blue is your colour you could have a Victron Multiplus.

As for the wet side of things, I've currently got a conventional boiler and indirect HW tank so the boiler could be replaced with something like this:

https://www.screwfix.com/p/ehc-fusion-comet-6kw-single-phase-electric-system-boiler/792tk

6kW would meet my household heating & HW demand.

(If I was to have a Tepeo ZEB I'd need two of them [or a backup heater] as my daily heat demand exceeds 40kWh for much of the winter.)

Houses with combi boilers might need to fit a HW storage tank, or have a much larger inverter to service an electric combi boiler, or accept that they'd need to buy electricity from the grid for HW.