My air source

[SteamyTea]

@tommy12398

 

Go and take an electrical meter reading tonight.

Then do the same every night for the rest of the week.

Without knowing how much you use, sorting it out is guesswork.

[tommy12398]

Do you know your EPC rating? 

How old is your ashp and make.

To be fair my wife will use alot from baking. And when it was 15000kw she was home all day with young kids. 

[tommy12398]

I have a smart meter. I reads every half hour. I know how much I'm using every day. Yesterday was 5.8 kW. Day before that 8.4. 56.4 for the week not including day. The app is always a day behind.  If that helps

[Bozza]

I think you have a few issues combined have caused your predicament.  

 

1.   EPC C rating in a modern house is not that great TBH.  A rating takes effort for sure, but high B is fairly easy to achieve.  No fault if the ASHP.

 

2.  Your usage is high.  Partly due to the insulation level, partly due to personal usage choices (oven etc) & possibly also setting could be an issue?  No fault of the ASHP.

 

3.  You seem to be on a variable rate tariff and haven’t fixed when you could have.  The high increases are certainly not your fault, but also no fault if the ASHP.

 

My car gets a a great MPG.  Unless I drive it like a maniac, then the MPG is rubbish.  That’s not the cars fault.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[SteamyTea]

3 minutes ago, tommy12398 said:

have a smart meter

Not excessive amounts.

I live alone and use about 3 kWh a day at the moment. Most will be hot water (just an ordinary immersion heater).

Winter that goes up to about 20 kWh a day.

 

kW is power, kWh is energy.

Energy is power times time.

So a normal kettle is around 2.5 kW, use it for 3 minutes to boil some water, 0.125 kWh.

Don't boil more that you need.

[Kelvin]

To give you some idea about your usage. My previous house was a 300sqm newly converted old barn. It was all electric no PV and had an ASHP. It could have been better insulated and it certainly could have been more airtight. In the last year I lived there we used 12191kWh that was two people wfh and two kids. Electricity was 13p kWh. 

[Thedreamer]

A new self build, insulated to a good standard with a reasonable level of airtightness should need very little heat and none for 8 months of the year.

 

One option for hot water could be an exhaust air source heat pump.

 

This provides our hot water and works very well. Made by the same company, Joule, it was a much cheaper solution for heating hot water. 

 

Our total electricity is around 4000kWh a year for a three bedroom in the Hebrides. 

 

My total cost this year for all my electricity/heating will be £400.

 

 

[tommy12398]

My old supplier went bust so had no option but a variable. They want 60p to fix. I'm with octopus. My house is better insulated than my mum and dad's. Yet there not gonna have the bills I have. Looking at the year so far I would put my electric usage down to 12000. It's got better since last year after a service.  There were a few issues.  But what ever you say about a ashp it's still at the MOMENT 29pkw. I'm really not against them. I do like it. Justs seems its pricing its self out of the market 

[SteamyTea]

1 minute ago, tommy12398 said:

But what ever you say about a ashp it's still at the MOMENT 29pkw

But you get around a CoP of 3.

You only get, with gas, about 80% of the energy converted into useful energy to heat your house and water.

Hardly worth changing a heating system to save a few quid a year.

Be better off changing your car to a much more economical one, probably.

[Kelvin]

Regardless your annual electricity consumption is very high which looks like it’s mostly winter usage if your current usage is typical. 

[tommy12398]

I'm looking to spend around 5k on saving or cutting energy costs. One option is put gas in!!! Unless electric can get under 20p again. I really cannot see a future for ashp. 

[tommy12398]

They say you get a cop of 3!

In October 42p kW x 12000kw witch will be my annual used from my air source £5200 

Lpg gas 42p liter. 7 kW to a liter

42÷7=6p a kW. 6 × 12000= £720. Say gas uses 4 x as much only £2880. I would say a massive saving!

[Simplysimon]

we run a mercedes ml 06 plate with 150k on the clock, used for pulling horse box. gets 20-25mpg towing and 28-30mpg with a careful right foot on a run. tax is now over £600 and does about 5k a year. wife wants to spend £thousands replacing it for one which gets more mpg and lower tax. i'm sticking with what we've got as we've done a few repairs and the cost to change is not worth it and we might have the same repairs to do on another.

 

we are renting a 200yr old cottage about half the size of yours and spend £2k on lpg a year and £20 a week on leccy. no idea of epc as we didn't get one when we rented, i know we should have. our last 948L of gas cost £652 though if memory serves i think there was £16 or tank rental in that.

 

so to sum up

27 minutes ago, tommy12398 said:

I'm looking to spend around 5k on saving or cutting energy costs. One option is put gas in!!!

fire on, but it's not worth it.

[AliG]

The price of mains gas has less overhead in it than the price of electricity. Thus the price of gas is likely to actually go up more than electricity.

 

To keep things very simple, if you assume a COP of 3 then gas boiler will be cheaper than a heat pump if electricity is more than 3x the price of gas. If you assumed 90% efficiency for gas, then the ratio would fall to 2.7x.

 

Two years ago electricity was roughly 13p/kWh and gas 3p. Thus gas was cheaper. 4.3 ratio. I think I had a fix at over a 5 to 1 ratio.

 

Today electricity is roughly 28p and gas 8p. 3.5 ratio, gas still cheaper but less so.

 

I would guess with the next cap gas will go up more than electricity and the ratio will be around 3x. So we will be getting close to parity.

 

It is unlikely that the COP on different heat pumps (assuming they are correctly installed and working) would be different enough to be worth the cost of changing.

 

I suggest that you look at the amount of electricity your ovens are using. The use roughly 1kWh/hr they are on. So assume they cost 30p going to 40p+ per hour. That alone is going to be hundreds of pounds a year.  I suspect that cost is disguised by your PV in the summer, but not in the winter.

 

I would be looking at getting a Eddi/iBoost/Solic to use your excess PV to heat your hot water which would materially reduce your consumption.

 

I am not sure, but a quick Google suggests that LPG prices are more like 70p/liter. They should be pretty much directly linked to gas prices which have soared again in the last few weeks as Russia has restricted supply.

 

Thus LPG costs around the same as mains gas and with a COP of 3 it is unlikely to give you much of a saving over your heat pump.

 

If your house was built in 2014, do you know the U-values of the walls and roof. Ultimately, energy costs are currently high and the best thing you can do is save energy. I would be looking for the best return energy saving ideas.

 

Traders spend all their days trying to arbitrage between different fuels and it is unlikely that this will provide a sustainable benefit. You could easily switch to LPG and then as the proportion of renewables in the grid increases it becomes more expensive than using electricity over the next few years.

 

I would also look into getting some kind of time of day tariff so that you could get much of your heating use during the night.

 

[tommy12398]

Or put this another way

My ashp at a cop of 3 is using 12000kw say at 29p that's still £3480. So say gas is 3 times less efficient  and I use 36000kw at 6p that's still £2160. And we all know electric won't say at 29p I know from a good souce cap in October will be around 40p that's around £5000. 

[tommy12398]

Even if lpg gets to a pound a liter it's still cheaper.  I'm I getting this all wrong. I think I'm been on the top side at using 36000kw

[Kelvin]

Your total electricity consumption is 12,000kWh not just the ASHP. And it’s high compared to my experience and compared to some others posting on this thread. 
 

You’ve lived there since 2014 do you still

have access to your statements so that you can see exactly what you’ve used each year since you’ve lived there? 

[JohnMo]

Are you sure your heat pump is the only issue, is the supply to the heat pump metered?

 

Example we are on a borehole with 40 lt/min pump.  We had 2500 plants installed on two slopes, installed 200m of drip feed pipe, turn on the two outside taps to water the plants and left it on for about a week.  Looked at my meter and nearly fell over I had used so much electric.  Took a while to realise where the electric had gone.  Now only water when PV is active.

 

Anything that uses electric 24/7, ventilation, treatment plant compressor etc, use small amounts in watts, but the kWh soon stack up.  masked in the summer if you have PV, short days in winter no longer masks this usage.

[tommy12398]

My total for everything is about 12500.  But was around 15000. I've got it down due to house empty 4 days aweek. Wife out to work again after lock down.  And set all temps down to 19 from 21. Plus a few issues with ashp. So I would I will be running for all electric between 12000 to 13000 kW a year

[AliG]

9 minutes ago, tommy12398 said:

Even if lpg gets to a pound a liter it's still cheaper.  I'm I getting this all wrong. I think I'm been on the top side at using 36000kw

At £1 a litre lpg would have similar costs to electricity at 40p. Considering what wholesale natural gas prices have done in the last few weeks I wouldn’t be surprised to see LPG prices rocket. The prices of all these things are linked.

 

I had a very simple thought. Is your hot water on 24 hours a day. You don’t need a pv diverter to heat hot water. You could just set your hot water to be on from 9-5 during summer and it would be heated by the excess PV for free.

[tommy12398]

No I don't know what my ashp only uses. It's not metered

[SteamyTea]

2 minutes ago, tommy12398 said:

No I don't know what my ashp only uses. It's not metered

Some have a built in meter that you can access.

What make and model is it and others that know it may be able to tell you.

[tommy12398]

Thing is what price will electric be in Jan when it goes up again 50p. Lpg is more stable than mains. It's not gone up like other fossil fuels 

[tommy12398]

14kw samsung 2014 model 

No meter built in!!

[SteamyTea]

Just now, tommy12398 said:

Lpg is more stable than mains. It's not gone up like other fossil fuels

It may well come the colder months.

https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/United-Kingdom/lpg_prices/