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Not used the word central on purpose, as including storage radiators, open fires, etc.
So the big date 1978 and the winter of discontent this changed my whole outlook on heating, never again do I want to rely on a single energy supply to my home. Be it an open fire, a gas fire, storage batteries, solar panels, generators or inverters, I want to be able to heat the home, should we lose for example electric from the grid.
In a good day in winter, I may get 11 kWh from solar and daily use around 12 kWh, so it does not matter how good a heat pump is, it would need to be combined with something else, be it back up gas fire, back-up generator, or back up boiler, basic thing is looking at multi-fuel.
The period between late September 1978 and February 1979 in the United Kingdom was too long in most cases to store power, Omar Khayyám put it in a nutshell,
have been around for many years, I first came across them in 1980 when working in Algeria, and also much latter still around when working in Hong Kong in the main used for cooling, but this is where the heat pump really comes into its own, it can heat and cool.
However, in my house, I don't "need" all rooms at 18 - 28°C, be it heating or cooling, if one room is at a living temperature that is enough when something has gone wrong, yes want all rooms normally to have heating, cooling not so important, but as back-up, one room would be enough. And let's face it, in the 50s even if the house had three open grates, likely a fire would only be lit in one, and with the modulating boiler, the idea is often to select what room will be heated when, so looking at outputs from the boiler which can drop to 6 kW or fewer.
As with days gone by, not reason not to heat just one room in the day, so heating system needs to be able to heat one or all rooms, the idea of heating all rooms all of the time, sounds good, but even if we can afford it, most people don't want to spend that much on heating, so today we are starting to look at a hybrid system, or some other way where we can select how much is heated at any one time.
So ideal heating needs to run between 2 kW and 15 kW for most homes, We have traditionally fitted massively oversized boilers in our homes, and a 35 kW boiler modulated to 6 kW is likely to be running inefficiently, to the whole idea of two boilers starts to make sense, we have moved towards the combi for years, but heating up the minium amount of water a combi can heat, just to wash one's hands, is clearly not efficient. Siphoning off some hot water when the central heating is running, that's a different story.
By accident in the parent's house, the central heating pipes ran in the same trunking as the DHW pipes, and we did get near instant hot water to wash hands, the whole idea of a 35 gallon cylinder of hot water, used twice a year on annually bath night, (rest of time using a shower) must be flawed. But to use solar to heat DHW it needs some storage, if I had a comb-boiler, then could not heat DHW with solar.
So every idea has pros and cons, so how can we integrate our homes, to increase comfort and reduce costs?
So the big date 1978 and the winter of discontent this changed my whole outlook on heating, never again do I want to rely on a single energy supply to my home. Be it an open fire, a gas fire, storage batteries, solar panels, generators or inverters, I want to be able to heat the home, should we lose for example electric from the grid.
In a good day in winter, I may get 11 kWh from solar and daily use around 12 kWh, so it does not matter how good a heat pump is, it would need to be combined with something else, be it back up gas fire, back-up generator, or back up boiler, basic thing is looking at multi-fuel.
The period between late September 1978 and February 1979 in the United Kingdom was too long in most cases to store power, Omar Khayyám put it in a nutshell,
But that does not mean as an extra we should not use a heat pump, these units
However, in my house, I don't "need" all rooms at 18 - 28°C, be it heating or cooling, if one room is at a living temperature that is enough when something has gone wrong, yes want all rooms normally to have heating, cooling not so important, but as back-up, one room would be enough. And let's face it, in the 50s even if the house had three open grates, likely a fire would only be lit in one, and with the modulating boiler, the idea is often to select what room will be heated when, so looking at outputs from the boiler which can drop to 6 kW or fewer.
As with days gone by, not reason not to heat just one room in the day, so heating system needs to be able to heat one or all rooms, the idea of heating all rooms all of the time, sounds good, but even if we can afford it, most people don't want to spend that much on heating, so today we are starting to look at a hybrid system, or some other way where we can select how much is heated at any one time.
So ideal heating needs to run between 2 kW and 15 kW for most homes, We have traditionally fitted massively oversized boilers in our homes, and a 35 kW boiler modulated to 6 kW is likely to be running inefficiently, to the whole idea of two boilers starts to make sense, we have moved towards the combi for years, but heating up the minium amount of water a combi can heat, just to wash one's hands, is clearly not efficient. Siphoning off some hot water when the central heating is running, that's a different story.
By accident in the parent's house, the central heating pipes ran in the same trunking as the DHW pipes, and we did get near instant hot water to wash hands, the whole idea of a 35 gallon cylinder of hot water, used twice a year on annually bath night, (rest of time using a shower) must be flawed. But to use solar to heat DHW it needs some storage, if I had a comb-boiler, then could not heat DHW with solar.
So every idea has pros and cons, so how can we integrate our homes, to increase comfort and reduce costs?
