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Comical EPC thingy


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1 hour ago, Roundtuit said:

We've recently had our ashp rhi application approved, which amounts to about £5.5k over the next 7 years

 

45 minutes ago, Roundtuit said:

The heat pump wasn't itemised, but the total cost was about £17k.

 

So you spent £17K upfront to get back £5.5K over 7 years.  I don't understand this logic.  

 

I didn't bother applying for any RHI and so avoided getting ripped off by approved installers; I did the procurement and install myself and we will spend about a quarter of that in total if I include our still-to-be-bought ASHP.   Our house sits at 22-23°C throughout 24×7.  Must have done something wrong.

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By way of contrast (and this probably reflects on the house thermal performance of our house as much as anything else), if I had opted to try to claim RHI then it would have added well over £2,000 to our ASHP installed cost (all the quotes I had for an MCS approved installation carried that sort of premium) and the payment we would have received would have been about £84 a year for 7 years, so under £600.

 

For us it made no sense at all to spend over £2,000 extra to install the same heat pump in order to be able to get back less than £600 from the RHI.

 

 

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Is it a completely dunce thing to think that it's ok to have a ASHP that is deliberately over-sized for the application, to allow some degree of redundancy. Is it NIBE (possibly all) that have a variable power consumption depending on load?

 

@JSHarris I will take a peak at your blog later to gen up, but since trying to figure out a suitable layout, i always think back to your setup and think roughly 'sunamp+ASHP = bigger ASHP'. If that makes any sense?

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Surely, the point is that not everyone has the time, inclination or knowledge to do the install themselves, and if you're going to get someone else to install it then the extra cost for that to be done by an MCS approved installer is, in most cases, more than covered by the RHI payment.

 

In your case Jeremy, that may not have been so, but we don't all have room for 6.25Kw of solar panels and the impact that has on the EPC score and hence the RHI payments.

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6 minutes ago, Big Neil said:

Is it a completely dunce thing to think that it's ok to have a ASHP that is deliberately over-sized for the application, to allow some degree of redundancy. Is it NIBE (possibly all) that have a variable power consumption depending on load?

 

Just about all the modern ones have an inverter driven compressor and vary the compressor load to suit the load and maintain the flow temperature that has been set.  Most of the time when just doing the under floor heating ours runs at a very slow speed.  About the only time it gets to full speed is heating the HW tank,

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9 minutes ago, Big Neil said:

Is it a completely dunce thing to think that it's ok to have a ASHP that is deliberately over-sized for the application, to allow some degree of redundancy. Is it NIBE (possibly all) that have a variable power consumption depending on load?

 

@JSHarris I will take a peak at your blog later to gen up, but since trying to figure out a suitable layout, i always think back to your setup and think roughly 'sunamp+ASHP = bigger ASHP'. If that makes any sense?

 

Our ASHP is too big just because very small ones were near-impossible to obtain when I was looking.  There are now 4 kW ones around, and one that size would have been a better match, although the 7 kW we have seems to be fine just run at a much lower output.

 

Having the Sunamp doesn't affect the size of the ASHP, as the Sunamp is only used for direct electrically-heated hot water.  ASHPs can be used for hot water OK, but I chose not to, mainly because the predicted COP when running at the temperature needed to charge a thermal store was pretty poor. A thermal store was our original set up as I didn't want to have to employ a heating engineer to install, and sign off against Part G3, an unvented cylinder.  The Sunamp is just a compact thermal store and again wouldn't be well-suited to be charged using hot water from an ASHP, as the charge temperature would have to be over 60°C, which is a bit high for an ASHP to deliver.

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11 hours ago, Mr Punter said:

 

If they can make it comply with FEE by making improvements elsewhere there is nothing fraudulent in having no test and air leakage the default 15.

I was referring to misuse of the EPC and RHI system rather than TFEE/DFEE & air test.

The cost of fabric upgrades to offset using 15 as the air leakage rate will be considerably more than cost of an air pressure test and this is the point I was making. As well as impacting DFEE the DER is also affected though not so much of an issue if using a heat pump - different if using gas, oil, electric etc.

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18 hours ago, Roundtuit said:

No. I spent £17k to get my house plumbed and heated so I could live in it.

 

My point was that we did the same for a few £K (sorry, plus the £2k my TF company charged to include the UFH loops in the slab).  OK, I designed the system myself and Jan and I installed it which saved a lot of money, but IMO going for some of these incentive schemes can be a false economy. 

 

Leaving aside the morality arguments, and just focusing on pure economic grounds, if you really are getting a payback of £5.5K over 7 years then you should be paying no more than £4K extra upfront.  I suspect the premium charged by an RHI accredited plumber, plus the cost of over-sizing the system is working out far more than that. 

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It staggered me that my plumber friend paid £11K to have a Mitsubishi ASHP and cylinder installed so he could claim the RHI.  You could have bought the kit for under £5K and he is a plumber FFS.  So unless he got more than £6K in RHI payments, he is worse off.

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4 hours ago, ProDave said:

It staggered me that my plumber friend paid £11K to have a Mitsubishi ASHP and cylinder installed so he could claim the RHI.  You could have bought the kit for under £5K and he is a plumber FFS.  So unless he got more than £6K in RHI payments, he is worse off.

Not necessarily Dave, as the time he'd have spent installing it is time that he could have spent getting paid to do other jobs that he was maybe more comfortable doing.

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5 hours ago, TerryE said:

 

My point was that we did the same for a few £K (sorry, plus the £2k my TF company charged to include the UFH loops in the slab).  OK, I designed the system myself and Jan and I installed it which saved a lot of money, but IMO going for some of these incentive schemes can be a false economy. 

 

Leaving aside the morality arguments, and just focusing on pure economic grounds, if you really are getting a payback of £5.5K over 7 years then you should be paying no more than £4K extra upfront.  I suspect the premium charged by an RHI accredited plumber, plus the cost of over-sizing the system is working out far more than that. 

 

Fair enough, but my point was that the RHI wasn't a significant part of the decision making process, and any payment is considered a bonus.

 

Focussing on pure economic grounds is fine for a theoretical debate, but as you know, practically, many other factors come in to play.  In this neck of the woods, we're not exactly at the cutting edge of plumbing and heating technology (..they're still whingeing that they can't use lead anymore...), and I'm happy that I couldn't have got my house plumbed, an ashp system and all sanitary-ware installed in an appropriate timescale for significantly less than I paid. A 'non-MCS' install wasn't really even an option.

 

That's not to say it can't be done, just that I couldn't do it, after factoring in all else.  I have no doubt that my plumber added himself a nice bonus to the cost, but it appears that's standard practice for quotes for self-builders. Some you win, some you loose...

 

Anyway, I offered-up my costs to the community on request, and hope that other folk can save a few quid on that!

 

 

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