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I am moving to a new home.
It needs most things replaced, it looks like the previous owner hasn't done much in the 30 years he has had it.
It has radiators and a gas boiler but that is pretty old.
I was toying with the idea of putting in flooring from concreate (concrete like tiling) and underfloor heating.
How feasible is it nowadays to run the central heating system from electricity, with heat pumps etc to increase the efficiency ?
Or is gas so much cheaper it is a non-starter?
Or should I just effectively have a combination, with the underfloor plus radiators ?
The reason is I would prefer to be electric as that offers the possibility of being more and more supplied from greener sources, whereas gas is gas.
After seeing the issues my mate has had with underfloor heating, I would never be tempted. If/when it leaks, it causes no end of problems.
Stoner to the thread!
Stoner to the thread!
If you're on mains gas, I'd stick with that for at least the next installation cycle.
Gas is Gas but even being nice and sourcing from nice energy suppliers your not going to change the balance. If you take an overall approach and aim to generate your own etc. then you could still argue that using gas is a good efficient option for the heating/water and using power generated for electrical items is a better use... probably
If you want to minimise your co2 footprint get serious with insulation and appliance spec/lighting etc.
If you are using water as the heating medium its pretty easy to switch between different sources. I have neighbours running pure electric, electric combined with geothermal (deep bore, 100m straight down), electric combined with solar hot water and geothermal, then there are those with pellet burners, wood gasification things or low energy geothermal (3-500m of pipe buried under a metre or two of soil)
As long as your radiators are sized for the likely temperature of the water from each source and/or you have a decent control system (and a big reservoir) you should be fine.
No one uses gas. Except maybe for cooking.
combined with solar hot water
Of everything that is what I miss from the last house that had that, power bills have never been the same since!!
If you have the space a thermal store would be a good idea. It allows you to use whatever energy source you like, lots of different sources simultaneously. Mine uses solar thermal, biomass and has an electric immersion (not for ch, but dhw comes from the same thermal store)
Allows you to add or change fuel type at any point in time in the future
That's likely to be my next step, thermal store. Can then add other things later as i need to. We use electric and geothermal at the moment, mostly geothermal, the electric boost hasn't switched on for 6 or 7 months except for when it self tests. But in the winter it gets a bit of hammer.
Most of our neighbours have exactly the same geothermal/electric set up too. I suspect one of the local companies did a deal when they built the last patch of houses (before we bought the place). They all came with geo and solar hot water from new.
Where are you that you can get geothermal (as opposed to GSHP)?
At work we have a heated warehouse where we store certain raw materials, which go solid at RT or winter outdoor temperature. The building is insulated with thermal cladding and there is plastic pipe buried in the floor and two x 3kw column heaters, not much different from an electric kettle, through which the water is pumped. 6Kw is sufficient to keep the whole warehouse at about 30 degrees, summer or winter. It's an excellent system and one I would consider if I could build a really well insulated house.
Even if in the future you move from a gas/oil fuel supply to green electricity then it will be the case that wet underfloor heating will be more efficient than running miles of heating elements i.e. using electricity to heat up the water that flows through the underfloor heating. Therefore the transition from gas fuel to green electricity is an easy switch.
[quote="Stoner"]Where are you that you can get geothermal (as opposed to GSHP)?It's the same thing. Big run of pipe either vertical/deep bore or several hundred metres of pipe buried in the garden, and a heat pump.
Just gets called different things in different places (and by different manufacturers i'd guess?) i'm sure there is some international standard, but here, the translation is (pretty much) Geothermal Heating.
Scandinavia.
I would say they're not really the same thing.
Geothermal in the Icelandic sense, say, is a high temperature system that collects energy primarily from the ground.
Heat pump systems are more dependant upon electricity to run the compressors and reverse refrigeration cycle to extract far less energy from the ground in a multiplier effect. And overall the system runs at lower temperatures.
I've never been a fan of heat pumps because while there might be some financial benefits over, say, gas from the COP over and above the electrical energy input, it takes an exceptional install to do the same at a better CO2 emissions rate unless on French nuclear grid or other non-carbon electricity supply
How feasible is it nowadays to run the central heating system from electricity, with heat pumps etc to increase the efficiency ?
It's perfectly feasible, but given the cost of electricity, the initial outlay, and the relatively long payback period I don't understand why you'd chose not to go for gas.
Fair enough, seems that it's just a matter of scale.
I can't afford to drill down far enough to get Icelandic amounts of heat.
Think ours is 110 or 120 metres down, hits granite at 3 metres, I'd have to find the data sheet though.
And FWIW i pay a subsidy to ensure that all my electricity is green. It's either provided from a hydro station about 60 km from here or nuclear. And gas isn't an option as there isn't any infrastructure, and masses of quite restrictive rules about storing any sort of volume of gas.
Oil used to be popular, but its now cripplingly expensive, also lots of new rules about storage means that many houses with it installed are now effectively illegal, and require changes before they can be sold. Think there is even a cut off in 2020 something where the systems will be shut down and tanks drained (by the council, but at the home owners expense.) but not looked into that in any detail since i didn't end up buying an oil heated house ~15 years ago.
Hydro electricity into a heat pump is a nice system.
so if I do go for underfloor heating then water might be a better option as that could be driven by gas or electricity, but there could be issues with maintenance.
Or I could go electic and tie it up with solar panels, maybe.
I was thinking about that first as the carpets have to go and I was thinking of those concreate tiles - will have to consider how that would interact with the heating.
Was just thinking about the long term gas usage, rather than right now. Costs not such an issue if they are somewhat in the same ballpark, no magnitudes different.
thanks for the advice, stuff to think on 🙂
The analysis you need to do it to compare your unit for cost energy for gas vs electricity. Invariably electricity is up to 4 x the cost so even if you have a really well installed GSHP system, you will struggle to achieve significant saving on running costs. There are a number of reasons for this. Electricity is a higher quality source of energy that is more useful but its production involves losses from gas etc. Second all the subsidies for green energy are loaded into the electricity price. Therefore it is highly unlikely a GSHP will beat a gas system where grid gas is available. IF you are off the gas main then when i last looked at it it could make sense but only over a very long term.
Spend your money on insulation, draught proofing then heating.
Wet underfloor is extremely reliable in my experience (30 years of installations), can work with multiple fuels, although if you are considering a heat pump in the future then make sure and tell whoever designs the system so that they can maximise the pipe density. You will then need to possibly control floor temp as well to prevent over heating if you use gas first.
Personally if you are connected to the grid then gas is a no brainer as your fuel choice. You can do the insulation etc as above which will massively affect your running costs, but by far the biggest influence will be how you control your heating in my opinion.