Newlywelsh

Thanks for the great advice! I don’t think we have any water ingress (except for the leaking HW cylinder, which is now removed). The house has cavity walls with rock wool insulation and all windows are double glazed. I’ll be increasing the roof insulation but I hadn’t considered air tightness and MVHR - definitely food for thought! My biggest priority though is getting some hot water in the taps, and I think I agree with the consensus of going with a new unvented cylinder that will run off E7 for now and PV when I manage to get it installed.

Thanks for the reassurance, both on SA reliability and customer support. I don’t think we will be able to export to the grid as we are not able to have smart meters (no mobile signal in this valley as yet) I’m looking at battery storage to smooth out our consumption and aim to use everything we generate as there seems little point in exporting at ~5p under the new SEG

I’m starting to think that’s the way forward… can you expand on the suggestion of a more efficient system?

They are pretty tatty but I need them to be be more controllable and work as a ‘system’. At the moment, I’m adjusting the output control at least twice a day and not really getting it right! The HW tank had a weeping leak from the side seam, so needed to go!

Good point, I think a SA size 9 is around £3k plus the install

All electric here, no gas in the village and installing a full new wet system would be very disruptive and I think pretty costly.

We’ve just moved into a 90s house in mid Wales, sadly it has had little or no maintenance for a few years and the original storage heaters are struggling to keep us warm but the hot water cylinder is completely shot - fortunately there is an electric shower… We will be having new Dimplex quantum storage heaters supplemented with electric radiators installed soon. I hope to have solar pv installed ASAP but am trying to get a good HW solution, currently trying to decide between standard replacement cylinder, solar thermal or maybe sunamp (which is how I came across this excellent forum!). I’ve read a few topics about SA but am still unsure if it would be a good investment as it’s still a relatively new product. I’m hoping to get some up to date viewpoints especially on reliability…