Random Renewables Thread

Yeah our home was built in 2017 so everything is electric

Funnily enough, when I was younger I thought electric cooking and heating were garbage and gas was the best. This was before heat pumps had become normal

I thought I'd on board with using gas until Creeslough, but I was chatting with my wife and she said I was insisting on not having gas anywhere near the house long before we moved in

I remember there was a case in the UK where some guy was stealing gas from another house and managed to blow up his and the neighbours house, killing the neighbours child in tbe process. Maybe that was what put me off using old dino farts for heating 🤔

Are you certain the figure of 700/week includes new homes?

The figure might come from the number of grants given out which I assume doesn't include new homes.

I assuming we'll see lots of grid scale batteries coming soon also.

I'd like to see more pumped storage but I don't think it's realistic.

Deffo. Use wayyyy less intentionally since we got solar. Use electric rads at start and end of winter. Keep gas boiler off until Nov and turn off again at end of Feb. Don't have a heatpump so costs me more for the electric rads but still happy to do it. Got an IR heater for mh small wfh room and it's perfect.

I watched the video myself, it certainly seems very nifty

I presume it's less useful if you already have a hot water cylinder since you'd already have all the plumbing in place

I'm kind of wondering why more cylinders don't have bigger coils nowadays to facilitate heat pumps

It looks like a great way to have a heat exchanger between two heat sources, like if you had a heat pump and a stove for example

Much simpler than trying to plumb both in, you could have the stove on an open loop system connected to the tank and then the heat pump on a closed loop system circulating water through the coil

You'd probably want valves to zone out the coil if the stove isn't lit to prevent you heating up the mini tank

HOW DOES IT WORK? is the title of the promo. It's a pity he doesn't tell us. Instead you're treated to a typical influencer ticktock style barrage of shouts, images and vague non facts. The device he's flogging is a reverse stratification cylinder. Its not new, I recall these being flogged at the earliest Bloom shows in the park. Eye wateringly expensive, their particular advantage being clouded by the usual sales bs claims even at the time, pre HPs.

A Reverse cylinder is one where the body of water in the cylinder is from the closed heat source flow and return, and the water in the heat transfer coil is the HW to your tap. The coils are generally much larger, and have additional stratification fins on the exterior of the coil to vastly increase the heat transfer from the tank water to the coil water, especially at the top, where the HW out will closely follow the temperature of the source heat in to the tank. There is no heat pump element to this device, it does NOT have a COP, or any multiplication of the energy provided by the actual boiler, stove, or heatpump. Owing to the fact that the return water from the tank to the heat pump when consuming HW will be considerably lower in temperature than the return from UFH or radiators, there is scope for greater heat transfer from your HP, and consequently higher COP. There is no mention of secondary heating of the tank water by immersion, but I did notice an electrical lead dangling behind the cylinder beside the sceptical sounding plumber.

I would instantly avoid products marketed in this kind of frantic excitable fashion. The smell of bs is overwhelming, but by all means do some research of stratification in cylinders, etc.

It's well known that HPs struggle to heat HW to higher temperatures, without the use of immersion elements to prevent legionnalla. Working in HW only mode with very small flow rate they will achieve workable temperatures for showers and baths even. The issue of legionnalla is avoided by a reverse cylinder as this sub legionnalla temperature tank water is not consumed, it heats the used flow from the coil which is fresh from the main. Buyer beware. The product has a function, but is grossly overpriced, hence the palaver in the YT videos.

This OTOH is a hybrid 100l cylinder with immersion and mini heat pump, which will give a steady flow of HW with a portion heated by HP action, with an effective COP of 2 as they claimed 50% lower heating cost. Starting here, you can progress right up to full size HW tanks with built in HPs as the heat source, circa €1500-3000.

https://www.tradeinn.com/techinn/en/ariston-lydos-hybrid-wifi-100l-vertical-electric-thermo/140481017/p

I agree there's a lot of YouTuber marketing in there, but I don't think they're actually selling the cylinder. There wasn't a mention of any shop that I saw

It seemed more like a design pitch to me

I believe it is a pretty old concept, doesn't make it a bad one. I suspect a slimline 2 coil tank with both coils connected in series could achieve the same thing

I think you need to recheck the whole heat pump flow temperature info, there's high temp models that can hit up to 75C with a CoP of around 3 still

No as good as the lower temps but still far more efficient than gas boilers

In general, high flow temps don't don't automatically make inefficient heat pumps. Bad design and poor setup are what typically kill one

Where this design probably does fail is with TOU electricity tariffs. Gas combi boilers work so we'll partly because gas is always the same price all day.

If it was variable the same way as electricity then combi boilers wouldn't find many customers outside of people having showers at 2am

He calls it a "heat pump combi thing". If that's the product market he's inferring, then the Ariston is the lower end of that pile, but it's obviously just a water tank he has. He references reverse heat exchange. He fudges comments about boosting (by immersion). What he doesn't do is explain what the f it is, what's inside it and how it works. Lots of reference to high COP, which is nonsense if it doesn't contain it's own heatpump.These heat geek tanks supplied by Newark as heat geek products are stratified tanks. A 150l one (a little tiddler of a tank) will set you back €2000 retail. (£1637 on their price list). You're free to 'apply' to order one on the Newark site, and only then have the pricing sent on to you. If you're easily impressed by back to front baseball cap wearing bulshitters, then sign up.

The tank is connected to the heat pump in his house, he's monitoring the flow temp and CoP on his laptop in the video

There's also a diagram around the middle of the video which literally explains how it works

Whatever about the product, the concept seems sound. The rate of heat transfer from tank to coil would be much faster than the other way around, so you only need your flow temp to be slightly higher than the water temp. 55C isn't the most efficient setpoint but it's more than sufficient

I'm pretty sure a 150l twin coil tank would be able to produce the same results for a fraction of the price

Based on my recent play throughs of Frostpunk, the world is about to freeze over 😱

Cheers. I thought (subjectively) that this year was much nicer than last so I was surprised to see the data showing otherwise.
Especially with all the global warming etc I thought there would be more sun not less! I'm down about 200kWh for May and fixing up to be the same for june. I reckon I'll come out with 750-850kWh this June vs 1gWh last year

Yeah, went in in September 2022! Approaching 2 years.

Global warming doesn't equal more sun for us in Ireland, it equals more moisture in the atmosphere, therefore more cloud and rain.

Incidentally, my daily average for June 24 is up by about 1kwh on June 23, so far at least.

A little lengthy as YouTube vids go but more interesting than I expected! Thought you could throw any old biological feedstuff (e.g. compost bins!) into those AD’s but turns out there’s quite the art to it.