You'll love this - you can correct for the temperature by using "degree days". You can look up the degree days for each year and then compare cost per degree days.
Thank you for answering a lot of things I wanted to know in preparation for my heat pump journey. Delighted for you and your family, that this has been a very positive outcome.
That's no problem, I had hoped this would help others in their efforts to switch to alternative heating solutions. We're all very pleased with the system.
Awesome stuff! We're getting our Daikin 11kw Heatpump installed early march. All heatloss calculations were done, and some radiators changed. Just a little nervous if it will all come together ok in the end 😅. Thanks for sharing your journey.
I’m getting my Daikin heat pump installed as we speak. I’ve opted for a split refrigerant system and that saves on the need for glycol or anti freeze valves in the system. I’m looking into the ESPAltherma project so I can get some very detailed performance data from the X10A Port on the hydro box. It’s my excuse to get back into learning about Python and MQTT communication protocols. It’s fascinating, and I suspect this project is going to run arms and legs.
@@anthonydyer3939 that's brilliant Anthony, looking forward to your video (I'm a subscriber) :) The Heat pump is the last green component! Already have a SolarEdge 10kw system and an ioniq 5 EV. I did my own heatloss calculation on top of the daikin approved installers, using heatpunk and they pretty much match up ~50w discrepancy. In the maths we trust! 👍
We maintain an 18c daytime temperature with a 2c drop overnight, ASHP used 710.76 kWh for our heating and DHW, We have a 1970's 5 bedroom detached home. Like you we have a battery but for us this can be emptied quite quickly on cold days. Before installing the ASHP I upgraded the loft insulation to 270mm but our wall cavities were not very good, due to broken down spray in foam. We had the ASHP for a year and used abut 3500kWh, then I found a company to suck out the old filling and replace it with the new beads. Savings for the latest year, means we used 2500kWh. I had heard that cavity wall insulation saves about 1/3rd so not far off. Never had any difficulty keeping the house warm.
Good video as with the others. The more data and facts there are available to those making decisions about whether to get a heat pump, rather than perceptions, the better. Our January 2023 gas boiler energy use for heating and hot water was 2,300 kWh gas. January 2024 with an Octopus heat pump 580 kWh electric for heating and hot water. Both months with internal temperatures of 20 degrees and similar weather (total degree days in each month very close for both data sets).
@@SpeakToTheGeekTechours went in early November. Very happy with the combination of heat pump, 13.5 kWh GivEnergy AiO battery and solar pv. Ignoring the pv 100kWh per winter month), our electricity cost has been 12p per kWh in Nov and January, 6p in Dec. Will do a final winter reckoning when the saving sessions end but I’m aiming for close to zero winter heating and hot water cost 🎉 Roll on the summer export season!
Ha, yeah she has this hobby of collecting twigs and lining them all up in parallel like she's creating a tally, it's unsettling to watch. Glad you found the video interesting!
Octopus installed my Daikin heat pump last April so my first winter with it. I was also using Evohome with my old gas boiler to micro manage each room's temperature schedule. It is definitely much more comfortable heating all rooms to the same temperature all day. Noise level outside is barely audible, inside I can’t hear it at all unlike my old gas boiler which was very noticeable in the kitchen. No creaking pipes on a cold morning is another benefit. I have not done a detailed cost analysis but my preliminary conclusions are the same as yours. For the coldest month of the year running costs on a standard tariff are similar or slightly less for a warmer, more comfortable house but if you have a time of use tariff and batteries then it is easy to make big savings. After switching to Octopus Intelligent Go and adding a second battery system to total 19.2 kWh my average cost per kWh for the last month was 10.2p and now it is a bit warmer and the solar panels are beginning to perform my average cost is below 8p per kWh.
That's an impressive average rate you're achieving! I'm managing about 11p/kWh at the moment and I really hope I can get on Intelligent Go soon to bring that down a bit.
Anyone that puts a lithium battery pack INSIDE their home must clearly not understand the severe risk they are taking with the lives of their loved ones. I hope it's in an isolated stainless box vented to the atmosphere.
@@squishedfrog99-gp4qq Lol, this one again! That's why LiFePO4 chemistry is being used because it removes the risk of thermal runaway. With older NMC cells I would tend to agree - they should go outside for safety and I think some even came with automatic fire extinguishers! But LiFePO4 is proven many times safer in that respect and is even being used in newer EVs now because of that too.
@squishedfrog99-gp4qq I do understand the risks, I am an engineer and have worked with lithium ion batteries for many years. I have been involved with the investigations of a few “thermal events” as they were euphemistically called. However my home batteries use a different technology, Lithium Phosphate, which is much safer. I would be more concerned about having a gas appliance in my house as these have a much worse safety record. As an engineer I think your suggestion of enclosing a potentially explosive or flammable device in a stainless box is very a bad idea. If an explosion did occur then stainless steel would become shrapnel as any vent would be insufficient and in case of fire then metals are very good conductors of heat.
@SpeakToTheGeekTech so you are categorically telling me these batteries that can store an incredible amount of energy are completely safe. Thermal runaway is not possible, and even if it does happen the fire will not spread to other cells and is easily extinguished. I suggest you watch the video by a British professor at Durham University. If you do it just might save your life. The way things are going the aim is for us all to have our EVs connected to the grid acting as one giant battery back up system. Sounds great in theory. It's absolutely insane.
Great to see these results. We had a Daikin installed in November to go with our AIO and small solar install. Our build is not complete so we have missing insualtion and wind blowing through some rooms. We are also heating the caravan in the garden (our current accomodation) so bills have been very high and the house is cold. We are pretty sure we have done the right thing but its hard to tell until we are airtight.
Great video. Really interesting figures from home assistant on temperature. Your house appears to lose about 1/2 the energy to my place so it’s a great source of info on heat pump requirements for me given the temperature rise when your heat pump was on was about what my place has when my really old potterton boiler does when it’s lit. I’m considering a heat pump or replacement boiler so this is a gold mine of info for me. Thank you so much for spending the time on this video. I definitely would look in to balancing out your radiators though. It looked like you had the bedroom warmer than the living room, I understand that zoning with TRVs isn’t a good idea but making sure you bias the living room a little is better. It would have been good to get an outside temperature overlay on the temps out of home assistant. There are waterproof housings for aquara sensors, but if they are not designed to be outside they may not like the higher humidity you’ll get outside.
I'm glad it helped. There's a whole series of videos I've made on the process of getting a heat pump from start to finish if you check the rest of my channel out so you can get an idea of the pitfalls I've experienced and what the installation process was like.
I have heard the loudest part is when the compressor kicks in and out. Also you are probably measuring dBA which is a weighted wide band measurement. To get a better idea of noise you should look at the value in the lower frequency band. Note 3dB is a doubling of the noise.
I’m not an acoustic engineer, I’m just trying to show you visually what the levels are like. In my opinion it’s a very reasonable level of noise but showing that on camera is difficult so I just used my Apple Watch to illustrate it
Thank you for the informative video. Was debating whether to "hit the button" so to speak but you've convinced me. Would be interested in a video about the controls you get for the heat pump, not sure if you get any sort of interface or whether they leave you with your current thermostat(s).
With the Daikin you get an ‘MMI’ which is where you control everything (schedules, settings etc) and a thermostat. You can also use the ONECTA app. I briefly show all of these in other videos in this series
@@SpeakToTheGeekTech Ah thank you for the information and quick reply, I will watch some more videos. Do you know if it will work with an existing Tado system? Apologies if this has already been answered.
In theory yes but in reality it depends. You shouldn’t use the Tado controller as it won’t be as efficient as the Daikin controller itself. But you can use the Tado radiator stats standalone in upstairs rooms like bedrooms to limit the temperatures as required - they just must not call for heat and be passive restrictors
ASHP fitted by Octopus in January - Octopus were absolutely brilliant - with solar panels it’s a no brainier for me and I am now all electric - one tip ask the engineers about trunking to enclose the external pipes, looks much neater.
We had Octopus install a 4kW Daikin Altherma back in August and had a very similar experience through the winter. With 19.5kWh of storage, Intelligent Octopus and a CT on the Harvi tracking the energy use, we're at £83.35 for all heating and hot water since install!
1118kWh to date and all either off-peak or battery. In fact, that isn’t factoring in the days where solar has covered it. As with all of this, a fair bit of investment needed to get to this point!
@@Michael-z2y Nope - since install. It has used 1118kWh in total. With our batteries it's been used almost exclusively on 7.5p rate electricity and generated solar from our PV. Based on the 7.5p rate - 1118*7.5p=£83.85 😀
Very useful and informative. It would have been nice to include a monthly repayment cost as well for the actual heat pump install so people might have an idea of 'total' costs. I appreciate systems and installation costs will vary dependant on house requirements.
I disagree with the concept of a heating system repaying itself - running my heat pump costs roughly the same as running my gas heating. The money savings are actually because of my solar and batteries so those savings count towards the payback of that system instead.
There are smaller models fortunately! And all sorts of ways of placing them around a home: wall mounting is an option. I’ve even seen photos of chimneys being replaced with them up top of a roof so they’re fully out of the way!
@@SpeakToTheGeekTech i don’t have a chimney either 🤣. Heat pump videos do not shoe an average terrace house, 2 bed semi, or flat. The house shown here is far from average.
This is the best video out there on actual cost comparisons - thank you. Can you do a detailed ROI analysis for your solar, batteries, heat pump, ev cost, including pay back period? Is it really all worth it?
Thank you! For solar and batteries, yes certainly. I put out an update every 6 months so check my channel page for all of those updates going back over 2 years - another one will be published in a couple of weeks. For the heat pump, no I won't be making an ROI video on that because I disagree with the concept of a heat pump providing me with a monetary investment. Its purpose is to heat my home. If it's cheaper than gas then great, but I'm not looking at its value in that way at all intentionally. For the EV, I could, I'll stick that on the list, but given the extra costs I've had recently I'd say it's a difficult one to talk about. I don't think there is an ROI on that for the average person - up front costs are more, running costs are lower, but overall it works out about the same. I think 5 years was what I originally worked out the Corsa-e would break even on, but I kept it for 3. Also, you have to assume you are comparing it against an equivalent ICE car, and in a lot of cases now there isn't anything quite the same. What would you compare a Tesla's costs against for example?
The concept of ROI comes up a lot but only on selected items. I fitted a new kitchen last year, costs about twice what I'll be paying for the ASHP. Nobody has ever asked for the ROI on the kitchen, and probably never will.
My install takes place in 3 weeks time, so really looking forward to seeing how well a heatpump does in our 3 bed 10 year old Semi. We also have solar and 2 Powerwall batteries so hopefully our bill will be well below the current gas cost. We are going to keep our EVO home TRVs., I contacted Honeywells technical dept and the said it would work fine with a heatpump and also sent me a wiring diagram for Octopuses electrician.
I urge caution using Evohome (or any other sort of on/off control). Honeywell of course say it’s fine but the controller that comes with your heat pump will report temperature rather than on/off so as the heat pump knows how to better regulate the flow through the circuit.
I’ve noticed a significant drop in the actual cost billed since having a heat pump installed Sept 2023, and a battery April 2023. We are on Intelligent Octopus and run two EVs that collectively do 31600 miles per year, so a lot of our electricity is for charging those, and our September to January costs have dropped dramatically from £1218 in 2022/23 (£411 gas/£807 electric) to £728 in 2023/24 (all elec). I think having both a heat pump and a battery has been a winning combination since the vast majority of our electricity is off peak rate now. Very happy at an average of £182 per month in winter for all our heating, cooking and commuting energy costs. Many years ago we were averaging £250 per month just for our diesel (110 mile round trip daily commute needed a full tank every week).
I've really enjoyed following your journey with the heat pump and am waiting for my pre install visit by Octopus in a couple of weeks. Have you made any changes to the controls yet as there are some impressive tweaks recommended by Heat Geek, or were you aiming to get a baseline 'as installed' by Octopus first? I've been doing some prep for the gas being capped off such as replacing my electric shower with a thermostatic mixer bath tap with shower outlet, and ordered an induction hob too. Looking forward to achieving carbon neutrality for transportation, space and water heating! I've also got solar and 9.5kwh GivEnergy battery so will be interesting to see how much the heat pump impacts battery SOC throughout the day. All the best, Simon.
I’m glad you enjoyed it! I did just yesterday attempt to adjust the weather comp curve to increase flow temperature a bit when outside temperatures are mild because it wasn’t quite getting the home to temperature when it’s above 12 degrees. Seems to have worked but I need to do more reading on other tweaks I can make!
Another one to consider is turning off the water immersion cycle (may be fortnightly?) and turning down the water temperature marginally because if there's sufficient turnover of water the risk of legionella is almost zero but there are savings to be had storing water at a lower temp. Do you schedule your hot water to heat at night when electric is cheaper? That's interesting about the weather compensation. I did ask for a lower flow temperature design to 43 degrees to target a design SCOP >4 but they don't do this any more as their approach is to minimise variations between installs as much as possible and the design flow temp is 50 degrees. I suppose this also means minimal radiator changes too in some cases although all mine need replacing as it's such an old system and not designed for low temperature heating.
Great insite, get my Octopus install in June. I too have Evohome and I am really happy with it. Have you done away with it all together. I was going to keep it and just have 2 deg fallback temp. I have run our Combi at 45deg for the heating this winter and my yearly gas bill for heating and water on a Combi is just under £500, using Evohome. House has been a nice temp 22 deg in the Living Room most other rooms between 21 and 18. Was hoping to do much the same with the heatpump. I also have 25kw of battery storage a 4kw array and have asked for an Eddi but not sure if I'm doing the right thing with the Eddi. I'm on Intelligent Octopus Go, with 15p Export, I can fill my batteries and charge my car at night. Sell back to the grid or heat my own water through the day? Thanks for the videos
Both my entire Evohome system and my Eddi has gone, sold on to new owners via eBay. I absolutely would not use the Evohome controller on a heat pump - the Daikin thermostat relays the temperature to the heat pump controller and allows it, along with weather compensation, to optimally adjust the flow temperature. Evohome can't do that, it's on/off (ok, ignoring OpenTherm if you have that because I don't think that is compatible with Daikin). I would consider using the radiator controllers in standalone mode on bedroom radiators, maybe I'll do that with some zigbee ones next winter, but I would never allow them to call for heat. As for Eddi, the more battery storage you have, the less point there is having that. Unless you have loads of excess solar every day then you're wasting energy by diverting it. I heat the tank every night using the heat pump and it's 3x more efficient than using the eddi. If I need a boost during the day I use the heat pump again taking energy from the batteries or solar, it's still 3x more efficient than the eddi. The only disadvantage of that method is it doesn't top your tank up automatically from solar like an eddi would, but I can live with that restriction by planning ahead.
I see you have what I take to be an Octopus soak-away. We were told we needed to build our own prior to the installation which we did at a cost of over £500 for a proper job including skip hire etc. I've seen others like your in other videos so obviously we got the wrong info from Octopus. We should have had our installation last week but because of unresolved issues around the un-looping of our supply and installing a 100amp cutout for our 80 amp fuse, the install got pushed back to June. Anyway thank for the very useful video on noise, costs etc. Looking forward to an installation in warmer weather and max output from solar panels. BTW... after 3 tries we have given up hope of getting a working smart meter which transmits 30 minute data. We'll be paying Octopus standard flexible rate for heating and car charging.
The soak-away was definitely included and there was never any talk about it costing. There was an option for direct drainage instead but that would have been tricky in its final location. Shame about the smart meter. There are options for a high gain antenna on a long wire so as it can be placed in a better position for signal, but I guess you have probably already exhausted that option. I have a high gain antenna on mine but it's inside the meter box as that was enough to get it working.
@@SpeakToTheGeekTech Hi. Yes we have asked about an antenna but they don't work in our area. I wonder how long the decking used on your soak away will last? I'm also wondering now if Octopus will want to build one of theirs in order to get the heat pump higher off the ground? We have had several communication issues with Octopus since getting a quote last year and I shall add the question of the soak-away to my list when I make a formal complaint. Glad I found this video of yours; I'll be watching some more.
I hope the decking lasts a long time! It’s on its side and doesn’t end up with sitting water on it so should last a while. If it fails I can always replace it myself - the feet of the heat pump are on concrete slabs which are bedded properly so the failure of the decking won’t affect it, it’ll just spill the gravel is all.
It's basic physics that you'd learn at GCSE level. You're not converting electrical energy into heat energy like a normal electric heater would at almost 100% efficient, you are using the heat pump to move heat energy from the air outside into a more compressed (and therefore higher temperature) smaller space in the water in your heating system. Therefore the lower the temperature difference between the air outside and the water in your system, the less effort is needed. Moving energy, not directly converting it, that's how it has the effect of being way more than 100% efficient in terms of heating your home.
So what he means is that if the heat pump is using 1kWh of electricity the heat pump extracts heat energy from the air and delivers it to the heating system at 3kWh so 300% efficient, this is what heat pumps do, split air con systems work in the same way.
Hi, thanks for the informative video. I’m due a survey visit from Octopus to fit the same heat pump. What I’ve been looking at is a battery system to power both the heat pump and the house power I don’t have solar and don’t think I want to get it as I’m not sure how long I’ll stay in the house. Have you done a video on your total usage, heat pump and power for the house? I’ve been trying to calculate how big a battery would need to be to power both the house and heat pump and if it’s even doable / cost-effective.
You'll need to separate power and energy in your head first - power being the immediate draw of the heat pump (in watts) which would relate to how much your battery's inverter can output, and energy being how much power is consumed over time and therefore impact the storage size of your battery. I will be doing a power/energy video on the heat pump at the end of winter when I have some decent data for the whole season, but I will say that for now you need a lot of storage to cover most of your needs. I have 21.7kWh and that doesn't cover everything on the very cold days. But.. you don't necessarily need it to cover everything, the most important thing is that your batteries get fully used regularly in order to achieve maximum benefit. If you have spare capacity sitting there most of the time, it's wasted money. I reckon my batteries cover about 75% of my home demand (excluding EV charging) which is quite a good level of cover. Finally, batteries on their own are only going to save you money if paired with a smart tariff (like Octopus Cosy, or Octopus Go if you also have an EV). Without a cheap-rate tariff or solar, the batteries aren't going to do a lot for you.
Got the exact same boiler as you fitted only 3/4 weeks ago and very pleased with it. I did not get it for cost reasons but so I can convert the whole house to electric with also solar panels, Battery and an EV and charger. I dont regret it at all but still a bit confused by the settings and working those out. My only complaint is no native app for it which is disappointing compared to say my Sunsynk Inverter !
Did you get the Daikin Altherma like me then? There is a native app called 'Onecta' (apps.apple.com/gb/app/onecta/id1474811586) which works provided your installer has fitted the Wifi adapter.
mah sadly got the one below that has no wifi, reason is I found out after is I said go for the hive ... a bit annoyed really but luckily I installed it in an accessible place ! @@SpeakToTheGeekTech
Yeah what the hell is up with carpets in bathrooms in the UK? I grew up with carpeted bathrooms and thought it was totally normal until I got a house of my own and realised how much of a stupid idea it is!
Nice video! It would have been great to include a local temperature graph of this Jan vs last. There are several websites that can provide temperature history - adds some extra detail to the comparison.
You know what, I did collate temperature graphs to compare both months but I totally forgot to include that in the video when I came to make it! Average temp for this Jan was lower than last Jan for certain, so if anything last January would have been cheaper by comparison.
Our EPC B rated chalet bungalow was built with underfloor heating and a Daikin air source heat pump. We have 16 solar panels and a 9.5kwh battery and use Octopus Cosy as the two of us are retired and at home 24/7. At the height of this winter monthly electricity bills hit £200. Temperature throughout the house was at 21C, only one room was above that. Our neighbour has an identical system and equally identical fuel bills! I was not impressed.
That cost sounds reasonable to me for 24/7 heating via a heat pump at that temperature, my total energy bill was about £150/month and I don't run as warm as you are. There's potential for optimising that I'm sure, but I know people who are paying a lot more for gas heating.
That seems pretty reasonable? We have gas heating and our Electric bill (lights, fridge freezer, shower, TV) was £110 for two people in Jan. With the heating cranked up that high im surprised it's not more than 200!
No, we have a mains water supply. I think air-to-air heat pumps are probably more suitable for properties in your part of the world. Here in the UK we have a unique situation where a large proportion of houses have wet heating systems with radiators where these sort of heat pumps are ideal - no need for any cooling really because we only get 1 day a year where it's too hot!
Another great video! It'd make a good 'short' video comparing the boiler noise and the heat pump noise. I'd like to see the battery usage on a few days over that cold snap in a future video if possible. Are you considering fitting smart thermostats to the bedroom radiators, so that they have a lower temp overnight, but allow you to run downstairs at a higher temp on cheap electricity?
I shall see what I can do about energy usage information during the cold snap. I can tell you now that I ran out! Even with 21.7kWh of storage, it's only mild days that I make it all the way through. The problem is when it's cold and horrible out, we're all inside using the TV, doing washing/drying, cooking, extra heating, etc... so whilst the heating is using the biggest chunk, it's not helped by all the rest.
@@SpeakToTheGeekTech With days like this being so rare, I doubt extra battery storage would pay back, it'd be nice to see what time you run out. Can you spot how many defrost cycles run from the energy usage / temp readings? For January to be cheaper means that you should almost certainly get paid back for your investment. And it also give interesting videos.
The times they run out vary from 5pm to midnight, as I said it's mostly our in-home usage of washing and drying and cooking which makes the biggest difference to how long the batteries last. The heat pump just ticks over nicely in the background!
My conclusion of having a heat pump in winter is that it'll never pay back enough to get extra batteries to cover the full winter load. What the batteries do is cover the more expensive periods in the time of day tariff. There'll be some unavoidable grid import but it won't be at the highest cost
I'm sorry to say there's no non-geek answer :( It's using Home Assistant and various temperature sensors around my house, plus an energy monitor watching it, also connected to Home Assistant, and then a little bolt-on gadget I made called ESPAltherma which I use to grab data straight from the heat pump into Home Assistant.
Those are two different things - the 5 year warranty is provided by Daikin on just the heat pump which means if something fails on it, I don't have to pay for replacement parts. That doesn't cover the effort to actually do the repair work though. The £9/month product from Octopus is a "Service and Maintenance Plan" which covers support from Octopus on the whole system including emergency callouts and an annual service. Octopus have included the first year of the aftercare service in the installation price so I do have that and will probably continue to pay that when it comes to renewal.
Long term its critical the heat pump is fitted level and remains so. Otherwise you can get accelerated bearing wear causing efficiency loss. Give it a check with a spirit level every month or so and you should be on top of it. Skillbuilder channel covered an ancient installation that showed this fault.
Yeah I saw that video, it was proper on the wonk though! I'll be keeping an eye on that, that's for certain, and getting it serviced properly every year. I did the same with the boiler so I'm already in the routine for that.
I don't calculate a break-even cost for a heating solution - its primary purpose is to heat my home, not make a profit therefore the value it gives me is to keep me warm. The solar and batteries however do justify a break-even calculation and that worked out at about 7.5 years - I'm 2 years in so have about 5.5 years remaining. I put together a video every 6 months or so to update on the progress of my predictions vs reality and next one will be in July I reckon. I needed a replacement for my boiler anyway so would have had to have paid for that anyway, and I managed to get near price parity on this heat pump with a boiler (see my heat pump costs video from about 2 weeks ago)
As someone who is about to get a job with Octopus as a basic Plumber The radiator issue on the compression shouldn't have happened and wont hapoen on my work. Also the one radiator fault would easily be solved by balancing each radiator around the house using the lock shield valve 👍 thats fir plimber use only though usually.....won't judge you though
Nice video, confirming what I see with my Vaillant 7kW ASHP as well. My whole 5 bedroom detached, moderately insulated, large extension, 225m2 house is consistently warm (19-20C ish), no ticking from the radiator piping anymore (indeed) and I saved a lot of money on my monthly energy bill in the process, running at say 130£ per month in Jan (Octopus Agile), my gas boiler was at least 400£ last year in January (EDF variable rate)
Nice! I really didn't expect to see any savings - I would just have been happy with it being cost neutral to run and being off gas, so the saving is a bonus
So twice as much as my gas bill for a 3 bed house in Scotland set at 19.5c. boiler flow control set to 47c. My average gas bill including hot water is £75-85 a month. House built in the 50s
That’s impressive, but different houses. All depends on when you’re heating, are you detached, window sizes, etc. so many variables that make it difficult to compare houses like that. By the sounds of it you have an efficient home so when the time comes to replace your boiler a heat pump would work well.
Our gas cost for January is the same as yours (£111) but ours includes heating the whole house and the hot water. Were considering a heat pump so in theory your heat pump figures should also apply to us.
Most likely. I could only make educated guesses at the running costs before installation so I was pretty happy to see my predictions of the running costs for gas vs electric were near the same (excluding using the batteries)
@@SpeakToTheGeekTech Is your £59.86 figure only for the heating or does it include your usual electricity usage for appliances etc? We've got a home battery and Octopus Go plus Solar Panels so should be able to take advantage of those also.
That's just heating/hot water. There's additional cost for the general running of the house and charging the car but I separated out just the heating costs to make it a fair comparison to gas.
I think you need to add extra to your heat pump running costs to account for both installation, and the electric battery. I fee, this is like someone saying they can feed themselves for £30/week by buying £30 of flour, and using other ingredients they just had lying around in the pantry. If you're saving money using a battery, you need to account for that initial outlay within the running costs.
The energy (and cost) savings are all being rolled up into the tracker I have for my battery and solar payback so it’s not being forgotten in my overall budgeting. However here that saving is being highlighted for illustration only - running costs with batteries is lower, although not truly lower until you have paid the costs of your batteries through those lower bills. I won’t ever consider the additional cost of the heat pump over a boiler in those calculations though (although I agree some people can argue I should), mainly because I have almost cost parity between the heat pump and a boiler installation (see my heat pump costs video)
What’s your how water “tank” settings? I noticed you are getting cop of >3 during hot water. Mine is getting about 1 at best. (No booster heater being used) do you use weather dependent?
Yes, weather compensation is on and it's set to heat to 48 degrees (not in powerful mode) every night during my off-peak hours. I get a COP of between 2-3 for hot water realistically. A COP of less than 1 is worse than using a booster heater, which would be 1 so something is definitely not right there!
Thanks for the data and insight. It would be nice to know how many square ft/meters your heated area is, and also the capacity of the Heat Pump . . . btu/ton.
Hi. This video is part of a series which has covered that information already (Project: Heat Pump ua-cam.com/play/PLKp2r5So-W3znOaHOMR-63nEvo-ITuFDk.html). But it’s about 110 square metres and a 6kW heat pump.
Would you mind to tell how much of the battery cost you and what size of capacity you have? Thinking of getting a battery (maybe 8-10 kwh) so I can charge it during midnight with lower rate:)
I’ve had mine a few years and costs are different now so what I paid would be meaningless for your calculations- you are best contacting an installer. I think you are looking at about £5k-£6k roughly for a 10kWh battery though. I have 21.7 kWh across two separate systems which is unusual to do. Check out the other videos on my channel though where I have talked about costs and my setup.
No issues at all. I have it scheduled to heat for 2 hours off-peak every night, that usually lasts the day but just in case I have it set to re-heat if it drops below 36 degrees so if someone takes an extra long shower it will boost itself back up. Means I don't need two schedules per day, but it will still make sure we have hot water on the occasional days we use more than usual. It stores it at a lower temperature than when we had the boiler so you need to plan for a larger tank. We went from 180 litres to 250 litres and I reckon they are about equivalent in terms of the amount of showering we get out of it due to it needing to mix in less cold water.
@@SpeakToTheGeekTechthanks for your reply, how long do you have to run the heat pump for to get a tank of hot water, how much does this cost on your tariff. Just trying to compare to my solar/battery set up.
A very difficult question to answer because it depends on the starting temperature of the water in the tank and the ambient temperature / time of year. The lower the initial tank temperature and the colder the air outside, the longer it'll take to heat it and the more energy it requires. Right now though I'd say it's using about 1.5-2kWh of energy to heat it on average each night and that takes about an hour. I pay 8.5p/kWh so that's 17p for 2kWh. Very rough figures of course.
My base measures 80x147cm but there are ones with a smaller footprint so it’s best to get an installer in to quote and they could recommend one that fits best in the space you have
I'm new to using home assistant having watched your other videos. I have some of those Aqara temp sensors but need to find a suitable extender to get the signal around my house. I was thinking some smart plugs would be good - any suggestions please? Also I am trying to find a suitable dashboard that can track my temps over time so I have a history - is that possible and would you mind letting me know which dashboard element you use for this please? Good to see the low running costs and gives confidence about our own switch to a heat pump. Thank you.
I have a number of Ikea Tradfri zigbee smart plugs because they were cheap and easy to get hold of. They work well as extenders too. However pretty much any mains powered zigbee device should extend your network - I also have a couple of zigbee LED strips which do the job. As for the temperature graph card, the one shown in the video is just the built-in History Graph card, nothing special. I also use tile cards in a grid to display each room, and a quick click on a tile for a room brings up a graph for the last few hours,
I use a new modem connected to my ISP's router - the range is superb and it uses both 2.5Ghz and 5Ghz as well as having tons of additional features that my ISP's modem/router doesn't have.
Another interesting video. The sound from my two air-to-air units is obliterated by background noise when they are cycling on. Even at full tilt on the coldest of days (when nobody is out save me checking), do they make much sound. I do need to take a sound reading from the upstairs window, as mine are mounted at the first-floor level.
Intresting to say the least. Looking through the commments I couldn't find out the size of your batteries as that is so important and if they runs through the Octopus approved battery system? I'd really appreciate it if you let us know. Thanks.
Oh right, yes I do have GivEnergy batteries but I don’t use that tariff personally. Check out Tim & Kat’s Green Walk and Gary Does Solar channels because they are both trying that tariff out over the summer
We still have a range oven with a gas hob and it would cost a lot of money to replace that. It's in the plan though eventually but we need to save up. Standing charge is about £7/month until that point though.
Crikey thats a big unit, id never fit one of those in my house's outdoor space. Think im going to wait for them to do the 9kw version of their in house heat pump, the form factor of their 6kwh one (taller than it is wide) looks like a much better fit, im hoping their upgraded one is a similar form factor, just taller.
Yeah it’s pretty big and I can completely understand why this solution isn’t suitable for a lot of homes. There are smaller units available and split units can also reduce the size required outdoors but at the expense of additional space required indoors. Air-to-air units can also work out smaller too because of the need for in-room vent units.
@@SpeakToTheGeekTech I dream of air to air but there's no grants even if you have solar cos they don't want to "encourage" more electricity use in summer with people using air con... Which is fine unless someone has solar, in which case it's the dumbest thing I ever heard. Never mind, one day...
Another great video - thank you! A few questions, if you don't mind - is it possible to get the heat pump to temporarily and automatically pause consumption when other short term high house loads are on? Eg. Oven, dishwasher (during heat cycle), kettle? I'm wondering if it can be made to cooperate with other devices to fly under the 3.6kw limit on my battery inverter and avoid peak grid draw. Related - what's the peak power the heat pump draws, please? Many thanks Andrew
Not natively. You could of course use a third party solution monitoring your home to do that (such as Home Assistant) if you wished. The Daikin Altherma heat pump has a cloud-based integration for Home Assistant. The peak power I've seen from the heat pump is 3kW but only briefly and in extreme situations (like at the end of the hot water cycle). In 'powerful' mode it can draw 6kW but that's heat pump + hot water cylinder immersion.
I should also add that it's not a good idea for efficiency reasons - if you keep pausing the heat pump then your COP values will drop dramatically and your running costs increase.
…but width for Octopus saving sessions - the only time our heat pump has been off all winter (until outside temperatures went above 13 degrees this week)
I turn my heat pump off for the saving session but otherwise I just leave it on. It's most efficient that way if the house is kept at a constant temperature and the heat pump is only having to replace lost energy
Question while comparing although not much is used, gas boilers use electricity to pump water around the radiator system. Therefore it would be interesting to know how much electricity gas boilers use and added in ti the cost comparison.
I did think about that - the pump for the old system ran at about 30W, so assuming that the remaining components used about 20W that's 50W total. If the heating ran at that for 12 hours per day, that'd be 0.6kWh/day, or 18.6kWh for the whole of January at a cost of about £5.40 peak rate. Not insignificant but as it was only a total guess I decided it would be unfair to include it. It would make my heat pump figure look even better though :)
@SpeakToTheGeekTech Fair enough and good shout about the data accuracy. Although not big additional usage figures in the comparison, it is interesting when you see advertised energy comparisons that the gas/oil heating solution they are being compared to does not seem to include any eletrical usage of the gas/oil boiler etc.
Great vid. Can you tell us how many bedrooms your house has please? I’ve got a 4 bed mid 80’s detached house and my electric bill for Jan was about £250 (including a heat pump + EV on Octopus Cosy)
@@SpeakToTheGeekTech our cop floats around 3-4, so I think we need to work on the insulation in the house. Our loft is well insulated (I enjoyed your vid on this) but the windows and wall cavity insulation needs looking at.
Hi my octopus install is next week what’s the water pressure like from the hot to your shower heads is it ok? I currently have a pump as I have a gravity system so there’s not enough pressure there but I’m told I won’t need that. What is your experience?
The pressure is direct from the mains water regardless of whether it’s hot or cold now, so if your cold water pressure is good right now then that’ll be what your hot is like after the conversion.
@@SpeakToTheGeekTech thanks for that I’m looking forward to getting the new system in ours now is 25 years old so I’m expecting a heck of an upgrade!!! I hope!!
I think the older and more knackered your boiler is, the better the heat pump performs by comparison. I genuinely can’t believe how much more comfortable the house is now.
@@SpeakToTheGeekTech it’s been a great system it’s a glow worm and I’ve serviced it every year so it’s done me proud but it’s getting tired and the radiators are tired too so we’re getting them all upgraded with the install I’m sure you are right I’m anticipating the house to feel all round better 👍 I’m looking forward to Long as they get the hot water on quick happy days!!
What was the peak and average power draw for the pump. Trying to figure out if that can be supplied from batteries as my home is pretty much never drawing power during the peak hours
The most it ever draws is 3kW and that’s only during a hot water cycle. For heating it occasionally gets to 2kW but usually sits between 400W and 1.5kW. My batteries easily cope with the power, just not the total energy on very cold days!
It takes about 45-60 minutes to heat the tank but it doesn’t draw 3kW for all of that. It starts off at about 1.2kW and slowly ramps up until it hits 3kW for the final 5 minutes or so.
you might want to look at the hot water settings. I discovered in the myriad of badly documented settings for my LG heat pump that it was using the immersion heater for a fair bit of the hot water heating which is of course much less efficient than the heat pump. I've managed to change the curve so it almost exclusively uses the heat pump for hot water. Mind it can still draw a lot just running the heating on cold days
Evohome is essentially an on/off controller which means your heat pump controller will have no idea what the indoor temperature is and whether it should just drop the flow temperature back to the minimum to maintain the home's heat as efficiently as possible. So it would work, but it would cost you more in energy to run. I know you can get an OpenTherm add-on for Evohome which would in theory allow that more efficient functionality, but I don't think that is compatible with heat pumps.
@@SpeakToTheGeekTech Hmm, interesting - thanks. I like the idea of heat pumps, but I don't really want to lose the efficiency of zoned heating (I work from home, and use quite distinctly defined areas of the house at different times of day).
Zoning isn't always as efficient as you think it's going to be and it took a while for me to get my head around this. Unless you have amazing insulation between all rooms, you have in effect one thermal envelope. Heat Geek explains it really well: ua-cam.com/video/zpTVIeUh04E/v-deo.htmlsi=jVnOwmJzv41WVWtF
How are you measuring your consumption? I'm logging mine but the Daikin Data is rubbish. I'm looking at monitoring the input with some CT clamp device but haven't decided what yet. Output, no clue really. The systems that had to be fitted under the old RHI are way too expensive for me.
I'm using a Shelly Pro EM to monitor the power used, and ESPAltherma to monitor everything else. Video coming up on 2nd March on that (or it's available right now for channel members).
@@SpeakToTheGeekTech I'm thinking of something similar. But the pro EM is a bit pricey and ESPAltherma+ HA to use it is looking like a bit of a steep curve. Also I don't want to increase my baseload any more by adding more Watts to run HA on something..
The Pro EM is probably the best value one around and is rated for accuracy. It comes with two CT clamps too. And a Raspberry Pi doesn't add much to your baseload. In my case the Pi actually offsets its own energy usage easily by automating lights and the standby modes on devices.
@@SpeakToTheGeekTechI’ll be interested to watch that one. Our Octopus electrician recommended an Efergy monitor as a simple to diy fit and use monitor as it is a battery powered transponder, so zero wiring. Doesn’t work with home assistant but does give access to the data.
I bought a shelly EM to monitor my heat pump and old FIT solar panels. Cheaper than the pro. Compared to the meters on the heat pump it's about 5-7% mis reading which is accurate enough. Could always adjust the reading in HA with a template sensor if needed
I've still not been able to get through to Octopus heat pump people. Sitting on the phone for 45 minutes during the week. They installed the Daikin heat pump and although it allows wifi on 2.4GHz, it 'blows a gasket' if it detects 5GHz anywhere on planet Earth. So I had to switch off my 5Ghz wifi. Then I tested it and discovered that if I degrade 5GHz encryption to an easily hackable state, it works ...... Why won't Octopus discuss this problem????
Technically yes, but in reality I have different set points for the desired temperature of my home at different times of the day. So for example it's set to keep the house at 20 degrees in the evenings, but at 10pm the set point drops to 17 degrees so the heat pump doesn't actually run after 10pm unless the house starts to drop below 17 over night. So it's never turned off, it's just left on all the time and it understands what temperatures I want and when.
Can we now look at the capital outlay to save £100 per month for 3moths and £75 per month another 3-4 moths, (estimate) saving £600 per year but having spent £10,000 (grant allowed for) upwards (heat pump, builders works, battery system etc) plus the necessary annual maintenance costs to maintain the heat pump and stop it getting noisy, for tech that will require replacement at 10 or 12 years at likely a similar cost. If you put that £10,000 into saving at only 3% that would be £300 per year, 5% would net £500. Compound that over the 10 year life expectancy at 5% is 12,208, over 20 years even factoring in 2 gas boiler replacements it would appear your at leat £18,000 worse off over the 20 year term. In this context I am struggling to call any renewable an investment
Firstly, I don't count the heat pump as an investment that will repay itself financially. It's a heating system, its provided benefit is to keep me warm. My boiler was about to break, therefore this installation was roughly the same cost as replacing that boiler... Secondly the boiler had an annual service and maintenance contract, so doing this for the heat pump too is like-for-like in both effort and cost. Lastly, there's several other videos on my channel covering the costs and payback period for the solar and battery kit, which I do consider an investment because its primary purpose is to save me money long term. By shifting from gas to electrical heating those green-tech components should provide me with even more benefit hence why I get a saving every month on my heating bill. Plus, I have reduced my carbon impact several-fold in the process - I know that financially investing the same money somewhere else could net me a larger return, but it's not all about that.
Another excellent video. I have 9.6kWh of battery and am worried that the heat pump will suck up all that power when at the moment, that will cover the house from 7am to 8pm most days. I realised that if I had cosy, I could charge the battery twice a day (use Agile at the moment). Do you think 9.6 kWh is enough to cover the 7am to 4pm timeframe before the next charge? I would love to see the hour usage of your heat pump on the really cold days.
On the coldest days I was easily chewing through 20+ kWh of energy just from the heat pump alone so no, I don't think 9.6kWh of storage would be enough to get you through. My 21.7kWh isn't enough, but it's also not worth spending the extra money on more batteries in my case just to save a few pounds a year - it doesn't make financial sense. I think in your case you may benefit from an additional battery. You won't cover all of the demand, but you'd cover most of it and making sure that battery is working as hard as it can every day is the key to getting the best pay-back from it. Feel free to browse my emoncms monitoring data for my heat pump here and you can see the correlation between temperature and energy use: unpraying-ape-8145.dataplicity.io/app/view?name=ASHP&readkey=82af8f22985d47049461f3fbbc16632a
@@SpeakToTheGeekTech Thanks for coming back to me. I would be happy to get another battery, but with a 3.6 kWh inverter that extra storage would not charge in the 3 hours. It is funny how one change might lead to other changes to get the most from it. I will certainly take a look at the link. Thanks for sharing. Do you know your base load before and after. I appreciate that you will have spikes now, but I the average would be interesting. Can you do a video on how you made the site? I assume it is via Home Assistant.
Tricky to figure out the baseload but I work on it being about 500W. Sometimes it was 300W over night, but in the day it was up to 750-800W if the TV was on and the kids home on their computers. The heat pump adds to that of course but if it's ticking over it's adding only about 400W! That link I shared was to the emoncms software from OpenEnergyMonitor running on an old Raspberry Pi 3 in my garage - there is an 'app' you can enable on it called HeatPumpMonitor which publishes all that data you are looking at. There will be an overview video of it in about 2 weeks time, but it's not a tutorial, just a bit of a showcase to demo what is possible.
I just swapped to agile from flux, and seems a no-brainer to keep flux over going to cosy. The rest of the day generally seems less than even the cheap part of the cosy or flux. When I get my heatpump ill probably charge the battery up and use it purely for the 4-7PM slot.
Did you have any trouble with the DNO when adding the heatpump? I've already got an EV charger and battery so wondering if adding a heatpump will be an issue...
Yes, sort of. When Octopus applied to the DNO for permission it was initially denied because my maximum possible load would exceed the 80A fuse I had. They said I'd need to go three-phase which I pushed back on to Octopus as you can imagine. Octopus weren't sure how to handle the situation if I'm honest so in the end I got a three-way email discussion going with them and the representative from the DNO. The issue was the EV charger really being the highest powered device I had, but I pointed out that it monitored the grid and had a limit on it to reduce or stop the output as the grid import neared the limit. I had to provide the DNO with a data sheet of the EV charger to prove that and it was accepted. I thought it was a bit silly though worrying about my small heat pump - if I turned on two regular electric heaters in my home that don't require any approval then all of a sudden I'm drawing way more sustained power than the heat pump can manage!
Ah, that's good to know. I'm pretty sure that my Zappi works that way, and I have a 100A main fuse, so hopefully it will work out. Had a heat loss survey done yesterday so waiting for a more detailed quote from that and confirmation that a hot water tank will fit in my little utility cupboard. 🤞🏻
Oooh exciting times! And yes, the Zappi does that too (in fact I'm pretty certain it's a legal requirement as part of the smart charger regulations, but I haven't seen that in writing anywhere)
£100 a month saving is pretty good. How much have you spent on the solar, batteries and heat pump and how long do you think it will take to make that back?
You need to be so careful showing noise levels as shown in your vlog. If you are actually 36dB I would be amazed. The watch can have a huge tolerance on it. Planning authorities will be looking for between 5 & 10dB below the background noise level at the nearest affected neighbour. First sound much but it can make a huge difference if you have to treat the air source heat pump to meet planning requirements.
I think it's fine, it's way below the limit even at that distance, and the nearest neighbour's window is considerably further away. My neighbours have said they can't even hear it from their garden.
How do these sound at midnight when cold in Janaury and February ? I am terrirfied of having 60 new builds all having them next to me, as the houses are being built and will all have them, they are being built very close to me. In my village it is nice and silent at night, but I have a feeling these will ruin that. The government seems to be going backwards on convenience, they are worried about emissions but don't they care about noise especially for people with sensitive hearing. These are running 24/7 yes?
So far it doesn't actually run much over night. It's "on" all the time, but the compressor isn't always running - it kicks in at about 5am until 9am to get the house to 20 degrees, then I set it back to 18 degrees during the day so the compressor turns off unless the house drops below 18. It then fires up again at about 4pm until 10pm to keep the house at 20, at which point the set point is 17 for the night. Unless the house drops below 17 over night then there's no heat pump noise at all - it's not kicked in for heating. I do have a hot water cycle set from 3am-4:30am but I've never heard it from inside the house.
But they do care about noise emissions and are very specific about what is required Search for 'MICROGENERATION INSTALLATION STANDARD: MCS 020 ' for more detail
Lithium Iron Phosphate (LiFePO4) so a lot more stable than NMC. They are in my garage which is joined to my house, if they'd been NMC lithium cells I'd have put them outside for sure.
did you get the referral from myself, and where do i look in the app for my share, have you considered weather compensation. My council planning have suggested sound proof my heat pump, i told them outright NO as noise would not be an issue, they are a bit of a jobs worth. and are they really going to refuse a ASHP if i say NO, bearing in mind that the GOV are relaxing heat pump planning.
@ecoterrorist1402 Are your initials JN? If so, the switch is still pending but I usually get referral credit a week or so after you have made your first payment to Octopus. You would get your share applied to your first bill I think. Not all the referrals reach the payment stage for various unknown reasons and I have no real control over that - I can't chase Octopus about other people's accounts so I just have to wait it out :)
I was surprised too when I first started using it! The airing cupboard with the tank in was right next to my bedroom and the immersion would make a noise that sounded like a kettle boiling. I guess it was air bubbles forming around the heating element. Could have been a perfect storm of an old heating element that needed replacing combined with an old copper tank that wasn't very well insulated but it was a bit noisy!
You mentioned you turn down the heat pump at night, because you are using lower water temp. I would suggest to only turn the system down by max 1°C. it's better to lower the flow rate to the bedrooms to compensate for this. this way you're heat pump would run way more efficient.
That would require smart valves on the bedroom radiators which I don't have at the moment, perhaps that's something for the future (hint, hint if any suppliers are reading and want something reviewing!). But yes, I agree that would be a lot more efficient. Tim from Tim and Kat's Green Walk did a video about using off-peak energy to boost your home temperature at night and concluded it could work out cheaper to run that way, but you'd need to make sure the bedrooms don't get too hot when it does that.
@@SpeakToTheGeekTech imo it's better to run everything open, without zoning. You can also do it trail and error so the bedroom stays 17/18°C. A lot like lowering the flow on a floorheating system.
We reduce the flow temperature with an offset from the weather dependant curve overnight, rather than using a set back that would switch the heat pump off
I've tried different scenarios but now we turn the master temperature down from 20 degrees to 18 degrees overnight so the heat pump doesn't have as much to do in the morning, but I don't turn it back up until about 10am when the agile rates are cheaper. In practice other than very cold nights the house retains the heat overnight and the heat pump hardly comes on at night.
I was trying to make a comment about degree days, but it keeps getting removed (not sure why) anyway, you should use degree days to allow you to compare different days.
Not me doing that sir! I shall definitely be looking in to degree days, someone else mentioned that to me yesterday and I hadn't heard of it before. Thanks!
@@SpeakToTheGeekTech I'll see if this works... If you divide your daily kWh by the daily degree day value for that day it allows you to directly compare different days against each other regardless of the actual usage, Because your house will generally have a consistent kWh/DD value (however it will vary a bit depending on solar gain and the wind direction on different days, it should however remain at about the same value) You will need to set a base temperature for the degree days, the main website you can get these from is degreedays (I'm avoiding putting the link in here as I think that's what's got me blocked before) The reason for the 15.5 degC base, is because above that temperature you will likely not need any heating in your house and any temperature outside below this will require some heating load. You can play around with the base, but generally 15.5 is going to give you reasonable results.
I hope so too! When I did my research prior to committing I noticed that pretty much all of the main brands have a selection of good and bad reports of aftercare so I figured they were all the same.
Comparing the average temperature for this January to last January it was actually a bit colder this year where I am. I've had outdoor temperature monitoring in my home automation system for many years so have quite a bit of historical data on that. I can't speak for the rest of the UK though. And the costs aren't ignored, they're in a different video in this series: ua-cam.com/video/Tc_5SlkNkik/v-deo.html
South Wales. We had some warm days, December was the mildest we've had for years, but January this year was definitely averaging colder than January last year for us.
Yes, there is a service cost for the heat pump. It's about the same as the service cost for a gas boiler and system so that means there's no cost difference which is why it's not included. Both systems should be serviced and maintained.
Trying to get help from Octopus is a no-no. No response to several emails sent over a period of 4 weeks. We have had to change our router but the Octopus-installed Daikin app refuses to re-connect. The manual shows wrong options and the Daikin app refuses to work with the dongle. I waited 45 minutes on the phone for an answer from Octopus but they answered and referred the call onwards but no-one has rung back. So we have no hot water or anything because the app is broken and Octopus can't help. Daikin does not respond to emails either 😞
That's not good. But, have you been to the MMI (the larger black screen they installed) and attempted to reconnect it to your new Wifi? That's where you do it, not in the app. Alternatively if you reconfigure your new Wifi router to use the same name and password as the old one, it'll automatically connect to it like nothing changed. The app is also not your main control interface for the system, it's just a convenient extra option. Your primary configuration method should always be the MMI screen. All of your schedules, enabling hot water, etc, is done through there. Whilst I agree their support could be better in this instance, the fact that your app isn't working because you changed your wifi network is not their fault or responsibility to resolve.
Odd. The printed manual I was supplied with and the on-line PDF manual are both correct. Are you perhaps in the wrong user mode? On the main display if you select 'User profile' it should prompt you for a PIN. By default they leave it in 'user' mode. There is also an 'Advanced' mode and an 'Installer' mode. I think you can configure Wifi if you are in advanced mode. Installer mode should be for commissioning but if you can't find the wifi option in advanced mode, try installer mode. You should always put it back in user mode after you have finished though or the app will complain! User Mode PIN: 0 0 0 0 Advanced PIN: 1 2 3 4 Installer PIN: 5 6 7 8
@@SpeakToTheGeekTech I have been setting it to advanced mode every time. Honestly, how often do people need to change their router? Once? It should be routine - not tying me in knots. The infuriating thing is that Daikin refused to discuss any problems and Octopus is dead on the phone. I can't believe that such a simple change should kill the system.
Honestly my routers get upgraded regularly for testing various things. I've used the same network name and password for many years (couple of decades I think now!), just configure the new routers with the old details. It means I don't need to ever go around and reconfigure everything. So much less hassle!
That does happen sometimes but it’s still not massively noisy. No different to a hot water cycle. Only happens on some cold days when there’s a lot of moisture in the air. When humidity is low even when it’s minus outside I was surprised to see no frost on the heat exchanger.
It’s balanced consistently across the whole house, I just don’t want the bedrooms at 20 degrees in the middle of the night… but I do want them that warm when I get up. I’m just fussy!
That’s not balanced! As per the radiator schedule octopus gave you the bedrooms will be designed to achieve 18°c If they are hitting 20°c then octopus didn’t balance your system
I have a weather-dependent curve set up by Octopus, I leave it on and just have two set backs - one in the evening, but a second during the main part of the day when we're either not in or quite active so don't need it any warmer (18 in the daytime seems plenty to me). I thought that was how I was supposed to use it? Open to any information that could make it more efficient though so please do point me in the direction of something I can read to learn more.
It's not supposed to recover its installation costs from running, its purpose is to heat your house not earn you money. Any savings on your bill are an added bonus. I have another video all about the installation costs and how it didn't cost much difference to a boiler installation.
This video is titled "How much does it cost to run?" not how much did other stuff cost... I've got other videos about the costs of the heat pump and the payback period on the solar and batteries. The savings those produce on my bills go towards the payback costs of the battery and solar components.
I'm on normal 'Go', not intelligent. I would love to be on intelligent but neither my car nor charger (yet) support it. I'll move as soon as I'm able to though!
DON'T USE BRITISH GAS for a Heat Pump install - they started my mum's simple 3 day install in a tiny bungalow that has UFH - so far it's been over 3 months and still very poor performance, bad efficiency, and bodge, bodge, bodge. Really disappointing and upsetting
That's a real shame. @UpsideDownFork used British Gas for his installation and seems to be pleased with it, but I think they subcontracted out so I guess it might be luck of the draw.
@@SpeakToTheGeekTech only because you included the cost of running an immersion heater. which nobody does because that is rediculously expensive and most people have gas combi boilers, so dont have a tank.
Except it isn't... the immersion heater is very slightly more efficient and was being used at off-peak energy rates comparable to gas. So for the sake of fairness I said they were cost comparable. In reality I found using the immersion throughout the year slightly cheaper on average due to the gas boiler's inefficiencies especially during the summer. But... for the sake of argument, the cost of running both are assumed to be comparable.
You don’t need to be with Octopus Energy to use them for the heat pump install but you can’t use them at all in Scotland even if you are already a customer. Disappointing
They are slowly expanding their operations across the whole UK. They are only just starting to install in Wales, I was the third here I think. It’s a sensible approach I think because they don’t want to install where they haven’t got local support in place or they can’t offer the service to you that they promise.
@@SpeakToTheGeekTech I have a 4 bed house and my gas bill is £33 to £60 a month. Electric is 4x the price of gas so even with a COP of 4 it’s the same price per kWh. You clearly replaced a gas boiler with that monstrosity and it’s slower to heat your house up on cold days.
Well done you. Yes, it costs the same to run if you don't get clever with your usage. That's pretty much what my video was about so I guess you didn't watch it. The financial savings I make are because of my batteries which can make use of off-peak energy rates. My gas boiler was knackered and needed replacing... again covered by my videos.
Oh, and the speed of heating my home up doesn't appear to have changed... once more covered by my videos, I have a constantly and consistently warm home with running costs on a par to my old boiler which didn't heat all rooms very well.
@@SpeakToTheGeekTech you don’t save any money. You just think you do. If you invested the money you would vastly make more money than buying a home battery or solar. I’ve ran the numbers. It makes no sense. All these green systems are a terrible financial disaster to spend your money on.
You'll love this - you can correct for the temperature by using "degree days". You can look up the degree days for each year and then compare cost per degree days.
That does sound like a great way to compare performance, I shall certainly be looking in to that!
Thank you for answering a lot of things I wanted to know in preparation for my heat pump journey. Delighted for you and your family, that this has been a very positive outcome.
That's no problem, I had hoped this would help others in their efforts to switch to alternative heating solutions. We're all very pleased with the system.
Our experience is very similar to yours. Having batteries and on Go is certainly the way to go, our solar panels helped too
You get one of those and then things escalate into full electrification :)
Well done on this Jan cost including batteries to heat your home. Wow. Very cool. 🎉
Thank you!
Awesome stuff! We're getting our Daikin 11kw Heatpump installed early march. All heatloss calculations were done, and some radiators changed. Just a little nervous if it will all come together ok in the end 😅. Thanks for sharing your journey.
I’m sure it’ll all work out well!
I’m getting my Daikin heat pump installed as we speak. I’ve opted for a split refrigerant system and that saves on the need for glycol or anti freeze valves in the system.
I’m looking into the ESPAltherma project so I can get some very detailed performance data from the X10A Port on the hydro box. It’s my excuse to get back into learning about Python and MQTT communication protocols. It’s fascinating, and I suspect this project is going to run arms and legs.
@@anthonydyer3939 that's brilliant Anthony, looking forward to your video (I'm a subscriber) :)
The Heat pump is the last green component! Already have a SolarEdge 10kw system and an ioniq 5 EV.
I did my own heatloss calculation on top of the daikin approved installers, using heatpunk and they pretty much match up ~50w discrepancy.
In the maths we trust! 👍
We maintain an 18c daytime temperature with a 2c drop overnight, ASHP used 710.76 kWh for our heating and DHW, We have a 1970's 5 bedroom detached home.
Like you we have a battery but for us this can be emptied quite quickly on cold days.
Before installing the ASHP I upgraded the loft insulation to 270mm but our wall cavities were not very good, due to broken down spray in foam. We had the ASHP for a year and used abut 3500kWh, then I found a company to suck out the old filling and replace it with the new beads. Savings for the latest year, means we used 2500kWh. I had heard that cavity wall insulation saves about 1/3rd so not far off. Never had any difficulty keeping the house warm.
That's good going for a large 1970s property
Good video as with the others.
The more data and facts there are available to those making decisions about whether to get a heat pump, rather than perceptions, the better.
Our January 2023 gas boiler energy use for heating and hot water was 2,300 kWh gas.
January 2024 with an Octopus heat pump 580 kWh electric for heating and hot water.
Both months with internal temperatures of 20 degrees and similar weather (total degree days in each month very close for both data sets).
Sounds like an even better result than mine!
@@SpeakToTheGeekTechours went in early November. Very happy with the combination of heat pump, 13.5 kWh GivEnergy AiO battery and solar pv. Ignoring the pv 100kWh per winter month), our electricity cost has been 12p per kWh in Nov and January, 6p in Dec.
Will do a final winter reckoning when the saving sessions end but I’m aiming for close to zero winter heating and hot water cost 🎉
Roll on the summer export season!
your dog living its best life in the background of the video was brilliant. Interesting video more widely!
Ha, yeah she has this hobby of collecting twigs and lining them all up in parallel like she's creating a tally, it's unsettling to watch. Glad you found the video interesting!
Octopus installed my Daikin heat pump last April so my first winter with it. I was also using Evohome with my old gas boiler to micro manage each room's temperature schedule. It is definitely much more comfortable heating all rooms to the same temperature all day. Noise level outside is barely audible, inside I can’t hear it at all unlike my old gas boiler which was very noticeable in the kitchen. No creaking pipes on a cold morning is another benefit. I have not done a detailed cost analysis but my preliminary conclusions are the same as yours. For the coldest month of the year running costs on a standard tariff are similar or slightly less for a warmer, more comfortable house but if you have a time of use tariff and batteries then it is easy to make big savings. After switching to Octopus Intelligent Go and adding a second battery system to total 19.2 kWh my average cost per kWh for the last month was 10.2p and now it is a bit warmer and the solar panels are beginning to perform my average cost is below 8p per kWh.
That's an impressive average rate you're achieving! I'm managing about 11p/kWh at the moment and I really hope I can get on Intelligent Go soon to bring that down a bit.
Anyone that puts a lithium battery pack INSIDE their home must clearly not understand the severe risk they are taking with the lives of their loved ones. I hope it's in an isolated stainless box vented to the atmosphere.
@@squishedfrog99-gp4qq Lol, this one again! That's why LiFePO4 chemistry is being used because it removes the risk of thermal runaway. With older NMC cells I would tend to agree - they should go outside for safety and I think some even came with automatic fire extinguishers! But LiFePO4 is proven many times safer in that respect and is even being used in newer EVs now because of that too.
@squishedfrog99-gp4qq I do understand the risks, I am an engineer and have worked with lithium ion batteries for many years. I have been involved with the investigations of a few “thermal events” as they were euphemistically called. However my home batteries use a different technology, Lithium Phosphate, which is much safer. I would be more concerned about having a gas appliance in my house as these have a much worse safety record. As an engineer I think your suggestion of enclosing a potentially explosive or flammable device in a stainless box is very a bad idea. If an explosion did occur then stainless steel would become shrapnel as any vent would be insufficient and in case of fire then metals are very good conductors of heat.
@SpeakToTheGeekTech so you are categorically telling me these batteries that can store an incredible amount of energy are completely safe. Thermal runaway is not possible, and even if it does happen the fire will not spread to other cells and is easily extinguished. I suggest you watch the video by a British professor at Durham University. If you do it just might save your life. The way things are going the aim is for us all to have our EVs connected to the grid acting as one giant battery back up system. Sounds great in theory. It's absolutely insane.
Great to see these results. We had a Daikin installed in November to go with our AIO and small solar install. Our build is not complete so we have missing insualtion and wind blowing through some rooms. We are also heating the caravan in the garden (our current accomodation) so bills have been very high and the house is cold. We are pretty sure we have done the right thing but its hard to tell until we are airtight.
Best of luck with that build! I wouldn't want to have been living in a caravan over winter I can say that much!
Thanks
Oh wow, thank you very much!
Great video. Really interesting figures from home assistant on temperature. Your house appears to lose about 1/2 the energy to my place so it’s a great source of info on heat pump requirements for me given the temperature rise when your heat pump was on was about what my place has when my really old potterton boiler does when it’s lit. I’m considering a heat pump or replacement boiler so this is a gold mine of info for me. Thank you so much for spending the time on this video.
I definitely would look in to balancing out your radiators though. It looked like you had the bedroom warmer than the living room, I understand that zoning with TRVs isn’t a good idea but making sure you bias the living room a little is better.
It would have been good to get an outside temperature overlay on the temps out of home assistant. There are waterproof housings for aquara sensors, but if they are not designed to be outside they may not like the higher humidity you’ll get outside.
I'm glad it helped. There's a whole series of videos I've made on the process of getting a heat pump from start to finish if you check the rest of my channel out so you can get an idea of the pitfalls I've experienced and what the installation process was like.
Another good video. Liking the charts.
Glad you like them!
I have heard the loudest part is when the compressor kicks in and out. Also you are probably measuring dBA which is a weighted wide band measurement. To get a better idea of noise you should look at the value in the lower frequency band. Note 3dB is a doubling of the noise.
I’m not an acoustic engineer, I’m just trying to show you visually what the levels are like. In my opinion it’s a very reasonable level of noise but showing that on camera is difficult so I just used my Apple Watch to illustrate it
Thank you for the informative video. Was debating whether to "hit the button" so to speak but you've convinced me. Would be interested in a video about the controls you get for the heat pump, not sure if you get any sort of interface or whether they leave you with your current thermostat(s).
With the Daikin you get an ‘MMI’ which is where you control everything (schedules, settings etc) and a thermostat. You can also use the ONECTA app. I briefly show all of these in other videos in this series
@@SpeakToTheGeekTech Ah thank you for the information and quick reply, I will watch some more videos. Do you know if it will work with an existing Tado system? Apologies if this has already been answered.
In theory yes but in reality it depends. You shouldn’t use the Tado controller as it won’t be as efficient as the Daikin controller itself. But you can use the Tado radiator stats standalone in upstairs rooms like bedrooms to limit the temperatures as required - they just must not call for heat and be passive restrictors
ASHP fitted by Octopus in January - Octopus were absolutely brilliant - with solar panels it’s a no brainier for me and I am now all electric - one tip ask the engineers about trunking to enclose the external pipes, looks much neater.
I quite like the look of the black insulated external piping. Perhaps once they start to wear then I may change my mind!
We had Octopus install a 4kW Daikin Altherma back in August and had a very similar experience through the winter. With 19.5kWh of storage, Intelligent Octopus and a CT on the Harvi tracking the energy use, we're at £83.35 for all heating and hot water since install!
That's impressively low running costs
1118kWh to date and all either off-peak or battery. In fact, that isn’t factoring in the days where solar has covered it. As with all of this, a fair bit of investment needed to get to this point!
Per month?
@@Michael-z2y Nope - since install. It has used 1118kWh in total. With our batteries it's been used almost exclusively on 7.5p rate electricity and generated solar from our PV.
Based on the 7.5p rate - 1118*7.5p=£83.85 😀
£83.35 for heating and hot water alone isn't impressive. If it includes electric as well, that would be impressive,
Very useful and informative. It would have been nice to include a monthly repayment cost as well for the actual heat pump install so people might have an idea of 'total' costs. I appreciate systems and installation costs will vary dependant on house requirements.
I disagree with the concept of a heating system repaying itself - running my heat pump costs roughly the same as running my gas heating. The money savings are actually because of my solar and batteries so those savings count towards the payback of that system instead.
That heat pump is almost as big as my garden; it is the future and everybody should get one 🤔.
There are smaller models fortunately! And all sorts of ways of placing them around a home: wall mounting is an option. I’ve even seen photos of chimneys being replaced with them up top of a roof so they’re fully out of the way!
@@SpeakToTheGeekTech i don’t have a chimney either 🤣. Heat pump videos do not shoe an average terrace house, 2 bed semi, or flat. The house shown here is far from average.
This is the best video out there on actual cost comparisons - thank you. Can you do a detailed ROI analysis for your solar, batteries, heat pump, ev cost, including pay back period? Is it really all worth it?
Thank you! For solar and batteries, yes certainly. I put out an update every 6 months so check my channel page for all of those updates going back over 2 years - another one will be published in a couple of weeks. For the heat pump, no I won't be making an ROI video on that because I disagree with the concept of a heat pump providing me with a monetary investment. Its purpose is to heat my home. If it's cheaper than gas then great, but I'm not looking at its value in that way at all intentionally. For the EV, I could, I'll stick that on the list, but given the extra costs I've had recently I'd say it's a difficult one to talk about. I don't think there is an ROI on that for the average person - up front costs are more, running costs are lower, but overall it works out about the same. I think 5 years was what I originally worked out the Corsa-e would break even on, but I kept it for 3. Also, you have to assume you are comparing it against an equivalent ICE car, and in a lot of cases now there isn't anything quite the same. What would you compare a Tesla's costs against for example?
The concept of ROI comes up a lot but only on selected items. I fitted a new kitchen last year, costs about twice what I'll be paying for the ASHP. Nobody has ever asked for the ROI on the kitchen, and probably never will.
My install takes place in 3 weeks time, so really looking forward to seeing how well a heatpump does in our 3 bed 10 year old Semi. We also have solar and 2 Powerwall batteries so hopefully our bill will be well below the current gas cost. We are going to keep our EVO home TRVs., I contacted Honeywells technical dept and the said it would work fine with a heatpump and also sent me a wiring diagram for Octopuses electrician.
I urge caution using Evohome (or any other sort of on/off control). Honeywell of course say it’s fine but the controller that comes with your heat pump will report temperature rather than on/off so as the heat pump knows how to better regulate the flow through the circuit.
I’ve noticed a significant drop in the actual cost billed since having a heat pump installed Sept 2023, and a battery April 2023. We are on Intelligent Octopus and run two EVs that collectively do 31600 miles per year, so a lot of our electricity is for charging those, and our September to January costs have dropped dramatically from £1218 in 2022/23 (£411 gas/£807 electric) to £728 in 2023/24 (all elec). I think having both a heat pump and a battery has been a winning combination since the vast majority of our electricity is off peak rate now. Very happy at an average of £182 per month in winter for all our heating, cooking and commuting energy costs. Many years ago we were averaging £250 per month just for our diesel (110 mile round trip daily commute needed a full tank every week).
I agree - the batteries really do appear to turbo-boost your savings!
I've really enjoyed following your journey with the heat pump and am waiting for my pre install visit by Octopus in a couple of weeks. Have you made any changes to the controls yet as there are some impressive tweaks recommended by Heat Geek, or were you aiming to get a baseline 'as installed' by Octopus first? I've been doing some prep for the gas being capped off such as replacing my electric shower with a thermostatic mixer bath tap with shower outlet, and ordered an induction hob too. Looking forward to achieving carbon neutrality for transportation, space and water heating! I've also got solar and 9.5kwh GivEnergy battery so will be interesting to see how much the heat pump impacts battery SOC throughout the day. All the best, Simon.
I’m glad you enjoyed it! I did just yesterday attempt to adjust the weather comp curve to increase flow temperature a bit when outside temperatures are mild because it wasn’t quite getting the home to temperature when it’s above 12 degrees. Seems to have worked but I need to do more reading on other tweaks I can make!
Another one to consider is turning off the water immersion cycle (may be fortnightly?) and turning down the water temperature marginally because if there's sufficient turnover of water the risk of legionella is almost zero but there are savings to be had storing water at a lower temp. Do you schedule your hot water to heat at night when electric is cheaper? That's interesting about the weather compensation. I did ask for a lower flow temperature design to 43 degrees to target a design SCOP >4 but they don't do this any more as their approach is to minimise variations between installs as much as possible and the design flow temp is 50 degrees. I suppose this also means minimal radiator changes too in some cases although all mine need replacing as it's such an old system and not designed for low temperature heating.
Great insite, get my Octopus install in June. I too have Evohome and I am really happy with it. Have you done away with it all together. I was going to keep it and just have 2 deg fallback temp. I have run our Combi at 45deg for the heating this winter and my yearly gas bill for heating and water on a Combi is just under £500, using Evohome. House has been a nice temp 22 deg in the Living Room most other rooms between 21 and 18. Was hoping to do much the same with the heatpump. I also have 25kw of battery storage a 4kw array and have asked for an Eddi but not sure if I'm doing the right thing with the Eddi. I'm on Intelligent Octopus Go, with 15p Export, I can fill my batteries and charge my car at night. Sell back to the grid or heat my own water through the day?
Thanks for the videos
Both my entire Evohome system and my Eddi has gone, sold on to new owners via eBay. I absolutely would not use the Evohome controller on a heat pump - the Daikin thermostat relays the temperature to the heat pump controller and allows it, along with weather compensation, to optimally adjust the flow temperature. Evohome can't do that, it's on/off (ok, ignoring OpenTherm if you have that because I don't think that is compatible with Daikin). I would consider using the radiator controllers in standalone mode on bedroom radiators, maybe I'll do that with some zigbee ones next winter, but I would never allow them to call for heat. As for Eddi, the more battery storage you have, the less point there is having that. Unless you have loads of excess solar every day then you're wasting energy by diverting it. I heat the tank every night using the heat pump and it's 3x more efficient than using the eddi. If I need a boost during the day I use the heat pump again taking energy from the batteries or solar, it's still 3x more efficient than the eddi. The only disadvantage of that method is it doesn't top your tank up automatically from solar like an eddi would, but I can live with that restriction by planning ahead.
great info thanks
Glad it was helpful!
I see you have what I take to be an Octopus soak-away. We were told we needed to build our own prior to the installation which we did at a cost of over £500 for a proper job including skip hire etc. I've seen others like your in other videos so obviously we got the wrong info from Octopus. We should have had our installation last week but because of unresolved issues around the un-looping of our supply and installing a 100amp cutout for our 80 amp fuse, the install got pushed back to June.
Anyway thank for the very useful video on noise, costs etc. Looking forward to an installation in warmer weather and max output from solar panels.
BTW... after 3 tries we have given up hope of getting a working smart meter which transmits 30 minute data. We'll be paying Octopus standard flexible rate for heating and car charging.
The soak-away was definitely included and there was never any talk about it costing. There was an option for direct drainage instead but that would have been tricky in its final location. Shame about the smart meter. There are options for a high gain antenna on a long wire so as it can be placed in a better position for signal, but I guess you have probably already exhausted that option. I have a high gain antenna on mine but it's inside the meter box as that was enough to get it working.
@@SpeakToTheGeekTech Hi. Yes we have asked about an antenna but they don't work in our area. I wonder how long the decking used on your soak away will last? I'm also wondering now if Octopus will want to build one of theirs in order to get the heat pump higher off the ground? We have had several communication issues with Octopus since getting a quote last year and I shall add the question of the soak-away to my list when I make a formal complaint. Glad I found this video of yours; I'll be watching some more.
I hope the decking lasts a long time! It’s on its side and doesn’t end up with sitting water on it so should last a while. If it fails I can always replace it myself - the feet of the heat pump are on concrete slabs which are bedded properly so the failure of the decking won’t affect it, it’ll just spill the gravel is all.
Over 300 percent efficient. I don't know what you're smoking, but I want some.
It's basic physics that you'd learn at GCSE level. You're not converting electrical energy into heat energy like a normal electric heater would at almost 100% efficient, you are using the heat pump to move heat energy from the air outside into a more compressed (and therefore higher temperature) smaller space in the water in your heating system. Therefore the lower the temperature difference between the air outside and the water in your system, the less effort is needed. Moving energy, not directly converting it, that's how it has the effect of being way more than 100% efficient in terms of heating your home.
So what he means is that if the heat pump is using 1kWh of electricity the heat pump extracts heat energy from the air and delivers it to the heating system at 3kWh so 300% efficient, this is what heat pumps do, split air con systems work in the same way.
Hi, thanks for the informative video. I’m due a survey visit from Octopus to fit the same heat pump. What I’ve been looking at is a battery system to power both the heat pump and the house power I don’t have solar and don’t think I want to get it as I’m not sure how long I’ll stay in the house. Have you done a video on your total usage, heat pump and power for the house? I’ve been trying to calculate how big a battery would need to be to power both the house and heat pump and if it’s even doable / cost-effective.
You'll need to separate power and energy in your head first - power being the immediate draw of the heat pump (in watts) which would relate to how much your battery's inverter can output, and energy being how much power is consumed over time and therefore impact the storage size of your battery. I will be doing a power/energy video on the heat pump at the end of winter when I have some decent data for the whole season, but I will say that for now you need a lot of storage to cover most of your needs. I have 21.7kWh and that doesn't cover everything on the very cold days. But.. you don't necessarily need it to cover everything, the most important thing is that your batteries get fully used regularly in order to achieve maximum benefit. If you have spare capacity sitting there most of the time, it's wasted money. I reckon my batteries cover about 75% of my home demand (excluding EV charging) which is quite a good level of cover. Finally, batteries on their own are only going to save you money if paired with a smart tariff (like Octopus Cosy, or Octopus Go if you also have an EV). Without a cheap-rate tariff or solar, the batteries aren't going to do a lot for you.
Got the exact same boiler as you fitted only 3/4 weeks ago and very pleased with it. I did not get it for cost reasons but so I can convert the whole house to electric with also solar panels, Battery and an EV and charger. I dont regret it at all but still a bit confused by the settings and working those out. My only complaint is no native app for it which is disappointing compared to say my Sunsynk Inverter !
Did you get the Daikin Altherma like me then? There is a native app called 'Onecta' (apps.apple.com/gb/app/onecta/id1474811586) which works provided your installer has fitted the Wifi adapter.
mah sadly got the one below that has no wifi, reason is I found out after is I said go for the hive ... a bit annoyed really but luckily I installed it in an accessible place !
@@SpeakToTheGeekTech
Nice to hear that britts are comming to the 21st century with heat in the house and no moldy carpets in the bathroom😂
Yeah what the hell is up with carpets in bathrooms in the UK? I grew up with carpeted bathrooms and thought it was totally normal until I got a house of my own and realised how much of a stupid idea it is!
Nice video! It would have been great to include a local temperature graph of this Jan vs last. There are several websites that can provide temperature history - adds some extra detail to the comparison.
You know what, I did collate temperature graphs to compare both months but I totally forgot to include that in the video when I came to make it! Average temp for this Jan was lower than last Jan for certain, so if anything last January would have been cheaper by comparison.
Our EPC B rated chalet bungalow was built with underfloor heating and a Daikin air source heat pump. We have 16 solar panels and a 9.5kwh battery and use Octopus Cosy as the two of us are retired and at home 24/7. At the height of this winter monthly electricity bills hit £200. Temperature throughout the house was at 21C, only one room was above that. Our neighbour has an identical system and equally identical fuel bills! I was not impressed.
That cost sounds reasonable to me for 24/7 heating via a heat pump at that temperature, my total energy bill was about £150/month and I don't run as warm as you are. There's potential for optimising that I'm sure, but I know people who are paying a lot more for gas heating.
That seems pretty reasonable? We have gas heating and our Electric bill (lights, fridge freezer, shower, TV) was £110 for two people in Jan.
With the heating cranked up that high im surprised it's not more than 200!
Do you have well water? Also, I'm not sure if this will ever catch on here in Massachusetts considering the humid summers.
No, we have a mains water supply. I think air-to-air heat pumps are probably more suitable for properties in your part of the world. Here in the UK we have a unique situation where a large proportion of houses have wet heating systems with radiators where these sort of heat pumps are ideal - no need for any cooling really because we only get 1 day a year where it's too hot!
Another great video! It'd make a good 'short' video comparing the boiler noise and the heat pump noise. I'd like to see the battery usage on a few days over that cold snap in a future video if possible. Are you considering fitting smart thermostats to the bedroom radiators, so that they have a lower temp overnight, but allow you to run downstairs at a higher temp on cheap electricity?
I shall see what I can do about energy usage information during the cold snap. I can tell you now that I ran out! Even with 21.7kWh of storage, it's only mild days that I make it all the way through. The problem is when it's cold and horrible out, we're all inside using the TV, doing washing/drying, cooking, extra heating, etc... so whilst the heating is using the biggest chunk, it's not helped by all the rest.
@@SpeakToTheGeekTech With days like this being so rare, I doubt extra battery storage would pay back, it'd be nice to see what time you run out. Can you spot how many defrost cycles run from the energy usage / temp readings? For January to be cheaper means that you should almost certainly get paid back for your investment. And it also give interesting videos.
The times they run out vary from 5pm to midnight, as I said it's mostly our in-home usage of washing and drying and cooking which makes the biggest difference to how long the batteries last. The heat pump just ticks over nicely in the background!
My conclusion of having a heat pump in winter is that it'll never pay back enough to get extra batteries to cover the full winter load. What the batteries do is cover the more expensive periods in the time of day tariff. There'll be some unavoidable grid import but it won't be at the highest cost
Great stuff!
I’ve just got ashp and have same thermostats
How did you get the graph up etc
For a non geek 😊
I'm sorry to say there's no non-geek answer :( It's using Home Assistant and various temperature sensors around my house, plus an energy monitor watching it, also connected to Home Assistant, and then a little bolt-on gadget I made called ESPAltherma which I use to grab data straight from the heat pump into Home Assistant.
@@SpeakToTheGeekTech why does everything have be so complicated 🤣
Did you decide to get the Octopus basic warranty £9 a month? Or just the standard 5 year warranty? Thanks
Those are two different things - the 5 year warranty is provided by Daikin on just the heat pump which means if something fails on it, I don't have to pay for replacement parts. That doesn't cover the effort to actually do the repair work though. The £9/month product from Octopus is a "Service and Maintenance Plan" which covers support from Octopus on the whole system including emergency callouts and an annual service. Octopus have included the first year of the aftercare service in the installation price so I do have that and will probably continue to pay that when it comes to renewal.
Long term its critical the heat pump is fitted level and remains so. Otherwise you can get accelerated bearing wear causing efficiency loss. Give it a check with a spirit level every month or so and you should be on top of it. Skillbuilder channel covered an ancient installation that showed this fault.
Yeah I saw that video, it was proper on the wonk though! I'll be keeping an eye on that, that's for certain, and getting it serviced properly every year. I did the same with the boiler so I'm already in the routine for that.
When you factor in the cost of the heat pump and battery storage (plus installation) how long do you calculate it will be before you break even?
I don't calculate a break-even cost for a heating solution - its primary purpose is to heat my home, not make a profit therefore the value it gives me is to keep me warm. The solar and batteries however do justify a break-even calculation and that worked out at about 7.5 years - I'm 2 years in so have about 5.5 years remaining. I put together a video every 6 months or so to update on the progress of my predictions vs reality and next one will be in July I reckon. I needed a replacement for my boiler anyway so would have had to have paid for that anyway, and I managed to get near price parity on this heat pump with a boiler (see my heat pump costs video from about 2 weeks ago)
As someone who is about to get a job with Octopus as a basic Plumber
The radiator issue on the compression shouldn't have happened and wont hapoen on my work.
Also the one radiator fault would easily be solved by balancing each radiator around the house using the lock shield valve 👍 thats fir plimber use only though usually.....won't judge you though
Good luck in your new job!
Nice video, confirming what I see with my Vaillant 7kW ASHP as well. My whole 5 bedroom detached, moderately insulated, large extension, 225m2 house is consistently warm (19-20C ish), no ticking from the radiator piping anymore (indeed) and I saved a lot of money on my monthly energy bill in the process, running at say 130£ per month in Jan (Octopus Agile), my gas boiler was at least 400£ last year in January (EDF variable rate)
Ohh, I have PV and a 20kW battery set up... running at say 20-30kW per day
Nice! I really didn't expect to see any savings - I would just have been happy with it being cost neutral to run and being off gas, so the saving is a bonus
So twice as much as my gas bill for a 3 bed house in Scotland set at 19.5c. boiler flow control set to 47c. My average gas bill including hot water is £75-85 a month. House built in the 50s
That’s impressive, but different houses. All depends on when you’re heating, are you detached, window sizes, etc. so many variables that make it difficult to compare houses like that. By the sounds of it you have an efficient home so when the time comes to replace your boiler a heat pump would work well.
Our gas cost for January is the same as yours (£111) but ours includes heating the whole house and the hot water. Were considering a heat pump so in theory your heat pump figures should also apply to us.
Most likely. I could only make educated guesses at the running costs before installation so I was pretty happy to see my predictions of the running costs for gas vs electric were near the same (excluding using the batteries)
@@SpeakToTheGeekTech Is your £59.86 figure only for the heating or does it include your usual electricity usage for appliances etc? We've got a home battery and Octopus Go plus Solar Panels so should be able to take advantage of those also.
That's just heating/hot water. There's additional cost for the general running of the house and charging the car but I separated out just the heating costs to make it a fair comparison to gas.
I think you need to add extra to your heat pump running costs to account for both installation, and the electric battery. I fee, this is like someone saying they can feed themselves for £30/week by buying £30 of flour, and using other ingredients they just had lying around in the pantry. If you're saving money using a battery, you need to account for that initial outlay within the running costs.
The energy (and cost) savings are all being rolled up into the tracker I have for my battery and solar payback so it’s not being forgotten in my overall budgeting. However here that saving is being highlighted for illustration only - running costs with batteries is lower, although not truly lower until you have paid the costs of your batteries through those lower bills. I won’t ever consider the additional cost of the heat pump over a boiler in those calculations though (although I agree some people can argue I should), mainly because I have almost cost parity between the heat pump and a boiler installation (see my heat pump costs video)
What’s your how water “tank” settings? I noticed you are getting cop of >3 during hot water. Mine is getting about 1 at best. (No booster heater being used) do you use weather dependent?
Yes, weather compensation is on and it's set to heat to 48 degrees (not in powerful mode) every night during my off-peak hours. I get a COP of between 2-3 for hot water realistically. A COP of less than 1 is worse than using a booster heater, which would be 1 so something is definitely not right there!
Thanks for the data and insight. It would be nice to know how many square ft/meters your heated
area is, and also the capacity of the Heat Pump . . . btu/ton.
Hi. This video is part of a series which has covered that information already (Project: Heat Pump
ua-cam.com/play/PLKp2r5So-W3znOaHOMR-63nEvo-ITuFDk.html). But it’s about 110 square metres and a 6kW heat pump.
Just paint that bracket white against the facia and the bit against the brick black or a mid-grey and itll disappear to anyone not looking hard.
Not a bad plan actually. I’ll probably cut it a bit shorter on the drop so prevent it overhanging the door frame too much too.
Would you mind to tell how much of the battery cost you and what size of capacity you have?
Thinking of getting a battery (maybe 8-10 kwh) so I can charge it during midnight with lower rate:)
I’ve had mine a few years and costs are different now so what I paid would be meaningless for your calculations- you are best contacting an installer. I think you are looking at about £5k-£6k roughly for a 10kWh battery though. I have 21.7 kWh across two separate systems which is unusual to do. Check out the other videos on my channel though where I have talked about costs and my setup.
@@SpeakToTheGeekTech 21.7kwh wow!!
Thanks so much :) i will check out the other video from you :)
Thanks for the video, how do you get on with hot water, no one ever seems to mention this?
No issues at all. I have it scheduled to heat for 2 hours off-peak every night, that usually lasts the day but just in case I have it set to re-heat if it drops below 36 degrees so if someone takes an extra long shower it will boost itself back up. Means I don't need two schedules per day, but it will still make sure we have hot water on the occasional days we use more than usual. It stores it at a lower temperature than when we had the boiler so you need to plan for a larger tank. We went from 180 litres to 250 litres and I reckon they are about equivalent in terms of the amount of showering we get out of it due to it needing to mix in less cold water.
@@SpeakToTheGeekTechthanks for your reply, how long do you have to run the heat pump for to get a tank of hot water, how much does this cost on your tariff. Just trying to compare to my solar/battery set up.
A very difficult question to answer because it depends on the starting temperature of the water in the tank and the ambient temperature / time of year. The lower the initial tank temperature and the colder the air outside, the longer it'll take to heat it and the more energy it requires. Right now though I'd say it's using about 1.5-2kWh of energy to heat it on average each night and that takes about an hour. I pay 8.5p/kWh so that's 17p for 2kWh. Very rough figures of course.
How much overall space is needed for the heatpump including the base stand to see if I could fit one thanks?
My base measures 80x147cm but there are ones with a smaller footprint so it’s best to get an installer in to quote and they could recommend one that fits best in the space you have
Thanks for a very informative video.
I have ti say that the background muzac added nothing useful. Why bother?
Specifically for the comments
I'm new to using home assistant having watched your other videos. I have some of those Aqara temp sensors but need to find a suitable extender to get the signal around my house. I was thinking some smart plugs would be good - any suggestions please? Also I am trying to find a suitable dashboard that can track my temps over time so I have a history - is that possible and would you mind letting me know which dashboard element you use for this please? Good to see the low running costs and gives confidence about our own switch to a heat pump. Thank you.
I have a number of Ikea Tradfri zigbee smart plugs because they were cheap and easy to get hold of. They work well as extenders too. However pretty much any mains powered zigbee device should extend your network - I also have a couple of zigbee LED strips which do the job. As for the temperature graph card, the one shown in the video is just the built-in History Graph card, nothing special. I also use tile cards in a grid to display each room, and a quick click on a tile for a room brings up a graph for the last few hours,
I use a new modem connected to my ISP's router - the range is superb and it uses both 2.5Ghz and 5Ghz as well as having tons of additional features that my ISP's modem/router doesn't have.
Another interesting video. The sound from my two air-to-air units is obliterated by background noise when they are cycling on. Even at full tilt on the coldest of days (when nobody is out save me checking), do they make much sound. I do need to take a sound reading from the upstairs window, as mine are mounted at the first-floor level.
They do seem to mount a2a on the wall a lot compared to a2a. I guess the size and weight can vary a lot
Intresting to say the least. Looking through the commments I couldn't find out the size of your batteries as that is so important and if they runs through the Octopus approved battery system? I'd really appreciate it if you let us know. Thanks.
21.7kWh (8.2 + 13.5). I don't know what you mean by an Octopus approved battery system? I've never heard of such a thing.
@@SpeakToTheGeekTech The GivEnergy batteries which are required for the Intelligent Octopus Flex tarrif.
Oh right, yes I do have GivEnergy batteries but I don’t use that tariff personally. Check out Tim & Kat’s Green Walk and Gary Does Solar channels because they are both trying that tariff out over the summer
Don’t know if you had gas completely disconnected/removed? But removing that standing charge would save even more!
We still have a range oven with a gas hob and it would cost a lot of money to replace that. It's in the plan though eventually but we need to save up. Standing charge is about £7/month until that point though.
Crikey thats a big unit, id never fit one of those in my house's outdoor space. Think im going to wait for them to do the 9kw version of their in house heat pump, the form factor of their 6kwh one (taller than it is wide) looks like a much better fit, im hoping their upgraded one is a similar form factor, just taller.
Yeah it’s pretty big and I can completely understand why this solution isn’t suitable for a lot of homes. There are smaller units available and split units can also reduce the size required outdoors but at the expense of additional space required indoors. Air-to-air units can also work out smaller too because of the need for in-room vent units.
@@SpeakToTheGeekTech I dream of air to air but there's no grants even if you have solar cos they don't want to "encourage" more electricity use in summer with people using air con... Which is fine unless someone has solar, in which case it's the dumbest thing I ever heard.
Never mind, one day...
Another great video - thank you! A few questions, if you don't mind - is it possible to get the heat pump to temporarily and automatically pause consumption when other short term high house loads are on? Eg. Oven, dishwasher (during heat cycle), kettle? I'm wondering if it can be made to cooperate with other devices to fly under the 3.6kw limit on my battery inverter and avoid peak grid draw.
Related - what's the peak power the heat pump draws, please? Many thanks Andrew
Not natively. You could of course use a third party solution monitoring your home to do that (such as Home Assistant) if you wished. The Daikin Altherma heat pump has a cloud-based integration for Home Assistant. The peak power I've seen from the heat pump is 3kW but only briefly and in extreme situations (like at the end of the hot water cycle). In 'powerful' mode it can draw 6kW but that's heat pump + hot water cylinder immersion.
I should also add that it's not a good idea for efficiency reasons - if you keep pausing the heat pump then your COP values will drop dramatically and your running costs increase.
…but width for Octopus saving sessions - the only time our heat pump has been off all winter (until outside temperatures went above 13 degrees this week)
Yeah a few people have mentioned to me about dropping the flow temperature instead. I need to look into that and maybe experiment.
I turn my heat pump off for the saving session but otherwise I just leave it on. It's most efficient that way if the house is kept at a constant temperature and the heat pump is only having to replace lost energy
Question while comparing although not much is used, gas boilers use electricity to pump water around the radiator system. Therefore it would be interesting to know how much electricity gas boilers use and added in ti the cost comparison.
I did think about that - the pump for the old system ran at about 30W, so assuming that the remaining components used about 20W that's 50W total. If the heating ran at that for 12 hours per day, that'd be 0.6kWh/day, or 18.6kWh for the whole of January at a cost of about £5.40 peak rate. Not insignificant but as it was only a total guess I decided it would be unfair to include it. It would make my heat pump figure look even better though :)
@SpeakToTheGeekTech Fair enough and good shout about the data accuracy. Although not big additional usage figures in the comparison, it is interesting when you see advertised energy comparisons that the gas/oil heating solution they are being compared to does not seem to include any eletrical usage of the gas/oil boiler etc.
Great vid. Can you tell us how many bedrooms your house has please? I’ve got a 4 bed mid 80’s detached house and my electric bill for Jan was about £250 (including a heat pump + EV on Octopus Cosy)
4 bed detached built in 2001
@@SpeakToTheGeekTech our cop floats around 3-4, so I think we need to work on the insulation in the house. Our loft is well insulated (I enjoyed your vid on this) but the windows and wall cavity insulation needs looking at.
Hi my octopus install is next week what’s the water pressure like from the hot to your shower heads is it ok? I currently have a pump as I have a gravity system so there’s not enough pressure there but I’m told I won’t need that. What is your experience?
The pressure is direct from the mains water regardless of whether it’s hot or cold now, so if your cold water pressure is good right now then that’ll be what your hot is like after the conversion.
@@SpeakToTheGeekTech thanks for that I’m looking forward to getting the new system in ours now is 25 years old so I’m expecting a heck of an upgrade!!! I hope!!
I think the older and more knackered your boiler is, the better the heat pump performs by comparison. I genuinely can’t believe how much more comfortable the house is now.
@@SpeakToTheGeekTech it’s been a great system it’s a glow worm and I’ve serviced it every year so it’s done me proud but it’s getting tired and the radiators are tired too so we’re getting them all upgraded with the install I’m sure you are right I’m anticipating the house to feel all round better 👍 I’m looking forward to Long as they get the hot water on quick happy days!!
What was the peak and average power draw for the pump. Trying to figure out if that can be supplied from batteries as my home is pretty much never drawing power during the peak hours
The most it ever draws is 3kW and that’s only during a hot water cycle. For heating it occasionally gets to 2kW but usually sits between 400W and 1.5kW. My batteries easily cope with the power, just not the total energy on very cold days!
that’s good news, any idea how long it draws 3kw to heat your tank of water ?
It takes about 45-60 minutes to heat the tank but it doesn’t draw 3kW for all of that. It starts off at about 1.2kW and slowly ramps up until it hits 3kW for the final 5 minutes or so.
Thanks for the info, super helpful
you might want to look at the hot water settings. I discovered in the myriad of badly documented settings for my LG heat pump that it was using the immersion heater for a fair bit of the hot water heating which is of course much less efficient than the heat pump.
I've managed to change the curve so it almost exclusively uses the heat pump for hot water.
Mind it can still draw a lot just running the heating on cold days
Is there a reason you can't continue to use your evohome system with the heat pump?
Evohome is essentially an on/off controller which means your heat pump controller will have no idea what the indoor temperature is and whether it should just drop the flow temperature back to the minimum to maintain the home's heat as efficiently as possible. So it would work, but it would cost you more in energy to run. I know you can get an OpenTherm add-on for Evohome which would in theory allow that more efficient functionality, but I don't think that is compatible with heat pumps.
@@SpeakToTheGeekTech Hmm, interesting - thanks. I like the idea of heat pumps, but I don't really want to lose the efficiency of zoned heating (I work from home, and use quite distinctly defined areas of the house at different times of day).
Zoning isn't always as efficient as you think it's going to be and it took a while for me to get my head around this. Unless you have amazing insulation between all rooms, you have in effect one thermal envelope. Heat Geek explains it really well: ua-cam.com/video/zpTVIeUh04E/v-deo.htmlsi=jVnOwmJzv41WVWtF
How are you measuring your consumption? I'm logging mine but the Daikin Data is rubbish. I'm looking at monitoring the input with some CT clamp device but haven't decided what yet. Output, no clue really. The systems that had to be fitted under the old RHI are way too expensive for me.
I'm using a Shelly Pro EM to monitor the power used, and ESPAltherma to monitor everything else. Video coming up on 2nd March on that (or it's available right now for channel members).
@@SpeakToTheGeekTech I'm thinking of something similar. But the pro EM is a bit pricey and ESPAltherma+ HA to use it is looking like a bit of a steep curve. Also I don't want to increase my baseload any more by adding more Watts to run HA on something..
The Pro EM is probably the best value one around and is rated for accuracy. It comes with two CT clamps too. And a Raspberry Pi doesn't add much to your baseload. In my case the Pi actually offsets its own energy usage easily by automating lights and the standby modes on devices.
@@SpeakToTheGeekTechI’ll be interested to watch that one. Our Octopus electrician recommended an Efergy monitor as a simple to diy fit and use monitor as it is a battery powered transponder, so zero wiring. Doesn’t work with home assistant but does give access to the data.
I bought a shelly EM to monitor my heat pump and old FIT solar panels. Cheaper than the pro. Compared to the meters on the heat pump it's about 5-7% mis reading which is accurate enough. Could always adjust the reading in HA with a template sensor if needed
I've still not been able to get through to Octopus heat pump people. Sitting on the phone for 45 minutes during the week. They installed the Daikin heat pump and although it allows wifi on 2.4GHz, it 'blows a gasket' if it detects 5GHz anywhere on planet Earth. So I had to switch off my 5Ghz wifi. Then I tested it and discovered that if I degrade 5GHz encryption to an easily hackable state, it works ......
Why won't Octopus discuss this problem????
Stick a cheap dedicated 2.4GHz access point next to it then, job done for probably under £15
Did you run the heat pump continuously 24\7 please?
Technically yes, but in reality I have different set points for the desired temperature of my home at different times of the day. So for example it's set to keep the house at 20 degrees in the evenings, but at 10pm the set point drops to 17 degrees so the heat pump doesn't actually run after 10pm unless the house starts to drop below 17 over night. So it's never turned off, it's just left on all the time and it understands what temperatures I want and when.
Can we now look at the capital outlay to save £100 per month for 3moths and £75 per month another 3-4 moths, (estimate) saving £600 per year but having spent £10,000 (grant allowed for) upwards (heat pump, builders works, battery system etc) plus the necessary annual maintenance costs to maintain the heat pump and stop it getting noisy, for tech that will require replacement at 10 or 12 years at likely a similar cost. If you put that £10,000 into saving at only 3% that would be £300 per year, 5% would net £500. Compound that over the 10 year life expectancy at 5% is 12,208, over 20 years even factoring in 2 gas boiler replacements it would appear your at leat £18,000 worse off over the 20 year term. In this context I am struggling to call any renewable an investment
Firstly, I don't count the heat pump as an investment that will repay itself financially. It's a heating system, its provided benefit is to keep me warm. My boiler was about to break, therefore this installation was roughly the same cost as replacing that boiler... Secondly the boiler had an annual service and maintenance contract, so doing this for the heat pump too is like-for-like in both effort and cost. Lastly, there's several other videos on my channel covering the costs and payback period for the solar and battery kit, which I do consider an investment because its primary purpose is to save me money long term. By shifting from gas to electrical heating those green-tech components should provide me with even more benefit hence why I get a saving every month on my heating bill. Plus, I have reduced my carbon impact several-fold in the process - I know that financially investing the same money somewhere else could net me a larger return, but it's not all about that.
Another excellent video. I have 9.6kWh of battery and am worried that the heat pump will suck up all that power when at the moment, that will cover the house from 7am to 8pm most days. I realised that if I had cosy, I could charge the battery twice a day (use Agile at the moment). Do you think 9.6 kWh is enough to cover the 7am to 4pm timeframe before the next charge? I would love to see the hour usage of your heat pump on the really cold days.
On the coldest days I was easily chewing through 20+ kWh of energy just from the heat pump alone so no, I don't think 9.6kWh of storage would be enough to get you through. My 21.7kWh isn't enough, but it's also not worth spending the extra money on more batteries in my case just to save a few pounds a year - it doesn't make financial sense. I think in your case you may benefit from an additional battery. You won't cover all of the demand, but you'd cover most of it and making sure that battery is working as hard as it can every day is the key to getting the best pay-back from it. Feel free to browse my emoncms monitoring data for my heat pump here and you can see the correlation between temperature and energy use: unpraying-ape-8145.dataplicity.io/app/view?name=ASHP&readkey=82af8f22985d47049461f3fbbc16632a
@@SpeakToTheGeekTech Thanks for coming back to me. I would be happy to get another battery, but with a 3.6 kWh inverter that extra storage would not charge in the 3 hours. It is funny how one change might lead to other changes to get the most from it. I will certainly take a look at the link. Thanks for sharing. Do you know your base load before and after. I appreciate that you will have spikes now, but I the average would be interesting.
Can you do a video on how you made the site? I assume it is via Home Assistant.
Tricky to figure out the baseload but I work on it being about 500W. Sometimes it was 300W over night, but in the day it was up to 750-800W if the TV was on and the kids home on their computers. The heat pump adds to that of course but if it's ticking over it's adding only about 400W! That link I shared was to the emoncms software from OpenEnergyMonitor running on an old Raspberry Pi 3 in my garage - there is an 'app' you can enable on it called HeatPumpMonitor which publishes all that data you are looking at. There will be an overview video of it in about 2 weeks time, but it's not a tutorial, just a bit of a showcase to demo what is possible.
I just swapped to agile from flux, and seems a no-brainer to keep flux over going to cosy. The rest of the day generally seems less than even the cheap part of the cosy or flux. When I get my heatpump ill probably charge the battery up and use it purely for the 4-7PM slot.
@@Deanus3110 I really like Agile. It could well be worth staying on it
Did you have any trouble with the DNO when adding the heatpump? I've already got an EV charger and battery so wondering if adding a heatpump will be an issue...
Yes, sort of. When Octopus applied to the DNO for permission it was initially denied because my maximum possible load would exceed the 80A fuse I had. They said I'd need to go three-phase which I pushed back on to Octopus as you can imagine. Octopus weren't sure how to handle the situation if I'm honest so in the end I got a three-way email discussion going with them and the representative from the DNO. The issue was the EV charger really being the highest powered device I had, but I pointed out that it monitored the grid and had a limit on it to reduce or stop the output as the grid import neared the limit. I had to provide the DNO with a data sheet of the EV charger to prove that and it was accepted. I thought it was a bit silly though worrying about my small heat pump - if I turned on two regular electric heaters in my home that don't require any approval then all of a sudden I'm drawing way more sustained power than the heat pump can manage!
Ah, that's good to know. I'm pretty sure that my Zappi works that way, and I have a 100A main fuse, so hopefully it will work out.
Had a heat loss survey done yesterday so waiting for a more detailed quote from that and confirmation that a hot water tank will fit in my little utility cupboard. 🤞🏻
Oooh exciting times! And yes, the Zappi does that too (in fact I'm pretty certain it's a legal requirement as part of the smart charger regulations, but I haven't seen that in writing anywhere)
@@SpeakToTheGeekTech good tip - I’ve yet to get an EV charger so good to know as that DNO application will be next up
3.3kW heat loss, so just a little 3.5kW Vaillant Aerotherm Plus needed! Now to get on to Nationwide!
£100 a month saving is pretty good. How much have you spent on the solar, batteries and heat pump and how long do you think it will take to make that back?
There's other videos on my channel which cover that, I am tracking payback on the solar and batteries.
You need to be so careful showing noise levels as shown in your vlog. If you are actually 36dB I would be amazed. The watch can have a huge tolerance on it. Planning authorities will be looking for between 5 & 10dB below the background noise level at the nearest affected neighbour. First sound much but it can make a huge difference if you have to treat the air source heat pump to meet planning requirements.
I think it's fine, it's way below the limit even at that distance, and the nearest neighbour's window is considerably further away. My neighbours have said they can't even hear it from their garden.
How do these sound at midnight when cold in Janaury and February ? I am terrirfied of having 60 new builds all having them next to me, as the houses are being built and will all have them, they are being built very close to me. In my village it is nice and silent at night, but I have a feeling these will ruin that. The government seems to be going backwards on convenience, they are worried about emissions but don't they care about noise especially for people with sensitive hearing. These are running 24/7 yes?
So far it doesn't actually run much over night. It's "on" all the time, but the compressor isn't always running - it kicks in at about 5am until 9am to get the house to 20 degrees, then I set it back to 18 degrees during the day so the compressor turns off unless the house drops below 18. It then fires up again at about 4pm until 10pm to keep the house at 20, at which point the set point is 17 for the night. Unless the house drops below 17 over night then there's no heat pump noise at all - it's not kicked in for heating. I do have a hot water cycle set from 3am-4:30am but I've never heard it from inside the house.
But they do care about noise emissions and are very specific about what is required
Search for 'MICROGENERATION INSTALLATION STANDARD: MCS 020 ' for more detail
Are your batteries lithium and are they inside your house?
Lithium Iron Phosphate (LiFePO4) so a lot more stable than NMC. They are in my garage which is joined to my house, if they'd been NMC lithium cells I'd have put them outside for sure.
@@SpeakToTheGeekTech They still ignite, but at higher temperature. Good luck.
did you get the referral from myself, and where do i look in the app for my share,
have you considered weather compensation.
My council planning have suggested sound proof my heat pump, i told them outright NO as noise would not be an issue, they are a bit of a jobs worth.
and are they really going to refuse a ASHP if i say NO, bearing in mind that the GOV are relaxing heat pump planning.
Do you need planning permission for other reasons? If the sound calculations are within MCS guidelines they are just done within permitted development
@ecoterrorist1402 Are your initials JN? If so, the switch is still pending but I usually get referral credit a week or so after you have made your first payment to Octopus. You would get your share applied to your first bill I think. Not all the referrals reach the payment stage for various unknown reasons and I have no real control over that - I can't chase Octopus about other people's accounts so I just have to wait it out :)
@@Lewis_Standing Front garden so at the moment yes you need planning
yes they are JN@@SpeakToTheGeekTech
4 39 How can you hear an immersion heater ?
I was surprised too when I first started using it! The airing cupboard with the tank in was right next to my bedroom and the immersion would make a noise that sounded like a kettle boiling. I guess it was air bubbles forming around the heating element. Could have been a perfect storm of an old heating element that needed replacing combined with an old copper tank that wasn't very well insulated but it was a bit noisy!
You mentioned you turn down the heat pump at night, because you are using lower water temp. I would suggest to only turn the system down by max 1°C. it's better to lower the flow rate to the bedrooms to compensate for this. this way you're heat pump would run way more efficient.
That would require smart valves on the bedroom radiators which I don't have at the moment, perhaps that's something for the future (hint, hint if any suppliers are reading and want something reviewing!). But yes, I agree that would be a lot more efficient. Tim from Tim and Kat's Green Walk did a video about using off-peak energy to boost your home temperature at night and concluded it could work out cheaper to run that way, but you'd need to make sure the bedrooms don't get too hot when it does that.
@@SpeakToTheGeekTech imo it's better to run everything open, without zoning. You can also do it trail and error so the bedroom stays 17/18°C. A lot like lowering the flow on a floorheating system.
We reduce the flow temperature with an offset from the weather dependant curve overnight, rather than using a set back that would switch the heat pump off
That's not what I mean, I mean you turn down your radiators (flow) and leave the heat pump running. Maybe turn it down with 1° overnight.
I've tried different scenarios but now we turn the master temperature down from 20 degrees to 18 degrees overnight so the heat pump doesn't have as much to do in the morning, but I don't turn it back up until about 10am when the agile rates are cheaper.
In practice other than very cold nights the house retains the heat overnight and the heat pump hardly comes on at night.
I was trying to make a comment about degree days, but it keeps getting removed (not sure why) anyway, you should use degree days to allow you to compare different days.
Not me doing that sir! I shall definitely be looking in to degree days, someone else mentioned that to me yesterday and I hadn't heard of it before. Thanks!
@@SpeakToTheGeekTech I'll see if this works...
If you divide your daily kWh by the daily degree day value for that day it allows you to directly compare different days against each other regardless of the actual usage,
Because your house will generally have a consistent kWh/DD value (however it will vary a bit depending on solar gain and the wind direction on different days, it should however remain at about the same value)
You will need to set a base temperature for the degree days, the main website you can get these from is degreedays (I'm avoiding putting the link in here as I think that's what's got me blocked before)
The reason for the 15.5 degC base, is because above that temperature you will likely not need any heating in your house and any temperature outside below this will require some heating load.
You can play around with the base, but generally 15.5 is going to give you reasonable results.
Hope you do t have any issues because daikin have awfull aftercare and support
I hope so too! When I did my research prior to committing I noticed that pretty much all of the main brands have a selection of good and bad reports of aftercare so I figured they were all the same.
Also you only paid the Electric standing charge and no standing charge for gas, that would have been a saving as well
Sadly not, I still have gas because of my gas hob so I'm still paying the standing charge for that.
@@SpeakToTheGeekTech Oh!
We have just had the warmest winter I can ever remember and you failed to mention cost of fitting heatpump
Comparing the average temperature for this January to last January it was actually a bit colder this year where I am. I've had outdoor temperature monitoring in my home automation system for many years so have quite a bit of historical data on that. I can't speak for the rest of the UK though. And the costs aren't ignored, they're in a different video in this series: ua-cam.com/video/Tc_5SlkNkik/v-deo.html
Down south essex its ten at night and had 17 during the day lucky to get ten during the day in january what part of the country you in
South Wales. We had some warm days, December was the mildest we've had for years, but January this year was definitely averaging colder than January last year for us.
You should also factor the Service Cost of HeatPump...
Yes, there is a service cost for the heat pump. It's about the same as the service cost for a gas boiler and system so that means there's no cost difference which is why it's not included. Both systems should be serviced and maintained.
Also whats the temperature settings are you using on your Heat Pump mine is set to 50 C for both water and heat control which it seems is not ideal
It's on a weather compensation curve so varies between 25 and 50 as it requires. Right this second the flow temperature is 40.5
Trying to get help from Octopus is a no-no. No response to several emails sent over a period of 4 weeks. We have had to change our router but the Octopus-installed Daikin app refuses to re-connect. The manual shows wrong options and the Daikin app refuses to work with the dongle. I waited 45 minutes on the phone for an answer from Octopus but they answered and referred the call onwards but no-one has rung back. So we have no hot water or anything because the app is broken and Octopus can't help. Daikin does not respond to emails either 😞
That's not good. But, have you been to the MMI (the larger black screen they installed) and attempted to reconnect it to your new Wifi? That's where you do it, not in the app. Alternatively if you reconfigure your new Wifi router to use the same name and password as the old one, it'll automatically connect to it like nothing changed. The app is also not your main control interface for the system, it's just a convenient extra option. Your primary configuration method should always be the MMI screen. All of your schedules, enabling hot water, etc, is done through there. Whilst I agree their support could be better in this instance, the fact that your app isn't working because you changed your wifi network is not their fault or responsibility to resolve.
Yes - I know! I've been trying to problem solve but the manual is wrong with a capital W. Its shows totally different options than on the screen.
Odd. The printed manual I was supplied with and the on-line PDF manual are both correct. Are you perhaps in the wrong user mode? On the main display if you select 'User profile' it should prompt you for a PIN. By default they leave it in 'user' mode. There is also an 'Advanced' mode and an 'Installer' mode. I think you can configure Wifi if you are in advanced mode. Installer mode should be for commissioning but if you can't find the wifi option in advanced mode, try installer mode. You should always put it back in user mode after you have finished though or the app will complain!
User Mode PIN: 0 0 0 0
Advanced PIN: 1 2 3 4
Installer PIN: 5 6 7 8
@@SpeakToTheGeekTech I have been setting it to advanced mode every time. Honestly, how often do people need to change their router? Once? It should be routine - not tying me in knots. The infuriating thing is that Daikin refused to discuss any problems and Octopus is dead on the phone. I can't believe that such a simple change should kill the system.
Honestly my routers get upgraded regularly for testing various things. I've used the same network name and password for many years (couple of decades I think now!), just configure the new routers with the old details. It means I don't need to ever go around and reconfigure everything. So much less hassle!
It's bigger than the Death Star
But overall less damaging to planets
@@SpeakToTheGeekTech 👍🤣
If gas were priced fairly and not linked to electricity, I guess you'd be sunk.
Hypothetical. If electricity were priced fairly and not artificially inflated by being linked to gas, it'd be even cheaper to run.
It’s not when it’s heating the house it’s when it freezes up and has to defrost
That does happen sometimes but it’s still not massively noisy. No different to a hot water cycle. Only happens on some cold days when there’s a lot of moisture in the air. When humidity is low even when it’s minus outside I was surprised to see no frost on the heat exchanger.
Daikin is here a very expensive heatpump , rather a rolly royce than any other except austrian lambda which is the worlds best heatpump.
Where abouts in the world are you?
Where is the Plushy Octopus?
You can buy them using Octopoints earned from the Saving Sessions if you wish, check your Octopus account for the store link and details
If your bedrooms are overheating your system is not balanced correctly
It’s balanced consistently across the whole house, I just don’t want the bedrooms at 20 degrees in the middle of the night… but I do want them that warm when I get up. I’m just fussy!
That’s not balanced! As per the radiator schedule octopus gave you the bedrooms will be designed to achieve 18°c
If they are hitting 20°c then octopus didn’t balance your system
You're using it wrong. Leave it on all day, every day and use weather compensation. Set back the temp in the evenings.
I have a weather-dependent curve set up by Octopus, I leave it on and just have two set backs - one in the evening, but a second during the main part of the day when we're either not in or quite active so don't need it any warmer (18 in the daytime seems plenty to me). I thought that was how I was supposed to use it? Open to any information that could make it more efficient though so please do point me in the direction of something I can read to learn more.
@@SpeakToTheGeekTech sorry, I misunderstood what you said in the video. Sounds like you've got it spot on 👍
@@SpeakToTheGeekTech the installer reference guide and the heat geek video on Daikin controller settings would be the best place to start
interesting, the saving and period to recover the installation costs doesnt make it worth while.
It's not supposed to recover its installation costs from running, its purpose is to heat your house not earn you money. Any savings on your bill are an added bonus. I have another video all about the installation costs and how it didn't cost much difference to a boiler installation.
So the batteries and solar system were free???
This video is titled "How much does it cost to run?" not how much did other stuff cost... I've got other videos about the costs of the heat pump and the payback period on the solar and batteries. The savings those produce on my bills go towards the payback costs of the battery and solar components.
Also, any particular reason why you're on intelligent rather than just go? If you've got an EV...
I'm on normal 'Go', not intelligent. I would love to be on intelligent but neither my car nor charger (yet) support it. I'll move as soon as I'm able to though!
@@SpeakToTheGeekTech bloody hell, I'm having a bad one today, I'll blame lack of sleep. Should have been 'not on intelligent' 😅 I'm off for a nap
Haha no worries mate!
DON'T USE BRITISH GAS for a Heat Pump install - they started my mum's simple 3 day install in a tiny bungalow that has UFH - so far it's been over 3 months and still very poor performance, bad efficiency, and bodge, bodge, bodge. Really disappointing and upsetting
That's a real shame. @UpsideDownFork used British Gas for his installation and seems to be pleased with it, but I think they subcontracted out so I guess it might be luck of the draw.
£8 per day when its cold...
Would have cost the same more-or-less the same in gas which was my point...
@@SpeakToTheGeekTech only because you included the cost of running an immersion heater. which nobody does because that is rediculously expensive and most people have gas combi boilers, so dont have a tank.
Except it isn't... the immersion heater is very slightly more efficient and was being used at off-peak energy rates comparable to gas. So for the sake of fairness I said they were cost comparable. In reality I found using the immersion throughout the year slightly cheaper on average due to the gas boiler's inefficiencies especially during the summer. But... for the sake of argument, the cost of running both are assumed to be comparable.
@@SpeakToTheGeekTech thanks for the videos and replies , they are very detailed and helpful
You don’t need to be with Octopus Energy to use them for the heat pump install but you can’t use them at all in Scotland even if you are already a customer. Disappointing
They are slowly expanding their operations across the whole UK. They are only just starting to install in Wales, I was the third here I think. It’s a sensible approach I think because they don’t want to install where they haven’t got local support in place or they can’t offer the service to you that they promise.
Imagine having that ugly noisy thing in your garden 😂 just to save pennies
It’s not to save pennies, it’s to heat my home
@@SpeakToTheGeekTech I have a 4 bed house and my gas bill is £33 to £60 a month. Electric is 4x the price of gas so even with a COP of 4 it’s the same price per kWh. You clearly replaced a gas boiler with that monstrosity and it’s slower to heat your house up on cold days.
Well done you. Yes, it costs the same to run if you don't get clever with your usage. That's pretty much what my video was about so I guess you didn't watch it. The financial savings I make are because of my batteries which can make use of off-peak energy rates. My gas boiler was knackered and needed replacing... again covered by my videos.
Oh, and the speed of heating my home up doesn't appear to have changed... once more covered by my videos, I have a constantly and consistently warm home with running costs on a par to my old boiler which didn't heat all rooms very well.
@@SpeakToTheGeekTech you don’t save any money. You just think you do. If you invested the money you would vastly make more money than buying a home battery or solar. I’ve ran the numbers. It makes no sense. All these green systems are a terrible financial disaster to spend your money on.
dreadful noisy cold pumps, Big and ugly...
But I literally just demonstrated it's not noisy and it works well! Yeah it's large, and the looks are not to everyone's taste I'll concede that much.
I have one and when it gets below 0 degrees it's terrible noisy and it costs a fortune to run
@@gareththomas2214 Sounds like a maintenance issue or not configured properly?