Air Source Heat Pumps

[Matt8500]

I cannot comment on the heat pump. We are considering too, but the heating engineer I trust is sceptical of it would work for our house without spending a lot of money.


Regarding solar, for us it has definitely been worth it, we had 18 panels and a 10 kwh battery installled. Like heat pumps you need a reputable installer who sources quality panels etc. My friend, who installed ours, gets about a quarter of his work from fixing poorly, and sometimes dangerously installed, set ups.

Even at this time of year on a sunny day we are generating over 30kwh. With Octopus feed in tariffs our bill should be comfortably negative for the year, from previously paying 400 a month. Bonus with an ev is free mileage!

[noTAGlove]

Regarding solar, for us it has definitely been worth it

Horses for courses and solar and batteries would be equivalent to burning £50 notes for me.

80% of my electricity is now consumed at night (EV, tumble dryer, washing machine and dishwasher) at 9.5p/kWh between midnight and 7am, when compared to approx. 28p/kWh daytime rate at all other hours

If you can shift your bulk electricity consumption to cheap overnight rates which almost all suppliers offer, none of these energy saving methods make any sense as you are into paybacks of low decades.

The overnight electricity you are using typically comes from renewables anyway, so you are still using green energy.

In fact, forget solar and harvest the overnight 9.5p/kWh into batteries if you still have significant daytime usage.

All these utility companies benefit from massive economies of scale. How are you ever going to compete with your very expensive one-off home projects without massive government subsidies?

It costs me less than £250 to charge my EV per year for 10k miles of use. Do I really want to put in £10k worth of solar and batteries in comparison?

I think it is all a bit of a clever scam designed by the government to have the users load shed demand on the grid rather than the utilities companies provide it. It probably makes sense to balance the demand this way, but the users are given a false sense that somehow it is financially rewarding for the user to do it.

And play it wrong and it will cost you, rather than save you money, with significant capital outlay and extremely low paybacks that any commercial company would not tolerate.