I put mirrored IR panels in my bathrooms, connected to a rocker switch and a timed relay set to 20 minutes. They face the exits to the shower. Hit the rocker before your shower and they are up to speed when you come out. They are tall and vertical and the heat you get on your body as you dry off is really nice. Then you can keep the bathroom room temp lower than would normally comfortable. Plus they work as a mirror which never steams up.
We've got 500W of IR light bulbs in our bathrooms, which here in NZ are very popular, but I don't find them very effective. Fine before I go in the show, but feel no heat from them at all when I get out. This is one of the situations that is giving me second thoughts about IR panels.
I thought that you were supposed to be a Yorkshireman. Real Yorkshiremen don't have heating upstairs, and it's never on in any vacant room. Doors are kept shut when not moving between rooms. Any transgressions are met with "were yer born in a field". A coal fire in the kitchen keeps everyone warm. If you have visitors you take a shovel full of coal from the kitchen into the front room to start the fire going, taking care to put out any embers which might fall onto the front room carpet.
I put heat panels upstairs in our house. First of all in my son's room and we liked them so much we put them in all the bedrooms. First they ran on the small power and were wired in later. It is not expensive because the chasing is minor and you simply mount them on the ceiling doing the wiring from the floor above. My house has solid wall so needs more spent on it to consider a heat pump. Losing radiators gives a bit more flexibility. The heat is radiant and I think it improves my son's eczema. I just need to get solar panels before my price cap finishes. I really like panels, heat pumps should be far cheaper and thanks for stimulating the discussion.
Infrared panels can also get VERY hot, from what I was told. In 2017 I bought a house that was built in 2003 and came with a heat pump and underfloor heating. I LOVE IT! The underfloor heating is very comfortable and makes me (and my cats) feel very good. :) The heat pump is from 2003 and a little loud but if you're buying new models, their fans are so immensely quiet that you hardly ever hear them. Also, make sure that those who install your heat pump explain it well to you. When I bought the house, the seller just told me to not touch anything from the heat pump because it's set up "perfectly". Well -- it wasn't. A year later I had it serviced and the technician explained to me that the water pump (pumping the water into the underfloor pipes) was set up to maximum, and the little dials for the temperature (on the heat pump itself) were also set high. He explained to me how to control the heat production better (set water pump to minimum; reduce the temperature of the produced heat/hot water), and lo and behold, my old heat pump now uses way less electricity than before.
The far IR panels are only warm to touch. I have a bathroom mirror, the rest of the house is to ceilings. The mirror does not get condensation and nor does the bathroom. The IR rays kill any damp and it feels like the subtle warmth of a summer day all round.
IR panels can get hot to the touch, but not excessively so. Also they tend to be installed on ceilings or higher up on a wall than say a wet radiator, so not really a safety issue, eg for young kids etc.
I wonder if you have missed the main benefit of IR panels versus convection heating? As you rightly point out, you would consider using it in your cinema room because you seldom use it, and also mention that you and your wife have different work patterns. With Gas and ASHP you are in fact pushing hot water around the entire house whether the radiators need heat or not to possibly heat the air space which would take quite a time to heat that volume of air, but with IR panels the air space is not heated, so you could only heat the specific rooms you are using at the time of occupation, and as it heats you not the air space the perception of being warm enough happens quicker than having to heat the entire volume of air in that and every room. More and more of us use electric showers on a regular basis, so warming almost 200 litres of water for a bath that might not get used seems a little pointless, so the occasional use of an immersion heater seems to me more logical as you are only heating the water when you need it to be hot. Most of us only use a couple of rooms during any 24-hour period so why heat all of them when they are not being used seems a waste to me. Just my rambling thoughts.
You can just close radiators in the rooms you do not use. Automatic knobs are like 30 quid even now so you don't even have to do it yourself. And if you want to keep your entire space warm all the time pretty much panels just do not make sense, at that point they become just regular electric spaceheaters. In this case the efficienty from a heatpump just can't be beat. Panels make sense in homes that are mostly empty because people are working all day, rooms with big volumes or high ceilings and if you only spend most your time in specific areas of the property. If you spend a few hours watching tv each night, shutting down the heating in the house and just run a panel where you are sitting would make them more efficient in that usecase. They have their usecases but certainly aren't a fix all solution.
As you already said, infrared heaters work with surface to surface radiation, like a being in front of an outdoor fireplace. It gives you instantaneous comfort, but it would take ages to get the air in the house heated, and when you leave the irradiation zone the heat comfort disappears as fast as it comes. BTW, humans normally need cooling like an old ICE engine, that’s why air at body temperature (36°C) doesn’t feel comfortable either, but too much cooling isn’t good either. Keep doing those videos, I think you are good at explaining things for normal people. I would have lost 90% of your audience after 2 minutes 🤣🤪
Excellent presentation and well reasoned. I think the payback argument is valid, but not the most important. We pay money to make out house better. We don’t talk about payback time for painting, decorating fixtures and fittings, we do it because it’s better. Being cheaper to run is part of that, but reducing emissions and being more comfortable is another important part of that. We will replace our oil fired system (no gas in our village) with a heat pump system over the next few years and have come to similar conclusions. We have been working hard to make our house more thermally efficient which has been pretty successful so far. Our solar panels do a great job, we just need a battery, when we can get one, to use that power we generate more efficiently. Better thermal insulation has been our best modification so far, and we can still improve there.
Totally this, folk will renew their kitchen every few years but want 'payback' for solar/heating etc. I do think a full house on IR panels would struggle though, but for spot heating it's fantastic. My partner works from home and has one above the desk, so we are only running a single 800w panel through the day, and only for a few hours. Much better than running the GCH all day.
First I will qualify, I am an amateur though into renewable energy since the 1990s. I wondered if I would have to strongly disagree but no. As you said in the beginning you have to take every case on its own merits. And as you have explained in your position I think you are making the right decision. There I said it! 🤩 However I am considering a different solution, first I don't live in the frozen wastelands of Yorkshire (That should get some response. Hehe, my cousin lives in Ilkley so I know it's beautiful 😁) so zero is a number rarely ever seen here. Second my heating system has probably reached the end of it's life so a complete change is required. Previously I have remodelled an old farmhouse fitting underfloor heating which is excellent until you need to modify or service! And lastly I am probably lucky that I have room to have a large solar panel array. My solution, planned, is insulated solid floors with IR above them. The floors should absorb all the energy that does not land on furniture or people and then release it back over time. The one big issue I am seeing is that a single phase electricity line only allows about 7Kw per hour or 28Kw with a 4 hour tariff. Electric car, electric heating, water et al do I need to have a 3 phase supply, that is expensive 😱😥 One thing that is maybe worth passing to the community is IR is now assessed as 120% efficient because it doesn't suffer the same heat convection losses as an electric bar heater. And heat pumps while they can achieve over 400% if run in their efficient cycle, as I think you will be. However when they have to start from cold, as many people have cyclic lives, it is probably fairer to assume they are in the 350% - 380% efficiency range. Great video by the way. Sorry for the anti Yorkshire sarcasm it is very tongue in cheek, I love the place really just wanted to see how many negative replies come from people who don't read to the end 👌🙏😂
So, when you enter a house with infrared panels - the air is unheated? If this is correct, then unless you're standing or sitting near the panel - you'll be cold! On the other hand the idea of a heating system without the complicated mix of piping etc and the regular servicing necessary for wet central heating - is very appealing!
It will heat the surfaces of whatever it’s hitting inside the house and they will heat up, which in turn will heat up the air. It’s the sun essentially. Doesn’t heat the air, heats anything it shines on.
Some research into heating for electric busses showed people with warm feet were comfortable at about 15 degrees C. People with cold feet were uncomfortable at an air temp of 24 degrees C. So rather than installing underfloor heating, buy the family some really warm slippers and knock the air temp back a degree or so.
We moved into a detached 1970's 3 bed house in December and replaced 9.3Kw of storage heaters with 2.6 Kw of infrared panels. No messy work installing radiators or piping, no expensive boiler/pump, all rooms have separate controls for timing/temperature etc To be honest we find it great and it halved our heating bills overnight. Rooms are now a steady temperature all the time and it's a pleasant heat. Your point on water heating is correct that's next on the agenda I guess. But to be honest our showers are all electric, dishwasher and washing machine etc. It's only for hand washing or baths we use the hot water so immersion heating is probably quite a waste. Your installation costs are way off though or depends on how you place your panels we certainly didn't need any plasterers and could do it all one room at a time if we wanted. We placed the panels where the old storage heaters had been so cabling was already in place. If we'd have gone for a wet system it would have cost thousands and thousands more. Feel as with any system getting your insulation sorted first is key. The saving most people don't take into account is the thermostatic control and timers per room. Only heat what you need to and when you need it. Once the room is up to temperature it stays that way. Storage heaters drive me crazy with constant adjustments required etc.
Interesting. We moved in to our c. 1970 house a year ago. We think the previous owner took out a gas CH system before installing oil based radiators and some wall mounted convectors but overall insufficient horsepower to make the house consistently comfortable. I knowingly bought it as a blank canvas and was heading for a heat pump solution but the costs were not good value for money so have started down the IR route. Your total kW is lower than I was expecting given 3 bedrooms. My bathroom one is 700W on its own. How many panels have you fitted? I’ll being doing the calculations shortly but interested in experience of others.
@@paulwilletts5268 We only have it downstairs currently we have 700W ones in the lounge, dining room and kitchen and 500W in the hallway so apologies 2.6Kw (not 2.1Kw as per above) these replaced 9.3Kw of storage heaters in the same 4 locations. Upstairs we have 3 old convector heaters which are currently switched off one in each of the bedrooms. Eventually we'll replace these as well but since about March they've been turned off anyway. During the day we have the temperature set to 20 degrees C and at night we put it down to 13 degrees but all controlled through smart life app on phone and each heater is configurable separately. During winter it does take a while to get up to temperature so we put them on an hour before we get up but during the day nice and steady heat, not the too hot or cold you had with storage. Must say though we did get underfloor insulation done with rockwool between the joists in the basement and some interior insulation 4-6cm of foam boards on the exterior facing walls of two of the bedrooms upstairs. All done FOC from a grant from energy savings trust as we had all electric heating. We also had the entire house re-rendered with a cork based render which helps with the insulation and seals any cracks or gaps not meant to be there. Any form of electric heating hates draughts. We do live in Aberdeenshire in Scotland though so very happy with the result. Yet to decide what we will do for hot water long term have 2Kw immersion system with a big lagged tank on economy 7 currently but it produces more hot water than we'd ever use to be honest. Both showers are electric as are washing machines and dish washers. Eventually will get solar and PV battery as well but only having moved in six months ago the budget has been busted so it's on the wish list.
@@eldridgep2 that makes more sense now. I did the calculation for the master bedroom and it suggests 1.2kW as it’s nearly 4m x 5m x 2.4 m high. My thoughts are for 2 panels to get a more even room coverage given the largish floor area, did you have to make any considerations like this? Two panels is more expensive than a single one of course.
@@paulwilletts5268 I don't have any rooms with dual panels no. My largest room is probably a bit smaller than that my lounge and dining rooms are joined by glass panelled double doors and combined they would be larger than that as they run the full length of the house each room has a single 700w panel. I guess if money is available then splitting the 1.2Kw demand between two 700W heaters would make sense. The only real difference would be the room would heat up quicker and then shut off due to thermostatic controls when up to temperature. Just make sure you run them off a single thermostat where the room is most in use? I can run multiple panels off of a single controller if I need to, I don't but in your case would make more sense. Are you ceiling mounting or wall mounting? Bear in mind you can't make them face windows/glass doors etc as they will be much less effective.
@@eldridgep2 I will be ceiling mounted for all my panels I expect, upstairs and downstairs excepting the bathroom towel rail version of course. I don’t think I need the mirror or image wall panel options. What I couldn’t get from Herschel tech support was a clear idea of the radiation arc from each panel hence my question. With a single panel it might be that certain parts of the room/floor don’t warm up as much. I will probably share my floor plans with Herschel and se what they think in terms of panel distribution.
Bought a wall infra red wall panel heater complete waste of money i listened to all the Hype and bought one worst investment i ever made it also cost a fortune in leccky bills
The radiators in my house are in inconvenient places so actually getting all those removed would be quite a good idea. My hot water is heated by my solar most of the year. I haven't decided on my future heating yet and your journey is interesting, will be interesting to see how you do once installed. Thanks for sharing
I've recently fitted a couple of IR panels in our 1950's house and they're as simple to fit as a light fitting. Four holes in the ceiling (four for the fixings and one for the power) and lift the floorboards above to connect the power. Our circumstances are different in that our house has never had central heating so air source heat pumps would involve starting from scratch. I am considering a mini-split system as this could heat the air from the same locations as the existing inefficient gas heaters and give us the COP efficiency gains of a heat pump without the disruption of radiators.
@@TheBushUpperCwmbran In modern kits, gas already included in the line, so you don't need to gas it yourself. You still need compressor and understanding of what you're doing, but if you're technically minded, everything is explained in the manual.
From some other point of view: Why I DID install the IR heating... Thinking about the future... gas & electric cost is going up and it will do so. 13MW/year solar panel installation + underfloor IR heating (not the bullshit IR panels on walls / ceilings, that is an old technology in 2022 ). Result: no more energy bills. Thank you ;)
As others have mentioned, a well insulated house is key to any low energy system working. I've being looking at Mitsubishi and Daikin mini split systems,.Unless I've misunderstood things with these there would be no need for a heat recovery system as they are continually exchanging the air in each area. Installation cost are still considerable but much cheaper and less invasive than a full air source heat pump system. The only problem with this is how best to heat your domestic hot water.
I was thinking of putting an IR panel above my woodworking bench - at the moment it goes unused all winter. I also suggested that the Village Hall, which is a large draughty space, swap from oil to IR heaters.
With the war in Ukraine, electrification in general, heat pumps and solar panels on as many buildings as possible in particular, just went from something that you do the math on vs. gas and other options, to something that is important for as many people in Europe and the UK to do as possible to fight back against Russian aggression.
It’s nothing to do with Russia it’s the uk and other European governments ludicrous pursuit of net zero. Wake up, Ukraine is one of the most corrupt countries in the world
@@WSMITHify Nothing you've said here in any way refutes my point that individuals should be taking control of their energy future by electrifying, going solar, etc. The political right seems to want everyone to take personal responsibility, EXCEPT when it comes to energy independence. Bizarre.
True but the UK doesn't have enough renewable capacity to start heating everyones homes with electric. If everyone made that switch the electric powering your green home would not come from renewables. Electric generation still uses fossil fuels to a large extent (burning gas in power stations). Sorry to burst your bubble but the limiting factor is the maximum renewable energy capacity of the whole country. Unless you get your own solar panels, this equation isn't changing
@@AndyLowe-net Creating electricity in a grid-scale natural gas power station is more efficient than producing heat in a consumer-grade natural gas boiler, though. Every study that I've read suggests electrification is a net efficiency gain. So no worries, my bubble is not yet burst. And yes, anyone who lives in a country with high electricity prices should run (not walk) to get solar put on every roof that they can, if you ask me. Especially factories that largely operate while the sun in shining, and usually have large unobstructed roofs!
Depending on the total heat needs of a proeprty, it might make sense to use simple electric heaters Heating isn't just the fuel cost it's also the capital cost and maintenance costs. The capital and maintenance cost for resistive heaters is close to zero Considering a heat pump costs £10,000+ and lasts about 15 years you are looking at a capital and interst cost of £1,200 a year If your property uses 12,000 units of heat per year That means the cost.pf the system is 10p a unit on top of the fuel cost. If your proeprty uses 3,000 units a year that means the cost of the system is 40p a unit pm top of the fuel cost If we assume future electricity bills are 25p a unit and a COP of 3.5x then the break even point is 6,720 KWh. If your home uses less than 6,720 KWh per year for hearing you are better off just buying resistance heaters Lots of modern builds will use less than 6,700 units so no need for a heat pump just use eletricity directly (it might still be worthwhile to have a cheap air to air unit to provide some baseload heating needs as they cost closer to £2000)
No mention of long term running costs, pretty sure ASHP will need some sort of maintenance to keep them quiet. IR have no moving parts and some manufacturers give 20 years warranties on them. How long is an ASHP expected to last?
I purchased an infrared panel it made zero different to the room you only felt the head when standing directly Infront but nothing else & did not heat the sofa or walls, so not like the sun. Unless more expensive ones do actually work? They look like a perfect idea but not from my experience.
My experience of actually being involved in the installation of an air source heat pump system confirms your view that installation costs and upgrading the building are VERY significant. The system works best when the house is entirely insulated from the outside. This then means you need an air recirculation system to draw fresh air in, through a heat exchanger, to every room. Also, be aware that heating systems and hot water cylinders depend on a buffer tank, with a 3kw immersion in it and a cylinder with one or two 3kw immersions. These are computer controlled and, certainly on the system I was involved in, you cannot tell when they are in use (for warming the underfloor heating systems and the hot water cylinder)......so, your heating and hot water will be reassuringly effective, but, at least in this particular system, you will not know when and for how long the immersion heaters are turned on. This would be something to ask your supplier, because monitoring very precisely how much the heat pump and how much the electric immersions are providing your heat is very important, I would think. In a worst case scenario, the heat pump may not work at all and your electricity bill will go through the roof.
I'm still on the fence between heat pumps and IR. EVM did not mention the servicing costs of heat pumps or their longevity but at a recent trade show I was talking to a supplier of IR panels and they claimed their product life would be significantly longer than any heat pump (but they would say that) and that heat pumps need servicing. My experience of airco is limited to my cars but both of my cars with airco have had to have expensive fixes to the airco as they aged, this suggests that indeed a system with moving parts and fluids is less reliable than something with no moving parts. I have yet to have trouble with a fridge and that is essentially the same technology so I am not sure how much I should worry.
I'm building a storage tank in my basement and running dump loads from my PV excess into it. This way I keep all my produced energy in my environment and not sent to the grid. I'm shutting off all my interties as my energy provider is only paying me wholesale rates for what I produce once a year with no interest. I don't know yet if it will be effective enough to tie into my radiant floors yet.
Just to correct one thing, depending on the geometry of your home, yes you need a buffer tank between the ASHP and your radiators, its basically a water storage volume that is used to feed the heat pump with water that is then circulated round the hot water tank and radiators. The correction point is that the buffer tank doesn’t have an immersion heater in it, only the hot water tank has. That immersion heater in the hot water tank is used to heat the hot water tank up every week to above 80 degrees to ensure that there’s no risk of legionnaires disease etc from the hot water (as the ASHP normally only heats the hot water to 55 degrees)
@@NickAskew Now you mention it ... we have about 20 - 30 far infra red panels at work (in place of tiles in suspended ceiling), they've been there for 10 years ... I can't remember us having had a single maintenance issue.
I recently converted a garage into a small apartment and installed infra red underfloor heating. It provides a lovely even heat throughout. It's 80 watts per SQ m and it won't break the bank.
I understand far infrared works most efficiently by converting to low infrared when hitting an object. So unfortunately, underfloor infrared hits carpet, or floor boards, then converts, so in theory anyway little or no far infrared hits body. The under carpet/under floor far infrared is heating the whole room, negating the savings and principle of far infrared heating, Unless far infrared waves can be measured sneaking past the floor boards or the carpet threads. But people love their underfloor infrared, it would be nice to apply some sensible research to the easy claims. As usual, the easy things are easy, and the harder things are hard. The sellers dont offer a cost comparison, they only want to make a profit.
One thing to consider is if you do work out that infrared panel installation is much cheaper than heat pump, you can use the left over budget for solar panels, which quite dramatically alters the long term costs equation.
Not really you can't use PV to run the panels at night when you need the heat the most and IR takes A LOT of energy because of its low efficiency, which takes it away from other house needs and battery charging.
@@chrischild3667 Low efficiency RELATIVE to heat pumps which have a COP of two to three times IR. So if, for example, you ran radiant floor off a heat pump water heater, you would have much greater efficiency. Overall you might even save cost over a HP's initial cost and maintenance but you would use more energy and create more pollution.
Good choice after buying a couple and installing them on the roof of a garage and garden Room I would they heat the user but do nothing to warm the room up and it used a lot of electric
I would be interested to learn what your expected energy use is for heating in the cold months. Have you factored in the additional batteries required to avoid paying for peak rate electricity?
Is it possible to use an air source heat pump to run a warm air heating system? I'd rather have a few small air vents and ducting under the floorboards than install massive radiators or underfloor heating through the house which they say is optimal for heat pumps.
You can get air to air heat pumps. A friend of ours had a gas to air system in the 1970s with vents in the floor but didn't really like it. Found too much convection air flow and noise. I would also caution against obscure makes or technologies due to lack of local service snd repair. That will change with time though.
If you already have solar panels, why aren't they also being used to heat the hot water in a cylinder tank. This is a no brainer that rarely gets mentioned. I'd also prefer to only heat the room to 18°C than heat it to 20 and have to open a window
Thanks for the video. I install IR panels and also have some in my own home. I think you were maybe over-egging the installation costs and inconvenience a bit to be honest. Compared with installing a new central heating system the disruption would be fairly minimal. There havent yet been enough studies to show relative efficiency but here are some things that are worth considering: - we need to break free from this cultural acceptance that we have to have one solution that provides both heating and hot water. We are conditioned to accept this due to our long standing love affair with gas boilers. I truly believe this is one of the reasons why ASHPs get so much publicity - it's easy for people to understand as it provides heating and hot water, same as the boiler under the stairs. The moment we break free of that conditioning then we can see that there is no reason why we can;t have a separate solution for our heating (eg. IR panels) and our hot water (eg. Sunamp heat battery). - ASHP's are efficient, that is true. However, as with all forms of water based heating they require a long run up to get the space warm. This encourages you to have the heating on/ASHP running even when the space is not occupied. This doesn't FEEL like an efficiency. This feels wasteful. IR panels on the other hand actively encourage you to be more conscious of your energy usage. Why heat a space that isnt being occupied for large portions of the day when teh space can heat up within 15 minutes using an IR panel. Look at how you use the rooms in your house: Bedrooms at night (where a lower maintained temperature is acceptable - say 16 degrees), bathroom for an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening, lounge for a few hours in the evening. Working from home? Just heat the space you need to occupy. Have a small panel overhead in your designated working from home space - hell, even put it on for a bit in spring and autumn if we get a cold snap.
That's really helpful Chris. I have a 150+ year old two-up two-down terraced cottage, with low ceilings. It's never had gas and existing heating is old Economy 7 storage. I'm planning to renovate and to block up the small fire place, and it seems that IR panels for heating might be ideal.
@@sologog8129 That's exactly were deep IR panels are better than any central heating. Convection rada heat the air, when hot moist air meets the cold wall you get condensation/ mold. With IR the surface of the wall heats up first, so it's actually recommended for houses with damp issues.
For me if I was getting infrared panels installed I think I would get the CH system drained down and leave the radiators installed in case I decided to get an ASHP later. If you install the infrared panels on the ceiling then cant you put the cable through a hole in the ceiling behind the panel? Then you wouldn't see it.
I have 500w oil heaters 'hidden' in main rooms. During the day when there is plenty Solar, these are switched on to overheat the room to around 26 degrees. Once they are switched off, room easily maintains temp of around 20 to 22 degrees until early hours of the morning. The furnishings and walls are storing heat from earlier. Without and using CH as normal, chairs are around 13 degrees and room quickly cools when boiler off. Using furnishings to store heat, chairs are around 19 and if boiler needed, a 40 minute run is enough.
@@leet3707 I do the same with my IR panels. If the sun is out, I switch my panels on remotely to heat the fabric of the house. I don't like exporting electricity if I can help it.
With an existing wet heating system in a well insulated home an air to water heat pump makes good sense for all the reasons you say in this video. However, there might be more to infrared panel efficiency and all is not as it seems. My home is a 1st floor flat in an old house dating from around 1910. All my walls are external except for 3 metres that border the communal hall. Walls face all aspects, north, south, east and west. The west facing wall gets no sun in winter months. No insulation, lots of large windows and 2.6 metre ceilings. There's no gas into the building, although there are still remnants of the pipes from the original gas lights in the walls. Consequently heating has been electric panel heaters on the walls. It's difficult and expensive to heat. I've replaced the panel heaters with infrared panels. 6.5kW of panel heaters have been replaced with 2.8kW of IR panels. Bathroom and bedroom location of the panels was easy. Directly replacing the existing heaters worked which made wiring to the existing heater power outlets easy. Their locations on the wall covered the whole rooms without causing heat shadows. The large open plan living area was more difficult and panels were mounted on the ceiling. Heating bills are lower and the flat is easier to heat. So despite both filament panel heaters and infrared panels being nearly 100% efficient the lower power IR panels work better. the rooms feel cosier. My unscientific explanation is that the IR panels cut out the middleman, the air. The heat goes directly to the things and people in the room cutting out the middleman. There must be losses in the transfer of heat from a panel heater to the air then people and things. In an older building that air has lots of ways to try and escape as well. Also, cold walls, especially the bathroom used to suffer light mould growth in the winter and that's gone. The only thing that seems to be a bit difficult is controlling them. Thermostat control is monitoring the air which is the last thing to warm up so I find myself setting it high initially then, after a bit of time feeling too hot and turning it down. They need a better control system but I'm not sure what. It's difficult to compare infrared to heating systems we know and for that reason they will struggle to sell themselves. It's a bit like comparing a muscle car to a lotus. They both get to 60MPH quickly but have very different ways of doing it.
Goodness me...installation of infra red does not cost thousands of pounds. Installation of cables into ceiling voids and then wiring them up is commonplace and normal for electricians. The thing you're missing totally is that when you take those radiators out, you suddenly get all that wall space to put furniture against. No more avoiding radiators or pipes. Your comments about holes in the floor are just daft. Once the pipes are cut off leave them where they are and plug the holes. Try shutting a few doors and you'd be amazed how much heat and therefore cold air doesn't mix.
aren’t there a couple of fundamentals? one that IR is direct heating so will only ever be 100% efficient not >100% which an ASHP should be. Also doesn’t cover your HW needs so will anyway be additional costs for that (where an ASHP may be also able to ‘charge’ your HW cylinder overnight on off peak)
We have far-infrared panels at work. Suspended ceilings, the panels are just "ceiling tiles", very convenient to alter when we move a partition wall etc. (a wet systems would be a nightmare to change). We found that people's legs / feet were cold, under their desks and out of direct line from panels ... solved that with an additional small panel under the desk. Works well for us in that situation
I fitted two panels into my house last august and did not use gas for heating during the winter. I live in a modern small 2 bed mid-terrace house which is very well insulated. The panel in the living room did most of the heating for the house and I kept track of its energy use via a smart plug. The panels heated the rooms and kept the room very near the set temperature. They turn on for short periods via a thermostat and the objects in the room retain the heat for a long time. With radiators, I found the temperature dropped very quickly once the heating turned off and this is one of the biggest advantages I've found with infrared. The heat does indeed stay within the room for the most part as it's the objects in the room which are heated and not the air directly. The heat for me is far more natural and pleasant. Maybe try one before deciding to spend money for the whole house. You are thinking of one already in the Cinema room so it would not be wasted. The only downside has you pointed out is the hot water but there are options for that too. I’ve got a small 1.5kW water heater in the bathroom with a 5L tank for example. I’m thinking of getting air conditioning which can provide both cooling and heating has I find my house is hard to cool in summer but easy to heat in winter. Air conditioning is an air-to-air heat pump which seems better to me that air-to-water which then goes back to air via radiators.
I was trying to ask a sales person about IR panels and thermostats. I don't understand how that works. I mean with radiators the air in the room is warmed up and when that reaches the set temperature then the radiators are turned off. But with IR it is the objects in front of the panel that are heated so how does the thermostat know when to turn off? If it waits for the air to be warm then that means the objects are now dissipating the heat into the room (as they will) and they have essentially taken the roll of the radiators.
@@NickAskew The air does indeed warm from the objects in the room and the thermostat works from the air temperature. You need the air to warm but as the many objects in the room give off the heat slowly compared to the one radiator giving out lots of heat quickly. I've found the thermostat needs setting lower and I've used less kWh in total.
Following up on the thermostat question, I had a similar thought myself and I think the Herschel or Jigsaw interviews on FullyCharged discussed this. It seems most people find a setting 1-2 degrees lower provides the same comfort level. Also, they have an efficiency of about 130% (from memory) when measured as a whole house system because of things like the retained heat dissipation when they’re turned off. The bathroom is done now with a Herschel wall towel panel and I’ll be doing the rest of the upstairs before this winter. My only real concern today is whether the hallway radiator will try and work harder because of the lower air temperature on the landing. Thought?
@@paulwilletts5268 The objects within a room receive of the heat and slowly transfer it to the air in the room. I have a cat and never close the living room door so she can move around freely. I’ve found the heat does stay mostly within the living room. Sorry to get all techie but here’s a little basic physics. Energy is not lost or created, it just moves from one object to another until all objects are equal in temperature. Therefore if you have something cold in a room, the whole room gets colder and the one object gets warmer. So keeping the heat within a room is the best practice for heating and you should always look at insulation and draft proofing first. Now if you heat the objects in a room via IR panels, they will transfer some of that heat to the air in the room. Conversely, if you heat the air in a room some of that heat transfers into the objects in the room. Both methods heat the room and both method are most effective when you can maintain the heat instead of allowing the room to cool when not in use and then putting lots of energy into heating it again to being it up to temperature. If a room is not use often, like Andy’s Cinema room, then IR would heat the people directly but the room may not feel comfortable for some time. The panel in my living room during winter came on maybe less than 10% of the time (many days much less) and kept thing nice. For me, a few hundred pounds on a panel to try was better than a few thousand on heat pump that may not work well due to needing to upgrade radiators etc. I would say, try an IR panel before dismissing them outright.
We live in a village with no gas supply so our heating was provided by an oil tank & oil boiler. When the oil tank died I installed an ASHP system as (a) £10k grant was available, (b) long term want to move to electric heating and away from fossil, (c) oil tank regulations meant that I’d have to put the new oil tank in the front garden to be sufficiently away from buildings, boundaries, sheds, etc. A few points to follow up on: at least with my (LG) system I don’t have the option to control when the hot water is heated by the ASHP. If the tank temperature drops below a certain level the ASHP will fire up and heat up the hot water automatically so we always have a full tank of hot water. There’s no option to heat the water with cheap overnight electricity. Also do consider that the ASHP is less efficient if it has a big temperature gradient to heat over, i.e. during the day outside air temp is warmer, there is therefore less energy required to heat the water to 55 degrees. Overnight when its cold outside there will be a bigger temperature differential to overcome and the ASHP will run for longer and cost more to heat the same water up. Our heat pump installer recommends that you keep the heat pump on all the time as the house is then kept an even efficient temperature, very much matching the “always keep the house warm” model that EVM is looking for. Be aware though of the running costs of doing this. Yes the house is then always at a constant temperature and the ASHP isn’t having to warm the water up from cold to 55 degrees, BUT energy is always leaking out of the house and the heat pump is running for longer to replace that energy and so its a balance of what is more efficient. In February to run the ASHP 24 hours a day the ASHP was using 60-80kW of energy a day. Plus we didn’t like the house being so warm overnight, couldn’t sleep ! We quickly changed to running the ASHP only in the evenings and the electricity usage dropped dramatically. In February, running the ASHP from 4-11pm used about 30kW a day, in March it was 25kW, and April (only 7:30-11:30) it was 18kW a day. So basically I found it much more efficient to only run the ASHP when we needed it in the evenings to warm the house up, and rely on the retained heat in the house for the rest of the day. In summer we are down to about 2kW a day for just hot water. We have a large house, energy rating C, but required a 18kW (2x 9kW) ASHP system to meet the energy demand. Overall I estimate we will use about 5,000kW a year for the ASHP, costing about £1,300 which compares favourably with £1,600 for running the oil boiler. When we get a storage battery this will reduce the running costs further as we shift to being able to use stored solar and overnight electricity
I have a LG Therma V 7kw air to water heat pump and there is no problem to setting the timer to heat the hot water during the cheap rate. I stop the heat pump being able to heat the water at 16.00hrs and set the timer to come on at 03.00. By this time the water is below the cut in temp and the heat pump heats up to set point. After that the heat pump can come on at any time during the day as required. Hopefully the sun is shining and it then uses the panels and the batteries. With our usage the water heats again just after lunch so twice a day in total. I hope this helps.
@@savute Thank you, I stand corrected. On my LG Therma V 9kW system, I’d been round the menu’s but the Timer menu says “locked” so I didn’t think I was able to set times for the hot water. More fiddling using your input I found the Schedule option allowed me to set a schedule to turn hot water on at 3am and turn it off at 6pm (in summer) and 4pm (in winter). I didn’t know I could do this ! My comments about the ASHP being less efficient overnight when the outside air is cooler I think still apply, but I have set this up and will see how much electricity it uses over the next couple of weeks to see if it’s materially different. It will behave more like a conventional boiler system with the hot water being allowed to cool down more as its used in the evening and then only boosted late at night. During the day if we use a lot of hot water and the temperature falls in the tank it will still be reheated (unless its after 4pm/6pm). I don’t believe it’s possible to change the time that the weekly sterilisation heating is performed though?
Hi Geoffrey, I am glad i have been able to help you. The LG controller menu is a nightmare and it has taken me a long time to more or less understand it. You can set the sterilization cycle for any time you want, i have mine in the cheap rate immediately after the hot water heating time. Just experiment with the times to make sure you do not encroach on the expensive electricity. I assume you know how to get into the main menu with all of the setting parameters, if not scroll to menu and press OK you will see in the bottom right a small series of numbers (mine is 3.05.6a) this is my password 3056. yours may be slightly different. Now keep pressing the up arrow until you see the screen to enter your password. once you have done this you have all the technical settings. Everything in here takes a bit of time to digest. The sanitary setting you need to scroll down quite a bit. Until you are familiar with anything, take a note of the setting before you change anything, then you can reset to this if what you do does not work. I am all electric and my elect bill for 12 months was £1056.05. To give you some idea of hot water cost, i timed my heat pump the other day, as i was standing beside it when it started to heat the water. It took exactly 17 minutes. With a bit of sun my solar panels and batteries will carry this without using any grid power. The £1056.05 was before the panels and batteries were fitted. Last month was the first bill after fitting the panels and batteries, and the bill was £14, the credit for power fed into the grid was £18. There are many ways to save money, the only problem many of them require you to spend money. If you need anything i will help if i can.
Ah, me again 🙂. At about 11:00 minutes you talk about on and off peak. It's one of my real frustrations, here in the Netherlands they are starting to say that we should no longer be getting paid as much for the electricity our panels generate. Some say this is fine and others (like me) find it is just dissuading people from investing in solar. However the latest thing is that the grid provider is now complaining that we are generating too much electricity from the panels. This is obviously during the day, so my suggestion to them is that if supply outstrips demand then perhaps they should have a lower tariff during the day and a higher one at night.
I am expecting that we will get time-of-use tariffs ... in Summer when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing then the cheapest rate will be "mid day", rather than over night - when we get benefit from North Sea wind electricity and usage is low. Might also be that we will be incentivised to discharge EV batteries (V2G) at times of peak requirement ... and fill them back up when electricity supply is over produced.
I'm hoping my gas boiler lasts a few more years to give me the time to make the decision. ASHPs are extremely expensive, and with more and more people fitting them, I'm concerned that the installers won't have as much time to make the required calculations for a good installation and will instead rely on rules of thumb which will leave houses either not sufficiently heated or paying way more than necessary on heating bills. IR panels look interesting to me so I'm going to give one a trial run this winter. My bedroom is always pretty cold, so I bought one (of the correct output for the size of the room) for about £200 and have it set up and ready to go. This winter I'm going to give it a thorough test to see how well it performs and how much energy it uses. I gave it a quick test on the day it arrived and the initial signs weren't great - the room barely got any warmer after an hour's use and, as expected, it used about 600W of electricity. At that rate, it would end up being phenomenally expensive to run the panels as the primary source of heating for the house - around 40p per hour just to heat my living room. But that wasn't the best test as it was on a day that heating wasn't required, so I'll wait and see how it performs in the cold weather at the end of the year before making any real judgements. As much as I like the idea of ditching gas and going fully electric, with the addition of solar panels and batteries further down the road, I'm only going to do it if it is financially viable. Otherwise, sorry to all those fossil fuel haters out there (me included!), but I'll be sticking with burning dinousaurs.
>> the room barely got any warmer after an hour's use and, as expected, it used about 600W of electricity You should feel warm in the room (e.g. if sitting in there), but far infra red panels won't heat the air in the room much. Legs under a desk is a problem as they will not be in line from the panel (a second small panel under the desk would solve that - e.g. if bedroom is used as home-office).
@@ecok I was under the impression that the IR panels heat up the surfaces and then the surfaces radiate the temperature back into the room to heat up the air. That didn't happen within an hour's test, which means they'd have to be run for a lot longer for that effect to work, so would cost a fortune. I'm still going to give it a proper test in the winter, but I'm a lot more sceptical about them now.
@@bujin1977 Yes, that's quite right. The air won't warm up much / slowly, but you will feel warm from IR heat, so I think the test you need is whether you feel warm rather than whether the air is warm. If the air temperature is a few degrees colder than normal you should feel comfortable ... but if the air is much colder than that you won't ... and if you need the air to heat up, in order to be comfortable, then I doubt this is any different to a fan heater (in terms of energy). IR will heat the surfaces, they will heat the air, and eventually the air will be warm - so IR is basically only any good if you can drop the air temperature a few degrees and just make the people in the room feel comfortable.
Did you consider maintenance costs, renewals, servicing etc in your comparison? Presumably you have a safe, accessible space outside where the heat pump can be placed and not cause any nuisance to anyone? In terms of faff of installation there will be wiring and plumbing work associated with a heat pump, I can’t remember the size of the circuit required but not insignificant if my memory isn’t playing tricks. You didn’t say where your consumer unit was, presumably close to the proposed site of the heat pump? I think you nicely captured the main benefit of a heat pump in that you can trickle heat in continuously at relatively low temperatures and hold a comfortable air temperature and heat hot water efficiently. In the spring, when the weather is variable and you get cool days but free infrared energy sporadically coming in through the windows, you’d probably end up opening some windows to dump some of the warmed air? Or worse, reverse the heat pump to cool it down? That wouldn’t look so good on an efficiency calc but I guess you rationalise it based on that only being for a few months of the year? Just a few thoughts…
We’re seriously considering IR as right now we have no CH or associated plumbing at all. I’ve looked into A2A but fear they are very expensive an option (£20K is our very rough estimate we were given recently). IR is cheap and we have solar coming. If only I could find decent priced IR with app control..
You need to be looking at the long term COP of heat pumps. True COP is closer to 2. And heat pumps run at a lot lower temperatures so you better buy a coat. I use 2x 1.7kw panels to heat 65m2.
Don't do it!! It's costs so much more then a gas boiler, in our old house I payed £65 a month £45 electric & £20 gas, our new house has a Samsung air source heat pump, we're on a cheaper tariff here aswell our bill is £150 a month in the winter, now its about £110 summer, not looking forward when our cheap tariff ends in October 🤦 miss really hot radiators to, they say leaving running all the time, no we saved £2 a day by cutting the power to the system at night, plus we don't trust it, it set on fire one night outside my little ones room, We're getting a log burner soon to save money for the winter
Have you considered keeping the ch system & gradually adding Far IR panels to eg bathroom & lounge only, with PIR detectors to only come on if people are in the room, whilst turning the rads in those rooms down very low. Far IR would work well with your battery backed solar panels as they are fairly low drain kW.
I have taken the plunge and Octopus Energy installed my Daikin Heat Pump about three weeks ago. This was a replacement for an 18kW gas boiler. The heat calculations showed we needed 6.6kW and therefore have 7kW installed. The calculated kWh ) annum were almost spot in to our actual usage. We had already installed solar and an Eddi so didn't necessarily need hw from heat pump. We hadn't used gas in last twelve months. Going forward will use solar during day and schedule heat pump on octopus go in winter. I did look at infrared and trialled 500w portable . We found the panel good to top-up living room in evenings on cold nights (only used about 1-1.5 kWh ) . Agree that heat pump efficiency is important our predicted sCOP is 3.4 . Our costs after grant were £6k for heat pump and IR was likely to cost £6.6k plus installation. I therefore concluded like you that installation and running costs in a whole house basis didn't quite work but using IR in specific location does.
Radiation inverse square law makes IR heating seem like a bad idea. We have a 3 zone A2A heat pump and it's amazing. Three sides of our open floor plan house make the heating even. Our south facing sunroom is the only side without a wall mount cassette head. Every house is different.
For ceiling mounted infrared panel, would you feel hot head and hair but cold feet? In cinema room, can’t you get heated chairs? It would be direct heat transfer to your body so even more efficient than IR heat panel?
@@chrislux12 Yes, I understand the principle from its marketing…. But my experience is different. I have old tube style IR heater in my shower room, only turned on in winter when getting out of shower. I feel it is very directional. Are IR panels the same? So it would need to be turned on hours before using the cinema room? How long does it need to heat up all the objects? I’m probably waaaay off, but wouldn’t a cheap fan heater be more efficient because it blows hot air directly at the person when room is being used? (I like warm feet)
I'd combine infrared with the radiators. Set the boiler thermostat on 17 and use your infrared panels on the place where you sit down. Use a light-infrared panel variant above that couch. You don't need an electrician to install an infrared panel.
Love the Heat geek channel. In the process of buying a new build which has a heat pump installed and it has been great for putting the builders through their paces with questions. (Will get a local company to check over the system is set up how they have said as want a solar panel quote as soon as I have completed)
We've been going through the same struggle trying to choose a Heat Pump or IR panels to replace our gas central heating, the difference we have is that we have forced air gas central heating. It's fast at heating up the house, but forced air heating is noisy and drafty. Radiators aren't very popular here in New Zealand. The options for us are, replace our gas furnace with a heat pump, which means putting pipes down the outside of the house from our loft to the outdoor unit, and we would also need to upgrade all of the ducting, which is fine for gas, but too narrow for a heat pump. The brings me to something about your install, I assumed that you would need to replace all of your radiators, because a heat pump can't heat the water as effectively as gas? I like the idea of IR panels with their radiated heat rather than blown air, but we discovered too that the installation cost was through the roof, and my wife also isn't sure about having white panels on the ceiling in every room. We can't install radiators because that would be as much disruption and installation cost as the panels. The other option is when the gas furnace deos fail, we just replace it with another one. The price difference between gas and a 400% efficient heat pump here in NZ isn't very difference. We also heat our hot water with an instant gas hot water boiler.
The is a lot of talk about efficiency but efficiency will not always equal cheaper. You can have solar panels that powers a 600w LiFePO4 Battery Generator that will then run a 300w IR panel all night for the next 10 years for the cost of £500-£750 or 7p a day.
I have followed you and your decision making for years and have loved that you do the research and then share your thought processes. We have bought most of the same technology that you have in the past but sadly on this topic I have to respectfully disagree. We had a couple of quotes for ASHP and even without replacing all the microbore pipe work the quote a year ago was £16 k. So the system would not keep us as warm as we like and reaslistically to install the bigger rads required and rip out and replace the microbore it would cost us even more. We would not see payback in our already elderly lifetime. I absolutely hate to say this but we have simply gone for a new efficient gas boiler and will be installing a couple of IR panels in the living room (so we don’t have to heat the whole house) and my office. We live in a 15 year old mid terraced and very well insulated house but the ASHP would not work here and would be very noisy in our small garden.
I expect your 15 year old build (or even a typical mega-builder property today) is nothing like as well insulated as it could have been - e.g. to Passive Haus standard - which would need no boiler nor wet system, and virtually no heating at all (3 bed passive house needs about 1kW heating on coldest winter days), which I think would be a better solution than all the housing stock we throw up in the UK. Right-first-time would be much better than having to upgrade it all later ...
Getting real benefit for spending your money is fantastic ... but forget about payback ... "payback" is a nonsense issue that we all get drawn into. How much is a new kitchen ... and what's the payback? How much to decorate the house ... and what's the payback? How much for a new sofa ... and what's the payback? How much for a new car ... and what's the payback? How much for a family holiday ... and what's the payback? How much for meals out or trip to the cinema ... and what's the payback? Using your money to improve your heating system, especially if means reduced energy use is great for you, great for the country and great for the planet ... that's the payback!
Interesting. I live on my own so i only need to heat where i am. I have electric shower and little need for hot water from taps. I find my radiators far more ugly than a panel. i prefer a panel on the ceiling to a radiator on the wall, space saving. No Liquids to leak!. Solid state no noise. No maintenance costs. My radiator system would need serious upgrade to install HP. With grants HP maybe cheaper. Good video though, each home is different and as long as we dont burn fossils :)
Hi, I'm going through a similar process with my house looking to go electric and cut gas off over the coming years. When I look at heat pumps to replace the boiler, they seem very expensive for what they are ... Ok fair enough, but I keep wondering and considering air to air instead. Grants aside, a heat pump via rads will easy cost us iro £10k. We can go air to air for half that and have the advantage of summer cooling. We have solar and already divert elec to heat our water. I hardly hear anyone talking about air to air. What am I missing?
@@savute yes I know, but my limited man maths makes its cheaper to install air to air than air to water even with the air to water grant (excluding hot water supply)
@@nicdensley4104 I would have looked seriously at air to air if they were included in the grant. I installed 5 in our house in South Africa, and being sun lovers we used them more for heating in the winter than for cooling. Contrary to what people think of Africa, Johannesburg can be very cold in the morning and evening with frost in the morning being common. They kept the house nice and warm and the heat is almost instant. If you want to install them yourself the problem here is you need a F certificate.
They might not qualify for grants. But Air To Air ASHP are simple to install, a lot cheaper to operate than twin cycle Wet systems. Air conditioning, is going to be, increasingly important in the coming decades...
Has a solar, load-diversion controller / immersion heater solution been considered for hot water ? Especially given the ability to electrically heat the water during off-peak times ( if you have such a tariff ) ? My device is called "Immersun" which is since discontinued, now there is the "MyEnergi Eddi " which works seamlessly with the Myennergi Zappi charger and accessories...
There are two infrared heating units in the lounge area/room at the back of our church. In winter these have been used rather than heating the whole church. I do not find them pleasant to use! The heat they give is related to how near you are (from my science lessons in the dim and distant past, I seem to remember that halving the distance to them quadruples the increase in heat - someone correct me if I'm wrong). This means that if you are sat in a meeting and are very near them, you quickly get too hot (think midday sun), but if you sit farther away then you take longer to warm up, so the units can't be turned off because some people are too hot. The only thing you can do is move away from their direct line of heating. I'd be interested to hear anyone's recent experience with infrared panels (the units above are quite old - perhaps things have improved?)
I think you are right, the problem lies in having the panels too far apart. For an even warming by infra red radiation you could consider yourself to be on the edge of a sphere with the IR heater in the centre. The inverse square law you remember is really obvious if you imagine many people around a traditional single bar electric radiator. The intensity of the light from a point source is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the source. Nearest is warmest.
If they "glow red" then they are infra red, rather than far infra red - that would definitely be different, but principle of near/warmer still applies. I think that's down to design though, and also cost, so might be the system design in the church was a compromise on capital cost.
In canada, a lot of people love the look of radiators. There are companies that refurbish radiators with electrical elements. So you keep the radiators, but replace the plumbing with electrics to connect them up. Now every radiator is it's own zone. There's no way it will ever be as cheap as a heat pump, but as supplemental heating in a prticular area, it can make sense.
EVM do you have a hot water tank.? you already have solar panels so get yourself a Solar iBoost to heat your water for free. And as you have a home storage battery, in the evening you can hit the 'boost' button and it'll top up your hot water (if it needs it) in only minutes. We've had ours for over 4yrs now and its saved us an inordinate amount of electricity and given gallons of hot water.
You've said you'd need a spark to run power to each ceiling for IR panels. Yet you'll also have to pay 10s of K for an ASHP, by the time you've upsized the pipework and rads (potentially) and the equipment itself..
@@ElectricVehicleMan however, to be fair, evm, some people will be happy to simply screw them to the wall and plug them into the nearest wall socket! So it CAN be a very cost effective solution......
You can get infra red panels that are pictures or mirrors…..heat pumps are fine on a new build that is made for a heat pump…..but on existing UK properties they aren’t so good.
I think im going to go down this road: heat pump ducted fan unit in the loft (with heat recovery) providing hot/cold air into the bedrooms. Air con fan units in the downstairs rooms supplying hot and cold air. For hot water, use solar to completely heat a cylinder every day. Maybe keep the boiler snd rads for a few years just in case. I dont understand the british obsession with sticking with radiators.
I am looking at fitting one IR panel in our kitchen extension which haemorrhages heat from every orifice and has one wet radiator that is clearly inadequate. However my wife asked me a question that totally foxed me, when you leave food to cool in a rack, for instance biscuits, does the IR panel heat them up.
This is great, thorough thinking around heating. We are currently looking at the heating solution in our 14th century church and it's a biggie. The (oil) boiler died and the tank needed replacing, the (victorian) radiators are badly placed and the pipework is broken (unded the floor) in many place, oh and there is no insulation and the roof is 30-40 metres high. So, given all that we are looking at under floor heating with some form of heat pump to get the building above the dew point 24/7 (needed to prevent the, grade 1 listed, building degrading any further) and then IR heating for when there are people there. Problem is this will cost an enormous amount and we have no funds available so serious fund raising is needed. Currently we have a string of temporary near IR heaters which got us through last winter without having to close so we know they are a possibility for comfort but the need to keep the floor and walls above about 10 degrees all the time is trickier but also ideally suited to a fairly small air source heat pump (ground source is not really an option due to all the archaeology and graves in the church yard).
I am in a likewise situation, except it's a house. Don't worry, the temps can go below 10, why not? I have quite a few centuries old paintings, as well as some centuries old musical instruments including a 4/4 double bass, and they are doing just fine. Humidity must stay right, but old stone structures do that very well.
Thanks for your video and have to say I am somewhat confused as in your previous video you clearly said AHP does not work for you and it’s better to stick to gas boiler for the time being. I also had a look into AHP and found that the COP rating was good in summer around 4:1 but can drop as low to 1:1 in winter which is when you need it most and therefore cost more to run in winter. I noticed that you have been looking at a smaller AHP 7Kw is that because it works better than a larger unit? What size is your Gas boiler you plan to replace?
May I draw your attention to what he actually said; he said, "CAN drop to 1:1", did NOT say drops to 1:1 for the entirety of winter, as you interpret, he said CAN drop, that means, occasionally. In real use, is mostly above 1:1. Only on coldest days does it become 1:1. Better, a high efficiency model can get more heat out of the lowest temperature air. However, it does this by running the fan more, so elec goes up a bit to power that. Real-world users are reporting that they pay slightly less overall than their old method of heating (unspecified, presumably oil or gas, although it is not identified whether they accounted for the elec use of the fan or pump of their old system when comparing expenses; it may be even cheaper to run a heat pump if they are not paying for the fan pr pump and their elec bill now is still lower, even without a gas or oil bill) ,. Unfortunately, heat pumps heat slowly, like over an hour if temp starts from cold inside, and so they must be left on at room temp all the time, even at night or at work. Also, people sneak in the air conditioning they never had before. So very comfortable, but always on, no quick body warming by standing in front after being frozen when coming back in from outside, and they offer 'additional feature of air conditioning, and humidification; but not so much on monthly savings.
Both is ideal. The infrared panels work well. You can get a picture heater on the wall and heat one room instant for 500 watts instead of 2000 Watts for heat pump that takes twice as long much more energy and wear moving parts.
I have an infrared heater in my home office. Its on the right side of me so the right side of my face gets really warm while the left does not. It feels very weird. Placement is much more important then people might think. Also i think its bad for my skin.
Well, I actually hate the idea of heating entire house all the time, especially now when both myself and the wife work from home. Having 2000 square feet to heat up just soy feet in the study don't feel cold is pure madness! We already did total refurb few years ago and installed new gas boiler... So I'm not too keen on total rip out. My plan at the moment is too invest in further insulation, get solar panels with battery storage and install IR panels to work in tandem with gas heating during coldest weeks, and alone during 5 and above. My problems with the heat pump is: - massive capital expenditure and labor - 200 pounds a year for servicing!! - I would need massive rads, mine are all slim now - even with my new gas boiler it takes ages to heat up the house, it's not going to be better with ASHP... - per room thermostats and Google assistant control are awesome, and will allow each of us to set temp they like (wife is ok with 15, I need 22 ;) Like someone else said below - if I'm to spend money it really needs to feel better.
@@ElectricVehicleMan Using my own free solar electricity for 90% of heating should be cheaper still, especially with current gas prices. I hope it works out, need to design and calculate the system with Herschel and our local solar guys...
Unless your ( improved ) insulation can be further improved, you may be on a hiding no nothing. Good insulation is needed for heat pumps. I explored sprayed on foam insulation e.g. in loft but rejected that solution as it now has a very poor reputation, not helped by underfinanced suppliers who tend to go serially bankrupt.
I've just bought a 1930s house that is in need of renovation, including replacing all the double glazing which is end of life, improving roof insulation, fixing electrics, and deciding what to do once I've had the back boiler ripped out. I was going to get a new gas combi (£8k - 10k for installation and conversion) but this video has got me thinking again - is it the right choice? Having said that, @Richard Cope points out that insulation has got to be very good for heat pumps to be effective - and they're so expensive to install. I don't have the £20 - 30k needed (and the rest!).
i make enough money not to care. convenience is king to me. i just set my entire house to one temp and it stays there all the time. you guys waste too much thought on these unimportant things.
Interesting topic; word of caution on the matter of redundancy, don’t rely on one source for space and water heating especially if the latter is used for showers. If the heat source fails you have lost everything. I have an electric shower now after my last oil combi boiler electrics failed.
1 heat up your house with a tradiational radiator..2 put it to 15 degrees celcius .... and heat the rest of the time with infrared heaters........ 1000 percent cheaper.. gas : 1m3 now 3 euro in the Netherlands. electricity 1kwh now 30 cents in the netherlands.
At about 6:30 you talk about hot water. Our house is three floors and the water heater (currently a combi gas boiler) is on the top floor while the only places that use that hot water are on the first floor (bathroom) and ground floor (kitchen). What I have noticed is that if we have to run hot water in the kitchen, the time to get hot water from the time is fairly long. So we are running away water (actually we try and capture that and put it to use in the garden) and then we get hot water, more commonly we tend to save doing the washing in the kitchen until just after someone has showered so that the time to get hot water in the kitchen is less. Obviously either way a large volume of hot water is going to go cold in the pipes between the top floor and the kitchen. Our alternatives are to install an electric water heater in the kitchen and bathroom, or to move the hot water system from the second floor to the bedroom that is adjacent to the bathroom and above the kitchen. We could simply install a heat pump water heater in the current location (second floor) and use some clever electronics to use solar power to heat that on a sunny day. Some complex calculations need to be done here.
Not really suitable for retro fit, but my house has long pipe runs, the hot water is plumbed as a "loop", and there is a pump. In bathroom there is a switch to turn on the pump (5 minutes or so, or until the "return" detects heat), and only then turn the tap on.
A 6KW heat pump with the rest of your house electrical items will consume 20-25 kWh a day over winter. Your 8kWh battery will NOT cover you all day…. Consider doubling your battery capacity and adding Solar.
Great video and well researched as always. I am also thinking about retrofitting an air source heat pump to my house. I wondered whether you had considered a Tepeo Zero Emission Boiler? This would replace your gas boiler with minimal interruption to the existing heating system in your house. You can charge it on a cheap rate electricity and it provides 40kWh of storage. I would like to see your thoughts on payback of the ZEB v an ASHP. That would be a great video!
@@jaydode6601 Sunamp has a maximum storage capacity of 12kWh, which is fine for domestic hot water but too small to provide space heating in most houses. The Tepeo has 40kWh which should meet the space and water heating requirements of many normal size houses. For bigger houses, you can get 100kWh of heat storage using a Caldera heat battery.
You can get more than one sun amp you can have multiple and setup in series. But insulation is the key to any heating system, and it helps to have a small house or flat for this system. I don't know what the average house size is? I just like having any no maintenance or noise (fans) if I want hot water and not costing a huge amount.
@@TheBigT. caldera are just massive for maison and hotel and puplic buildings, love the tech simple and effective but expensive it be great if a couple household got together and share the heating.
Tepeo ZEB and ASHP both uses electricity but ASHP has benefits of the CoP of 3 compared to 1 for the Tepeo so it is likely to cost 3x more to run than ASHP.
One of the biggest problem people have is they have become wedded to this ridiculous whole house heating. Let alone to crazy high 20C. Never used to be that way. Used to be one fire in the main room. Things like cooler bedrooms are actually good for your sleep too. In part this odd modern attitude is shown by you wearing only a T shirt. I Never have! I have one wood burning stove. That is it. Only used a few hours in evenings, if it actually gets cold, single figures C, which is very few weeks a year in recent winters. I am retired and live there all the time.
What about the bedroom? If you microzone the bed, you can basically not heat the bedroom ever. During the night in particular this can prevent quite a lot of heat loss, as you probably keep a window open for ventilation (the warm air heated by radiators would escape). The door to the bedroom probably stays closed most of the time, so zoning works. Matter of fact, it SHOULD stay closed for fire safety, if nothing else.
I’m heating my house with 3000 Watts. 6 zones. I’m still on my same tank of oil for the last two years. I used 3/4 tank in that time. House uniform temp is 73 F. Mass is heated / radiated. Not air. The fenestration issues of incoming air is pleasant. Temp doesn’t drop. It’s a pleasant heat. I’m trying different transformers. The system - works really well. I’m not using a panel. I’m using a foil and it’s painted over. Invisible. I’ve pioneered a Carbon Nano tube liquid coating for glass. All windows are coated. 99% UV shield. 90% Heat block in summer. 90% IR Mirror in Winter.
You aren't getting anywhere near 400% efficiency out of a heat pump. Not even close. In extremely perfect laboratory conditions, most heat pumps were shown to give around 125% efficiency. Mark my words, a decade away or so, you'll be seeing endless adverts for 'were you mis sold an air source heat pump' claims.
I’m getting that now so how’s that work? And the countries that have ran them for decades, that’s just a myth too? You’re thinking of these as new tech, they’ve been around ages.
About 4:30 in you say that it is a relatively modern house so you expect to get 400%. I don't understand how the efficiency of the heat pump is related to the style of the house. Surely the pump would be just as efficient attached to a barn, it's just that the heat would immediately escape. However I do like these discussions as we are looking to either go the heat pump or infra red route (or a combination) and the other channel you mention are also really interesting to watch.
@@ElectricVehicleMan the lower the flow temp can be for a given radiator size. You can heat a leaking, uninsulated, single glazed, solid walled building with a flow temp of 40 if you’ve got space for large enough rads. The rad sizes determine the flow temp.
@@dorsetengineering And the insulation determines the radiator size (if aiming for low temp). Putting in massive radiators isn’t something most people would consider. A modern house with good insulation should mean an easier/cheaper install and lower specced heat pump.
@@ElectricVehicleMan swapping a manky old type 11 or a type 21 to a type 22 is usually all that’s required. The latest changes to part L will require proper heat loss calcs and designing for 55 flow anyway so people will get used to larger rads as we move forwards.
@@ElectricVehicleMan ok I get your point now. Obviously you could install a 40 degree system in a barn and the efficiency of the heat pump (the energy output compared to the input) would be identical. However if you want to achieve the result of heating that barn then you would need a higher output temperature and that is where you lose the efficiency. Actually I think most people agree that insulation should be step 1 for every heating type. The lower the required heating, the lower the bill.
heat pumps are ok but when it gets cold they don't work very well. I have had them over the last 20 years in New Zealand. Our climate is better than the UK. We use log burners which makes the house warm, in comparison the heat pumps are just so, so.
@@stevehorner8302 Have you not heard of search engines? www.euronews.com/green/2023/10/30/do-heat-pumps-work-in-winter-experts-explain-why-nordic-countries-have-installed-the-most- Took about 10 seconds to find this bullshit. 🤦♂️
Heat pumps makes a lot more sense than IR radiators. However if you went IR why take out the old radiators? Just drain down and leave in place. That would leave the future option of heat pumps without having to put in new radiators and piping them in everywhere.
Dutch new homes lose heat leze than 0,5 gr C a day, yours is not very air thight and or well insulated, given the heatlos in a couple of hours. Maybe improve there too?.
It all boils down to unit cost of gas and electric, the current wholesale gas price is 16.48p pkwh so at least 20p pkwh by the time it gets to your house, electric is about 50p pkwh. Heating oil is very expensive at the moment, about 80p a litre, but that works out at 8p pkwh, 2.5 times cheaper than gas, but by the time you fitted a new boiler and a tank you are looking at around 4k, but payback could be as little as two years. Solar is useless for heating in the winter, batteries or no batteries. The only thing i saw that made a bit of sense to me was these electric heat storage units, they store about 50kwh of heat on cheap rate electric and provides CH and hot water just like a normal combi boiler. It's one unit that's not much bigger than a gas boiler and the only difference is it must be floor mounted, as it's bloody heavy. They cost about 5k so about the same as a decent battery, If you have solar but no battery this could be a better idea to spend your money on, any spare solar can be fed into the unit and top it up on cheap electric at night. In the summer you may loose a bit to feed in, but even then you use hot water and have showers, and remember this is 50 kwh the same money will get you about 10 kwh of batteries. I do wander how long cheap rate electric is going to last.
I put mirrored IR panels in my bathrooms, connected to a rocker switch and a timed relay set to 20 minutes. They face the exits to the shower. Hit the rocker before your shower and they are up to speed when you come out. They are tall and vertical and the heat you get on your body as you dry off is really nice. Then you can keep the bathroom room temp lower than would normally comfortable. Plus they work as a mirror which never steams up.
That sounds excellent.
I do the same. I never heat the bathroom any other time. (I don't live in the bathroom)
We've got 500W of IR light bulbs in our bathrooms, which here in NZ are very popular, but I don't find them very effective. Fine before I go in the show, but feel no heat from them at all when I get out. This is one of the situations that is giving me second thoughts about IR panels.
I thought that you were supposed to be a Yorkshireman. Real Yorkshiremen don't have heating upstairs, and it's never on in any vacant room. Doors are kept shut when not moving between rooms. Any transgressions are met with "were yer born in a field". A coal fire in the kitchen keeps everyone warm. If you have visitors you take a shovel full of coal from the kitchen into the front room to start the fire going, taking care to put out any embers which might fall onto the front room carpet.
Turn the TV off when no-one's watching it you'd save a bit 👍
I put heat panels upstairs in our house. First of all in my son's room and we liked them so much we put them in all the bedrooms. First they ran on the small power and were wired in later. It is not expensive because the chasing is minor and you simply mount them on the ceiling doing the wiring from the floor above. My house has solid wall so needs more spent on it to consider a heat pump. Losing radiators gives a bit more flexibility. The heat is radiant and I think it improves my son's eczema. I just need to get solar panels before my price cap finishes. I really like panels, heat pumps should be far cheaper and thanks for stimulating the discussion.
Are they placed on the ceiling or the walls? Is it true that from the ceiling, they can heat your head?
Infrared panels can also get VERY hot, from what I was told.
In 2017 I bought a house that was built in 2003 and came with a heat pump and underfloor heating. I LOVE IT! The underfloor heating is very comfortable and makes me (and my cats) feel very good. :)
The heat pump is from 2003 and a little loud but if you're buying new models, their fans are so immensely quiet that you hardly ever hear them.
Also, make sure that those who install your heat pump explain it well to you. When I bought the house, the seller just told me to not touch anything from the heat pump because it's set up "perfectly". Well -- it wasn't. A year later I had it serviced and the technician explained to me that the water pump (pumping the water into the underfloor pipes) was set up to maximum, and the little dials for the temperature (on the heat pump itself) were also set high. He explained to me how to control the heat production better (set water pump to minimum; reduce the temperature of the produced heat/hot water), and lo and behold, my old heat pump now uses way less electricity than before.
The far IR panels are only warm to touch. I have a bathroom mirror, the rest of the house is to ceilings. The mirror does not get condensation and nor does the bathroom. The IR rays kill any damp and it feels like the subtle warmth of a summer day all round.
IR panels can get hot to the touch, but not excessively so. Also they tend to be installed on ceilings or higher up on a wall than say a wet radiator, so not really a safety issue, eg for young kids etc.
I wonder if you have missed the main benefit of IR panels versus convection heating? As you rightly point out, you would consider using it in your cinema room because you seldom use it, and also mention that you and your wife have different work patterns. With Gas and ASHP you are in fact pushing hot water around the entire house whether the radiators need heat or not to possibly heat the air space which would take quite a time to heat that volume of air, but with IR panels the air space is not heated, so you could only heat the specific rooms you are using at the time of occupation, and as it heats you not the air space the perception of being warm enough happens quicker than having to heat the entire volume of air in that and every room. More and more of us use electric showers on a regular basis, so warming almost 200 litres of water for a bath that might not get used seems a little pointless, so the occasional use of an immersion heater seems to me more logical as you are only heating the water when you need it to be hot. Most of us only use a couple of rooms during any 24-hour period so why heat all of them when they are not being used seems a waste to me. Just my rambling thoughts.
You can just close radiators in the rooms you do not use. Automatic knobs are like 30 quid even now so you don't even have to do it yourself.
And if you want to keep your entire space warm all the time pretty much panels just do not make sense, at that point they become just regular electric spaceheaters. In this case the efficienty from a heatpump just can't be beat.
Panels make sense in homes that are mostly empty because people are working all day, rooms with big volumes or high ceilings and if you only spend most your time in specific areas of the property.
If you spend a few hours watching tv each night, shutting down the heating in the house and just run a panel where you are sitting would make them more efficient in that usecase.
They have their usecases but certainly aren't a fix all solution.
As you already said, infrared heaters work with surface to surface radiation, like a being in front of an outdoor fireplace. It gives you instantaneous comfort, but it would take ages to get the air in the house heated, and when you leave the irradiation zone the heat comfort disappears as fast as it comes.
BTW, humans normally need cooling like an old ICE engine, that’s why air at body temperature (36°C) doesn’t feel comfortable either, but too much cooling isn’t good either.
Keep doing those videos, I think you are good at explaining things for normal people. I would have lost 90% of your audience after 2 minutes 🤣🤪
Excellent presentation and well reasoned. I think the payback argument is valid, but not the most important. We pay money to make out house better. We don’t talk about payback time for painting, decorating fixtures and fittings, we do it because it’s better. Being cheaper to run is part of that, but reducing emissions and being more comfortable is another important part of that. We will replace our oil fired system (no gas in our village) with a heat pump system over the next few years and have come to similar conclusions. We have been working hard to make our house more thermally efficient which has been pretty successful so far. Our solar panels do a great job, we just need a battery, when we can get one, to use that power we generate more efficiently.
Better thermal insulation has been our best modification so far, and we can still improve there.
Totally this, folk will renew their kitchen every few years but want 'payback' for solar/heating etc. I do think a full house on IR panels would struggle though, but for spot heating it's fantastic. My partner works from home and has one above the desk, so we are only running a single 800w panel through the day, and only for a few hours. Much better than running the GCH all day.
Thankyou for the shout out!!! Really appreciate it!!
First I will qualify, I am an amateur though into renewable energy since the 1990s. I wondered if I would have to strongly disagree but no. As you said in the beginning you have to take every case on its own merits. And as you have explained in your position I think you are making the right decision. There I said it! 🤩
However I am considering a different solution, first I don't live in the frozen wastelands of Yorkshire (That should get some response. Hehe, my cousin lives in Ilkley so I know it's beautiful 😁) so zero is a number rarely ever seen here. Second my heating system has probably reached the end of it's life so a complete change is required. Previously I have remodelled an old farmhouse fitting underfloor heating which is excellent until you need to modify or service! And lastly I am probably lucky that I have room to have a large solar panel array.
My solution, planned, is insulated solid floors with IR above them. The floors should absorb all the energy that does not land on furniture or people and then release it back over time.
The one big issue I am seeing is that a single phase electricity line only allows about 7Kw per hour or 28Kw with a 4 hour tariff. Electric car, electric heating, water et al do I need to have a 3 phase supply, that is expensive 😱😥
One thing that is maybe worth passing to the community is IR is now assessed as 120% efficient because it doesn't suffer the same heat convection losses as an electric bar heater. And heat pumps while they can achieve over 400% if run in their efficient cycle, as I think you will be. However when they have to start from cold, as many people have cyclic lives, it is probably fairer to assume they are in the 350% - 380% efficiency range.
Great video by the way. Sorry for the anti Yorkshire sarcasm it is very tongue in cheek, I love the place really just wanted to see how many negative replies come from people who don't read to the end 👌🙏😂
So, when you enter a house with infrared panels - the air is unheated? If this is correct, then unless you're standing or sitting near the panel - you'll be cold!
On the other hand the idea of a heating system without the complicated mix of piping etc and the regular servicing necessary for wet central heating - is very appealing!
It will heat the surfaces of whatever it’s hitting inside the house and they will heat up, which in turn will heat up the air.
It’s the sun essentially. Doesn’t heat the air, heats anything it shines on.
@@ElectricVehicleMan Thanks for your reply - so if one was in sited in a hallway the air would eventually feel warm for people entering the house?
Some research into heating for electric busses showed people with warm feet were comfortable at about 15 degrees C. People with cold feet were uncomfortable at an air temp of 24 degrees C. So rather than installing underfloor heating, buy the family some really warm slippers and knock the air temp back a degree or so.
And wear bed socks at night.
Well said Matthew, you sound like a real Yorkshireman, unlike EVM who I suspect is a fake.
@@Bettys_Eldest you're right. EVM is AI, amazing what they can do with deepfake these days.
I totally believe that
We moved into a detached 1970's 3 bed house in December and replaced 9.3Kw of storage heaters with 2.6 Kw of infrared panels. No messy work installing radiators or piping, no expensive boiler/pump, all rooms have separate controls for timing/temperature etc
To be honest we find it great and it halved our heating bills overnight. Rooms are now a steady temperature all the time and it's a pleasant heat. Your point on water heating is correct that's next on the agenda I guess. But to be honest our showers are all electric, dishwasher and washing machine etc. It's only for hand washing or baths we use the hot water so immersion heating is probably quite a waste.
Your installation costs are way off though or depends on how you place your panels we certainly didn't need any plasterers and could do it all one room at a time if we wanted. We placed the panels where the old storage heaters had been so cabling was already in place.
If we'd have gone for a wet system it would have cost thousands and thousands more. Feel as with any system getting your insulation sorted first is key.
The saving most people don't take into account is the thermostatic control and timers per room. Only heat what you need to and when you need it. Once the room is up to temperature it stays that way. Storage heaters drive me crazy with constant adjustments required etc.
Interesting. We moved in to our c. 1970 house a year ago. We think the previous owner took out a gas CH system before installing oil based radiators and some wall mounted convectors but overall insufficient horsepower to make the house consistently comfortable. I knowingly bought it as a blank canvas and was heading for a heat pump solution but the costs were not good value for money so have started down the IR route. Your total kW is lower than I was expecting given 3 bedrooms. My bathroom one is 700W on its own. How many panels have you fitted? I’ll being doing the calculations shortly but interested in experience of others.
@@paulwilletts5268 We only have it downstairs currently we have 700W ones in the lounge, dining room and kitchen and 500W in the hallway so apologies 2.6Kw (not 2.1Kw as per above) these replaced 9.3Kw of storage heaters in the same 4 locations.
Upstairs we have 3 old convector heaters which are currently switched off one in each of the bedrooms. Eventually we'll replace these as well but since about March they've been turned off anyway. During the day we have the temperature set to 20 degrees C and at night we put it down to 13 degrees but all controlled through smart life app on phone and each heater is configurable separately.
During winter it does take a while to get up to temperature so we put them on an hour before we get up but during the day nice and steady heat, not the too hot or cold you had with storage. Must say though we did get underfloor insulation done with rockwool between the joists in the basement and some interior insulation 4-6cm of foam boards on the exterior facing walls of two of the bedrooms upstairs. All done FOC from a grant from energy savings trust as we had all electric heating. We also had the entire house re-rendered with a cork based render which helps with the insulation and seals any cracks or gaps not meant to be there. Any form of electric heating hates draughts.
We do live in Aberdeenshire in Scotland though so very happy with the result. Yet to decide what we will do for hot water long term have 2Kw immersion system with a big lagged tank on economy 7 currently but it produces more hot water than we'd ever use to be honest. Both showers are electric as are washing machines and dish washers.
Eventually will get solar and PV battery as well but only having moved in six months ago the budget has been busted so it's on the wish list.
@@eldridgep2 that makes more sense now. I did the calculation for the master bedroom and it suggests 1.2kW as it’s nearly 4m x 5m x 2.4 m high. My thoughts are for 2 panels to get a more even room coverage given the largish floor area, did you have to make any considerations like this? Two panels is more expensive than a single one of course.
@@paulwilletts5268 I don't have any rooms with dual panels no. My largest room is probably a bit smaller than that my lounge and dining rooms are joined by glass panelled double doors and combined they would be larger than that as they run the full length of the house each room has a single 700w panel.
I guess if money is available then splitting the 1.2Kw demand between two 700W heaters would make sense. The only real difference would be the room would heat up quicker and then shut off due to thermostatic controls when up to temperature. Just make sure you run them off a single thermostat where the room is most in use? I can run multiple panels off of a single controller if I need to, I don't but in your case would make more sense. Are you ceiling mounting or wall mounting? Bear in mind you can't make them face windows/glass doors etc as they will be much less effective.
@@eldridgep2 I will be ceiling mounted for all my panels I expect, upstairs and downstairs excepting the bathroom towel rail version of course. I don’t think I need the mirror or image wall panel options. What I couldn’t get from Herschel tech support was a clear idea of the radiation arc from each panel hence my question. With a single panel it might be that certain parts of the room/floor don’t warm up as much. I will probably share my floor plans with Herschel and se what they think in terms of panel distribution.
Bought a wall infra red wall panel heater complete waste of money i listened to all the Hype and bought one worst investment i ever made it also cost a fortune in leccky bills
The radiators in my house are in inconvenient places so actually getting all those removed would be quite a good idea. My hot water is heated by my solar most of the year. I haven't decided on my future heating yet and your journey is interesting, will be interesting to see how you do once installed. Thanks for sharing
I've recently fitted a couple of IR panels in our 1950's house and they're as simple to fit as a light fitting. Four holes in the ceiling (four for the fixings and one for the power) and lift the floorboards above to connect the power. Our circumstances are different in that our house has never had central heating so air source heat pumps would involve starting from scratch. I am considering a mini-split system as this could heat the air from the same locations as the existing inefficient gas heaters and give us the COP efficiency gains of a heat pump without the disruption of radiators.
Get yourself a cheap air to air split and you'll be very happy. Especially if you invest one day in installing it yourself.
@@paulf3353 are you allowed to install this yourself, including gassing the system?
@@TheBushUpperCwmbran In modern kits, gas already included in the line, so you don't need to gas it yourself. You still need compressor and understanding of what you're doing, but if you're technically minded, everything is explained in the manual.
From some other point of view: Why I DID install the IR heating... Thinking about the future... gas & electric cost is going up and it will do so. 13MW/year solar panel installation + underfloor IR heating (not the bullshit IR panels on walls / ceilings, that is an old technology in 2022 ). Result: no more energy bills. Thank you ;)
Any electric heating system would apply to that.
A heat pump would use less electric than the panels so would be even cheaper.
As others have mentioned, a well insulated house is key to any low energy system working. I've being looking at Mitsubishi and Daikin mini split systems,.Unless I've misunderstood things with these there would be no need for a heat recovery system as they are continually exchanging the air in each area. Installation cost are still considerable but much cheaper and less invasive than a full air source heat pump system. The only problem with this is how best to heat your domestic hot water.
I was thinking of putting an IR panel above my woodworking bench - at the moment it goes unused all winter.
I also suggested that the Village Hall, which is a large draughty space, swap from oil to IR heaters.
With the war in Ukraine, electrification in general, heat pumps and solar panels on as many buildings as possible in particular, just went from something that you do the math on vs. gas and other options, to something that is important for as many people in Europe and the UK to do as possible to fight back against Russian aggression.
Slava 🇺🇦
It’s nothing to do with Russia it’s the uk and other European governments ludicrous pursuit of net zero. Wake up, Ukraine is one of the most corrupt countries in the world
@@WSMITHify Nothing you've said here in any way refutes my point that individuals should be taking control of their energy future by electrifying, going solar, etc. The political right seems to want everyone to take personal responsibility, EXCEPT when it comes to energy independence. Bizarre.
True but the UK doesn't have enough renewable capacity to start heating everyones homes with electric. If everyone made that switch the electric powering your green home would not come from renewables. Electric generation still uses fossil fuels to a large extent (burning gas in power stations). Sorry to burst your bubble but the limiting factor is the maximum renewable energy capacity of the whole country. Unless you get your own solar panels, this equation isn't changing
@@AndyLowe-net Creating electricity in a grid-scale natural gas power station is more efficient than producing heat in a consumer-grade natural gas boiler, though. Every study that I've read suggests electrification is a net efficiency gain. So no worries, my bubble is not yet burst. And yes, anyone who lives in a country with high electricity prices should run (not walk) to get solar put on every roof that they can, if you ask me. Especially factories that largely operate while the sun in shining, and usually have large unobstructed roofs!
Depending on the total heat needs of a proeprty, it might make sense to use simple electric heaters
Heating isn't just the fuel cost it's also the capital cost and maintenance costs. The capital and maintenance cost for resistive heaters is close to zero
Considering a heat pump costs £10,000+ and lasts about 15 years you are looking at a capital and interst cost of £1,200 a year
If your property uses 12,000 units of heat per year That means the cost.pf the system is 10p a unit on top of the fuel cost. If your proeprty uses 3,000 units a year that means the cost of the system is 40p a unit pm top of the fuel cost
If we assume future electricity bills are 25p a unit and a COP of 3.5x then the break even point is 6,720 KWh. If your home uses less than 6,720 KWh per year for hearing you are better off just buying resistance heaters
Lots of modern builds will use less than 6,700 units so no need for a heat pump just use eletricity directly (it might still be worthwhile to have a cheap air to air unit to provide some baseload heating needs as they cost closer to £2000)
No mention of long term running costs, pretty sure ASHP will need some sort of maintenance to keep them quiet. IR have no moving parts and some manufacturers give 20 years warranties on them. How long is an ASHP expected to last?
What about ihelios heating films? infrared heating underfloor or in the ceiling, hidden away from eyesight?
IR heating panels are expensive, and inefficient. Don't waste your money like I have.
I purchased an infrared panel it made zero different to the room you only felt the head when standing directly Infront but nothing else & did not heat the sofa or walls, so not like the sun. Unless more expensive ones do actually work? They look like a perfect idea but not from my experience.
My experience of actually being involved in the installation of an air source heat pump system confirms your view that installation costs and upgrading the building are VERY significant. The system works best when the house is entirely insulated from the outside. This then means you need an air recirculation system to draw fresh air in, through a heat exchanger, to every room. Also, be aware that heating systems and hot water cylinders depend on a buffer tank, with a 3kw immersion in it and a cylinder with one or two 3kw immersions. These are computer controlled and, certainly on the system I was involved in, you cannot tell when they are in use (for warming the underfloor heating systems and the hot water cylinder)......so, your heating and hot water will be reassuringly effective, but, at least in this particular system, you will not know when and for how long the immersion heaters are turned on. This would be something to ask your supplier, because monitoring very precisely how much the heat pump and how much the electric immersions are providing your heat is very important, I would think. In a worst case scenario, the heat pump may not work at all and your electricity bill will go through the roof.
I'm still on the fence between heat pumps and IR. EVM did not mention the servicing costs of heat pumps or their longevity but at a recent trade show I was talking to a supplier of IR panels and they claimed their product life would be significantly longer than any heat pump (but they would say that) and that heat pumps need servicing. My experience of airco is limited to my cars but both of my cars with airco have had to have expensive fixes to the airco as they aged, this suggests that indeed a system with moving parts and fluids is less reliable than something with no moving parts. I have yet to have trouble with a fridge and that is essentially the same technology so I am not sure how much I should worry.
I wonder what the outside temp would be when the cop drops to a point where it is not effective heating.
I'm building a storage tank in my basement and running dump loads from my PV excess into it. This way I keep all my produced energy in my environment and not sent to the grid. I'm shutting off all my interties as my energy provider is only paying me wholesale rates for what I produce once a year with no interest.
I don't know yet if it will be effective enough to tie into my radiant floors yet.
Just to correct one thing, depending on the geometry of your home, yes you need a buffer tank between the ASHP and your radiators, its basically a water storage volume that is used to feed the heat pump with water that is then circulated round the hot water tank and radiators. The correction point is that the buffer tank doesn’t have an immersion heater in it, only the hot water tank has. That immersion heater in the hot water tank is used to heat the hot water tank up every week to above 80 degrees to ensure that there’s no risk of legionnaires disease etc from the hot water (as the ASHP normally only heats the hot water to 55 degrees)
@@NickAskew Now you mention it ... we have about 20 - 30 far infra red panels at work (in place of tiles in suspended ceiling), they've been there for 10 years ... I can't remember us having had a single maintenance issue.
I recently converted a garage into a small apartment and installed infra red underfloor heating. It provides a lovely even heat throughout. It's 80 watts per SQ m and it won't break the bank.
Wait a year, and please report your findings
I understand far infrared works most efficiently by converting to low infrared when hitting an object. So unfortunately, underfloor infrared hits carpet, or floor boards, then converts, so in theory anyway little or no far infrared hits body. The under carpet/under floor far infrared is heating the whole room, negating the savings and principle of far infrared heating, Unless far infrared waves can be measured sneaking past the floor boards or the carpet threads. But people love their underfloor infrared, it would be nice to apply some sensible research to the easy claims. As usual, the easy things are easy, and the harder things are hard. The sellers dont offer a cost comparison, they only want to make a profit.
One thing to consider is if you do work out that infrared panel installation is much cheaper than heat pump, you can use the left over budget for solar panels, which quite dramatically alters the long term costs equation.
A good tip for others but EVM has solar and battery already. Don't think he can fit any more panels to his house.
Not really you can't use PV to run the panels at night when you need the heat the most and IR takes A LOT of energy because of its low efficiency, which takes it away from other house needs and battery charging.
@@mosfet500 panels are 100% efficient. Same as a heater fan. They're not pow efficiency like a gas boiler, for comparison sake which is
@@chrischild3667 Low efficiency RELATIVE to heat pumps which have a COP of two to three times IR. So if, for example, you ran radiant floor off a heat pump water heater, you would have much greater efficiency. Overall you might even save cost over a HP's initial cost and maintenance but you would use more energy and create more pollution.
@@mosfet500 thanks for clarifying your post.
Good choice after buying a couple and installing them on the roof of a garage and garden Room I would they heat the user but do nothing to warm the room up and it used a lot of electric
I would be interested to learn what your expected energy use is for heating in the cold months. Have you factored in the additional batteries required to avoid paying for peak rate electricity?
Yes he did
Is it possible to use an air source heat pump to run a warm air heating system? I'd rather have a few small air vents and ducting under the floorboards than install massive radiators or underfloor heating through the house which they say is optimal for heat pumps.
You can get air to air heat pumps. A friend of ours had a gas to air system in the 1970s with vents in the floor but didn't really like it. Found too much convection air flow and noise. I would also caution against obscure makes or technologies due to lack of local service snd repair. That will change with time though.
If you already have solar panels, why aren't they also being used to heat the hot water in a cylinder tank. This is a no brainer that rarely gets mentioned.
I'd also prefer to only heat the room to 18°C than heat it to 20 and have to open a window
Thanks for the video. I install IR panels and also have some in my own home. I think you were maybe over-egging the installation costs and inconvenience a bit to be honest. Compared with installing a new central heating system the disruption would be fairly minimal. There havent yet been enough studies to show relative efficiency but here are some things that are worth considering:
- we need to break free from this cultural acceptance that we have to have one solution that provides both heating and hot water. We are conditioned to accept this due to our long standing love affair with gas boilers. I truly believe this is one of the reasons why ASHPs get so much publicity - it's easy for people to understand as it provides heating and hot water, same as the boiler under the stairs. The moment we break free of that conditioning then we can see that there is no reason why we can;t have a separate solution for our heating (eg. IR panels) and our hot water (eg. Sunamp heat battery).
- ASHP's are efficient, that is true. However, as with all forms of water based heating they require a long run up to get the space warm. This encourages you to have the heating on/ASHP running even when the space is not occupied. This doesn't FEEL like an efficiency. This feels wasteful. IR panels on the other hand actively encourage you to be more conscious of your energy usage. Why heat a space that isnt being occupied for large portions of the day when teh space can heat up within 15 minutes using an IR panel. Look at how you use the rooms in your house: Bedrooms at night (where a lower maintained temperature is acceptable - say 16 degrees), bathroom for an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening, lounge for a few hours in the evening. Working from home? Just heat the space you need to occupy. Have a small panel overhead in your designated working from home space - hell, even put it on for a bit in spring and autumn if we get a cold snap.
Water condensation on walls if walls are cold? Mold?
That's really helpful Chris. I have a 150+ year old two-up two-down terraced cottage, with low ceilings. It's never had gas and existing heating is old Economy 7 storage. I'm planning to renovate and to block up the small fire place, and it seems that IR panels for heating might be ideal.
@@daveg56 go for it. And if you live in Surrey or surrounding area give me a shout
@@stapo101 Appreciate your offer, am up in Bucks with a good sparky on hand.
@@sologog8129 That's exactly were deep IR panels are better than any central heating. Convection rada heat the air, when hot moist air meets the cold wall you get condensation/ mold. With IR the surface of the wall heats up first, so it's actually recommended for houses with damp issues.
For me if I was getting infrared panels installed I think I would get the CH system drained down and leave the radiators installed in case I decided to get an ASHP later. If you install the infrared panels on the ceiling then cant you put the cable through a hole in the ceiling behind the panel? Then you wouldn't see it.
I find the love for IR heating bizarre, not something I want in my home! I want to heat the fabric of the building properly, ASHP for me
I have 500w oil heaters 'hidden' in main rooms. During the day when there is plenty Solar, these are switched on to overheat the room to around 26 degrees. Once they are switched off, room easily maintains temp of around 20 to 22 degrees until early hours of the morning. The furnishings and walls are storing heat from earlier. Without and using CH as normal, chairs are around 13 degrees and room quickly cools when boiler off. Using furnishings to store heat, chairs are around 19 and if boiler needed, a 40 minute run is enough.
@@leet3707 I do the same with my IR panels. If the sun is out, I switch my panels on remotely to heat the fabric of the house. I don't like exporting electricity if I can help it.
With an existing wet heating system in a well insulated home an air to water heat pump makes good sense for all the reasons you say in this video.
However, there might be more to infrared panel efficiency and all is not as it seems.
My home is a 1st floor flat in an old house dating from around 1910. All my walls are external except for 3 metres that border the communal hall. Walls face all aspects, north, south, east and west. The west facing wall gets no sun in winter months. No insulation, lots of large windows and 2.6 metre ceilings. There's no gas into the building, although there are still remnants of the pipes from the original gas lights in the walls. Consequently heating has been electric panel heaters on the walls. It's difficult and expensive to heat.
I've replaced the panel heaters with infrared panels. 6.5kW of panel heaters have been replaced with 2.8kW of IR panels. Bathroom and bedroom location of the panels was easy. Directly replacing the existing heaters worked which made wiring to the existing heater power outlets easy. Their locations on the wall covered the whole rooms without causing heat shadows. The large open plan living area was more difficult and panels were mounted on the ceiling.
Heating bills are lower and the flat is easier to heat. So despite both filament panel heaters and infrared panels being nearly 100% efficient the lower power IR panels work better. the rooms feel cosier.
My unscientific explanation is that the IR panels cut out the middleman, the air. The heat goes directly to the things and people in the room cutting out the middleman. There must be losses in the transfer of heat from a panel heater to the air then people and things. In an older building that air has lots of ways to try and escape as well. Also, cold walls, especially the bathroom used to suffer light mould growth in the winter and that's gone.
The only thing that seems to be a bit difficult is controlling them. Thermostat control is monitoring the air which is the last thing to warm up so I find myself setting it high initially then, after a bit of time feeling too hot and turning it down. They need a better control system but I'm not sure what.
It's difficult to compare infrared to heating systems we know and for that reason they will struggle to sell themselves. It's a bit like comparing a muscle car to a lotus. They both get to 60MPH quickly but have very different ways of doing it.
Goodness me...installation of infra red does not cost thousands of pounds. Installation of cables into ceiling voids and then wiring them up is commonplace and normal for electricians. The thing you're missing totally is that when you take those radiators out, you suddenly get all that wall space to put furniture against. No more avoiding radiators or pipes. Your comments about holes in the floor are just daft. Once the pipes are cut off leave them where they are and plug the holes. Try shutting a few doors and you'd be amazed how much heat and therefore cold air doesn't mix.
I don’t want holes in my floor, plugged or otherwise. And electricians ain’t cheap. Especially over an entire house.
aren’t there a couple of fundamentals? one that IR is direct heating so will only ever be 100% efficient not >100% which an ASHP should be. Also doesn’t cover your HW needs so will anyway be additional costs for that (where an ASHP may be also able to ‘charge’ your HW cylinder overnight on off peak)
We have far-infrared panels at work. Suspended ceilings, the panels are just "ceiling tiles", very convenient to alter when we move a partition wall etc. (a wet systems would be a nightmare to change). We found that people's legs / feet were cold, under their desks and out of direct line from panels ... solved that with an additional small panel under the desk. Works well for us in that situation
I have a 170 watt under the desk model from Heating Green
I fitted two panels into my house last august and did not use gas for heating during the winter. I live in a modern small 2 bed mid-terrace house which is very well insulated. The panel in the living room did most of the heating for the house and I kept track of its energy use via a smart plug. The panels heated the rooms and kept the room very near the set temperature. They turn on for short periods via a thermostat and the objects in the room retain the heat for a long time. With radiators, I found the temperature dropped very quickly once the heating turned off and this is one of the biggest advantages I've found with infrared. The heat does indeed stay within the room for the most part as it's the objects in the room which are heated and not the air directly. The heat for me is far more natural and pleasant.
Maybe try one before deciding to spend money for the whole house. You are thinking of one already in the Cinema room so it would not be wasted.
The only downside has you pointed out is the hot water but there are options for that too. I’ve got a small 1.5kW water heater in the bathroom with a 5L tank for example.
I’m thinking of getting air conditioning which can provide both cooling and heating has I find my house is hard to cool in summer but easy to heat in winter. Air conditioning is an air-to-air heat pump which seems better to me that air-to-water which then goes back to air via radiators.
I was trying to ask a sales person about IR panels and thermostats. I don't understand how that works. I mean with radiators the air in the room is warmed up and when that reaches the set temperature then the radiators are turned off. But with IR it is the objects in front of the panel that are heated so how does the thermostat know when to turn off? If it waits for the air to be warm then that means the objects are now dissipating the heat into the room (as they will) and they have essentially taken the roll of the radiators.
@@analogueavenue I've mounted my panels on the wall and have a cable coming down to a nearby socket. This is not an issue for me.
@@NickAskew The air does indeed warm from the objects in the room and the thermostat works from the air temperature. You need the air to warm but as the many objects in the room give off the heat slowly compared to the one radiator giving out lots of heat quickly. I've found the thermostat needs setting lower and I've used less kWh in total.
Following up on the thermostat question, I had a similar thought myself and I think the Herschel or Jigsaw interviews on FullyCharged discussed this. It seems most people find a setting 1-2 degrees lower provides the same comfort level. Also, they have an efficiency of about 130% (from memory) when measured as a whole house system because of things like the retained heat dissipation when they’re turned off. The bathroom is done now with a Herschel wall towel panel and I’ll be doing the rest of the upstairs before this winter. My only real concern today is whether the hallway radiator will try and work harder because of the lower air temperature on the landing. Thought?
@@paulwilletts5268 The objects within a room receive of the heat and slowly transfer it to the air in the room. I have a cat and never close the living room door so she can move around freely. I’ve found the heat does stay mostly within the living room.
Sorry to get all techie but here’s a little basic physics. Energy is not lost or created, it just moves from one object to another until all objects are equal in temperature. Therefore if you have something cold in a room, the whole room gets colder and the one object gets warmer. So keeping the heat within a room is the best practice for heating and you should always look at insulation and draft proofing first.
Now if you heat the objects in a room via IR panels, they will transfer some of that heat to the air in the room. Conversely, if you heat the air in a room some of that heat transfers into the objects in the room. Both methods heat the room and both method are most effective when you can maintain the heat instead of allowing the room to cool when not in use and then putting lots of energy into heating it again to being it up to temperature. If a room is not use often, like Andy’s Cinema room, then IR would heat the people directly but the room may not feel comfortable for some time.
The panel in my living room during winter came on maybe less than 10% of the time (many days much less) and kept thing nice.
For me, a few hundred pounds on a panel to try was better than a few thousand on heat pump that may not work well due to needing to upgrade radiators etc. I would say, try an IR panel before dismissing them outright.
Tube heaters are the best eco solution, descrete too!
We live in a village with no gas supply so our heating was provided by an oil tank & oil boiler. When the oil tank died I installed an ASHP system as (a) £10k grant was available, (b) long term want to move to electric heating and away from fossil, (c) oil tank regulations meant that I’d have to put the new oil tank in the front garden to be sufficiently away from buildings, boundaries, sheds, etc.
A few points to follow up on: at least with my (LG) system I don’t have the option to control when the hot water is heated by the ASHP. If the tank temperature drops below a certain level the ASHP will fire up and heat up the hot water automatically so we always have a full tank of hot water. There’s no option to heat the water with cheap overnight electricity. Also do consider that the ASHP is less efficient if it has a big temperature gradient to heat over, i.e. during the day outside air temp is warmer, there is therefore less energy required to heat the water to 55 degrees. Overnight when its cold outside there will be a bigger temperature differential to overcome and the ASHP will run for longer and cost more to heat the same water up.
Our heat pump installer recommends that you keep the heat pump on all the time as the house is then kept an even efficient temperature, very much matching the “always keep the house warm” model that EVM is looking for. Be aware though of the running costs of doing this. Yes the house is then always at a constant temperature and the ASHP isn’t having to warm the water up from cold to 55 degrees, BUT energy is always leaking out of the house and the heat pump is running for longer to replace that energy and so its a balance of what is more efficient.
In February to run the ASHP 24 hours a day the ASHP was using 60-80kW of energy a day. Plus we didn’t like the house being so warm overnight, couldn’t sleep !
We quickly changed to running the ASHP only in the evenings and the electricity usage dropped dramatically. In February, running the ASHP from 4-11pm used about 30kW a day, in March it was 25kW, and April (only 7:30-11:30) it was 18kW a day. So basically I found it much more efficient to only run the ASHP when we needed it in the evenings to warm the house up, and rely on the retained heat in the house for the rest of the day. In summer we are down to about 2kW a day for just hot water.
We have a large house, energy rating C, but required a 18kW (2x 9kW) ASHP system to meet the energy demand. Overall I estimate we will use about 5,000kW a year for the ASHP, costing about £1,300 which compares favourably with £1,600 for running the oil boiler. When we get a storage battery this will reduce the running costs further as we shift to being able to use stored solar and overnight electricity
I have a LG Therma V 7kw air to water heat pump and there is no problem to setting the timer to heat the hot water during the cheap rate. I stop the heat pump being able to heat the water at 16.00hrs and set the timer to come on at 03.00. By this time the water is below the cut in temp and the heat pump heats up to set point. After that the heat pump can come on at any time during the day as required. Hopefully the sun is shining and it then uses the panels and the batteries. With our usage the water heats again just after lunch so twice a day in total. I hope this helps.
@@savute Thank you, I stand corrected. On my LG Therma V 9kW system, I’d been round the menu’s but the Timer menu says “locked” so I didn’t think I was able to set times for the hot water. More fiddling using your input I found the Schedule option allowed me to set a schedule to turn hot water on at 3am and turn it off at 6pm (in summer) and 4pm (in winter). I didn’t know I could do this !
My comments about the ASHP being less efficient overnight when the outside air is cooler I think still apply, but I have set this up and will see how much electricity it uses over the next couple of weeks to see if it’s materially different. It will behave more like a conventional boiler system with the hot water being allowed to cool down more as its used in the evening and then only boosted late at night. During the day if we use a lot of hot water and the temperature falls in the tank it will still be reheated (unless its after 4pm/6pm).
I don’t believe it’s possible to change the time that the weekly sterilisation heating is performed though?
Hi @@geoffreycoan
Hi Geoffrey, I am glad i have been able to help you. The LG controller menu is a nightmare and it has taken me a long time to more or less understand it. You can set the sterilization cycle for any time you want, i have mine in the cheap rate immediately after the hot water heating time. Just experiment with the times to make sure you do not encroach on the expensive electricity. I assume you know how to get into the main menu with all of the setting parameters, if not scroll to menu and press OK you will see in the bottom right a small series of numbers (mine is 3.05.6a) this is my password 3056. yours may be slightly different. Now keep pressing the up arrow until you see the screen to enter your password. once you have done this you have all the technical settings. Everything in here takes a bit of time to digest. The sanitary setting you need to scroll down quite a bit. Until you are familiar with anything, take a note of the setting before you change anything, then you can reset to this if what you do does not work. I am all electric and my elect bill for 12 months was £1056.05. To give you some idea of hot water cost, i timed my heat pump the other day, as i was standing beside it when it started to heat the water. It took exactly 17 minutes. With a bit of sun my solar panels and batteries will carry this without using any grid power. The £1056.05 was before the panels and batteries were fitted. Last month was the first bill after fitting the panels and batteries, and the bill was £14, the credit for power fed into the grid was £18. There are many ways to save money, the only problem many of them require you to spend money. If you need anything i will help if i can.
Just had my ashp fitted really pleased with it we will see how good it is in colder weather 😀
Ah, me again 🙂. At about 11:00 minutes you talk about on and off peak. It's one of my real frustrations, here in the Netherlands they are starting to say that we should no longer be getting paid as much for the electricity our panels generate. Some say this is fine and others (like me) find it is just dissuading people from investing in solar. However the latest thing is that the grid provider is now complaining that we are generating too much electricity from the panels. This is obviously during the day, so my suggestion to them is that if supply outstrips demand then perhaps they should have a lower tariff during the day and a higher one at night.
I am expecting that we will get time-of-use tariffs ... in Summer when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing then the cheapest rate will be "mid day", rather than over night - when we get benefit from North Sea wind electricity and usage is low. Might also be that we will be incentivised to discharge EV batteries (V2G) at times of peak requirement ... and fill them back up when electricity supply is over produced.
Would need to match generation tho
I'm hoping my gas boiler lasts a few more years to give me the time to make the decision. ASHPs are extremely expensive, and with more and more people fitting them, I'm concerned that the installers won't have as much time to make the required calculations for a good installation and will instead rely on rules of thumb which will leave houses either not sufficiently heated or paying way more than necessary on heating bills. IR panels look interesting to me so I'm going to give one a trial run this winter. My bedroom is always pretty cold, so I bought one (of the correct output for the size of the room) for about £200 and have it set up and ready to go. This winter I'm going to give it a thorough test to see how well it performs and how much energy it uses. I gave it a quick test on the day it arrived and the initial signs weren't great - the room barely got any warmer after an hour's use and, as expected, it used about 600W of electricity. At that rate, it would end up being phenomenally expensive to run the panels as the primary source of heating for the house - around 40p per hour just to heat my living room.
But that wasn't the best test as it was on a day that heating wasn't required, so I'll wait and see how it performs in the cold weather at the end of the year before making any real judgements.
As much as I like the idea of ditching gas and going fully electric, with the addition of solar panels and batteries further down the road, I'm only going to do it if it is financially viable. Otherwise, sorry to all those fossil fuel haters out there (me included!), but I'll be sticking with burning dinousaurs.
>> the room barely got any warmer after an hour's use and, as expected, it used about 600W of electricity
You should feel warm in the room (e.g. if sitting in there), but far infra red panels won't heat the air in the room much. Legs under a desk is a problem as they will not be in line from the panel (a second small panel under the desk would solve that - e.g. if bedroom is used as home-office).
@@ecok I was under the impression that the IR panels heat up the surfaces and then the surfaces radiate the temperature back into the room to heat up the air. That didn't happen within an hour's test, which means they'd have to be run for a lot longer for that effect to work, so would cost a fortune. I'm still going to give it a proper test in the winter, but I'm a lot more sceptical about them now.
@@bujin1977 Yes, that's quite right. The air won't warm up much / slowly, but you will feel warm from IR heat, so I think the test you need is whether you feel warm rather than whether the air is warm. If the air temperature is a few degrees colder than normal you should feel comfortable ... but if the air is much colder than that you won't ... and if you need the air to heat up, in order to be comfortable, then I doubt this is any different to a fan heater (in terms of energy). IR will heat the surfaces, they will heat the air, and eventually the air will be warm - so IR is basically only any good if you can drop the air temperature a few degrees and just make the people in the room feel comfortable.
Did you consider maintenance costs, renewals, servicing etc in your comparison? Presumably you have a safe, accessible space outside where the heat pump can be placed and not cause any nuisance to anyone? In terms of faff of installation there will be wiring and plumbing work associated with a heat pump, I can’t remember the size of the circuit required but not insignificant if my memory isn’t playing tricks. You didn’t say where your consumer unit was, presumably close to the proposed site of the heat pump?
I think you nicely captured the main benefit of a heat pump in that you can trickle heat in continuously at relatively low temperatures and hold a comfortable air temperature and heat hot water efficiently. In the spring, when the weather is variable and you get cool days but free infrared energy sporadically coming in through the windows, you’d probably end up opening some windows to dump some of the warmed air? Or worse, reverse the heat pump to cool it down? That wouldn’t look so good on an efficiency calc but I guess you rationalise it based on that only being for a few months of the year? Just a few thoughts…
We’re seriously considering IR as right now we have no CH or associated plumbing at all. I’ve looked into A2A but fear they are very expensive an option (£20K is our very rough estimate we were given recently). IR is cheap and we have solar coming.
If only I could find decent priced IR with app control..
You need to be looking at the long term COP of heat pumps. True COP is closer to 2. And heat pumps run at a lot lower temperatures so you better buy a coat.
I use 2x 1.7kw panels to heat 65m2.
Don't do it!! It's costs so much more then a gas boiler, in our old house I payed £65 a month £45 electric & £20 gas, our new house has a Samsung air source heat pump, we're on a cheaper tariff here aswell our bill is £150 a month in the winter, now its about £110 summer, not looking forward when our cheap tariff ends in October 🤦 miss really hot radiators to, they say leaving running all the time, no we saved £2 a day by cutting the power to the system at night, plus we don't trust it, it set on fire one night outside my little ones room, We're getting a log burner soon to save money for the winter
Have you considered keeping the ch system & gradually adding Far IR panels to eg bathroom & lounge only, with PIR detectors to only come on if people are in the room, whilst turning the rads in those rooms down very low.
Far IR would work well with your battery backed solar panels as they are fairly low drain kW.
I have taken the plunge and Octopus Energy installed my Daikin Heat Pump about three weeks ago. This was a replacement for an 18kW gas boiler. The heat calculations showed we needed 6.6kW and therefore have 7kW installed. The calculated kWh ) annum were almost spot in to our actual usage. We had already installed solar and an Eddi so didn't necessarily need hw from heat pump. We hadn't used gas in last twelve months. Going forward will use solar during day and schedule heat pump on octopus go in winter. I did look at infrared and trialled 500w portable . We found the panel good to top-up living room in evenings on cold nights (only used about 1-1.5 kWh ) . Agree that heat pump efficiency is important our predicted sCOP is 3.4 . Our costs after grant were £6k for heat pump and IR was likely to cost £6.6k plus installation. I therefore concluded like you that installation and running costs in a whole house basis didn't quite work but using IR in specific location does.
Radiation inverse square law makes IR heating seem like a bad idea. We have a 3 zone A2A heat pump and it's amazing. Three sides of our open floor plan house make the heating even. Our south facing sunroom is the only side without a wall mount cassette head. Every house is different.
The pump will need to be replaced in 10 to 15 years. You’re infrared panels will not.
I bought an IR panel to see how well they work. Pretty useless for heating purposes. I use it as a towel warmer.
Spot on. In my case they were an expensive mistake. The only thing they're fit for is a skip.
For ceiling mounted infrared panel, would you feel hot head and hair but cold feet?
In cinema room, can’t you get heated chairs? It would be direct heat transfer to your body so even more efficient than IR heat panel?
Infrared panels heat objects so as long as it has been sized correctly it would heat the floor, seats etc not just the top of your head.
@@chrislux12 Yes, I understand the principle from its marketing…. But my experience is different.
I have old tube style IR heater in my shower room, only turned on in winter when getting out of shower. I feel it is very directional. Are IR panels the same?
So it would need to be turned on hours before using the cinema room? How long does it need to heat up all the objects?
I’m probably waaaay off, but wouldn’t a cheap fan heater be more efficient because it blows hot air directly at the person when room is being used? (I like warm feet)
I'd combine infrared with the radiators. Set the boiler thermostat on 17 and use your infrared panels on the place where you sit down. Use a light-infrared panel variant above that couch. You don't need an electrician to install an infrared panel.
Love the Heat geek channel. In the process of buying a new build which has a heat pump installed and it has been great for putting the builders through their paces with questions. (Will get a local company to check over the system is set up how they have said as want a solar panel quote as soon as I have completed)
We have had infrared panels for more than 5 years and they are fabulous, reasonably economical and silent.
Also no moving parts.
And far infrared panels do not need yearly servicing and are no fuss to install, even in a 200 year old house.
We've been going through the same struggle trying to choose a Heat Pump or IR panels to replace our gas central heating, the difference we have is that we have forced air gas central heating. It's fast at heating up the house, but forced air heating is noisy and drafty. Radiators aren't very popular here in New Zealand. The options for us are, replace our gas furnace with a heat pump, which means putting pipes down the outside of the house from our loft to the outdoor unit, and we would also need to upgrade all of the ducting, which is fine for gas, but too narrow for a heat pump. The brings me to something about your install, I assumed that you would need to replace all of your radiators, because a heat pump can't heat the water as effectively as gas? I like the idea of IR panels with their radiated heat rather than blown air, but we discovered too that the installation cost was through the roof, and my wife also isn't sure about having white panels on the ceiling in every room. We can't install radiators because that would be as much disruption and installation cost as the panels. The other option is when the gas furnace deos fail, we just replace it with another one. The price difference between gas and a 400% efficient heat pump here in NZ isn't very difference. We also heat our hot water with an instant gas hot water boiler.
The is a lot of talk about efficiency but efficiency will not always equal cheaper.
You can have solar panels that powers a 600w LiFePO4 Battery Generator that will then run a 300w IR panel all night
for the next 10 years for the cost of £500-£750 or 7p a day.
I have followed you and your decision making for years and have loved that you do the research and then share your thought processes. We have bought most of the same technology that you have in the past but sadly on this topic I have to respectfully disagree. We had a couple of quotes for ASHP and even without replacing all the microbore pipe work the quote a year ago was £16 k. So the system would not keep us as warm as we like and reaslistically to install the bigger rads required and rip out and replace the microbore it would cost us even more. We would not see payback in our already elderly lifetime. I absolutely hate to say this but we have simply gone for a new efficient gas boiler and will be installing a couple of IR panels in the living room (so we don’t have to heat the whole house) and my office. We live in a 15 year old mid terraced and very well insulated house but the ASHP would not work here and would be very noisy in our small garden.
I expect your 15 year old build (or even a typical mega-builder property today) is nothing like as well insulated as it could have been - e.g. to Passive Haus standard - which would need no boiler nor wet system, and virtually no heating at all (3 bed passive house needs about 1kW heating on coldest winter days), which I think would be a better solution than all the housing stock we throw up in the UK. Right-first-time would be much better than having to upgrade it all later ...
Getting real benefit for spending your money is fantastic ... but forget about payback ... "payback" is a nonsense issue that we all get drawn into. How much is a new kitchen ... and what's the payback? How much to decorate the house ... and what's the payback? How much for a new sofa ... and what's the payback? How much for a new car ... and what's the payback? How much for a family holiday ... and what's the payback? How much for meals out or trip to the cinema ... and what's the payback? Using your money to improve your heating system, especially if means reduced energy use is great for you, great for the country and great for the planet ... that's the payback!
Interesting. I live on my own so i only need to heat where i am. I have electric shower and little need for hot water from taps. I find my radiators far more ugly than a panel. i prefer a panel on the ceiling to a radiator on the wall, space saving. No Liquids to leak!. Solid state no noise. No maintenance costs. My radiator system would need serious upgrade to install HP. With grants HP maybe cheaper. Good video though, each home is different and as long as we dont burn fossils :)
Hi, I'm going through a similar process with my house looking to go electric and cut gas off over the coming years. When I look at heat pumps to replace the boiler, they seem very expensive for what they are ... Ok fair enough, but I keep wondering and considering air to air instead. Grants aside, a heat pump via rads will easy cost us iro £10k. We can go air to air for half that and have the advantage of summer cooling. We have solar and already divert elec to heat our water.
I hardly hear anyone talking about air to air. What am I missing?
They unfortunately do not qualify for government subsidy payments.
@@savute yes I know, but my limited man maths makes its cheaper to install air to air than air to water even with the air to water grant (excluding hot water supply)
@@nicdensley4104 I would have looked seriously at air to air if they were included in the grant. I installed 5 in our house in South Africa, and being sun lovers we used them more for heating in the winter than for cooling. Contrary to what people think of Africa, Johannesburg can be very cold in the morning and evening with frost in the morning being common. They kept the house nice and warm and the heat is almost instant. If you want to install them yourself the problem here is you need a F certificate.
They might not qualify for grants. But Air To Air ASHP are simple to install, a lot cheaper to operate than twin cycle Wet systems. Air conditioning, is going to be, increasingly important in the coming decades...
@@Charlie-UK Air is a bad conductor - science proved sorry...
Has a solar, load-diversion controller / immersion heater solution been considered for hot water ?
Especially given the ability to electrically heat the water during off-peak times ( if you have such a tariff ) ?
My device is called "Immersun" which is since discontinued, now there is the "MyEnergi Eddi " which works seamlessly with the Myennergi Zappi charger and accessories...
Pointless with a battery really. That takes up all the solar.
@@ElectricVehicleMan MyEnergy Zappi can be set up to divert part to water heating & part to eg.car charging.
There are two infrared heating units in the lounge area/room at the back of our church. In winter these have been used rather than heating the whole church.
I do not find them pleasant to use! The heat they give is related to how near you are (from my science lessons in the dim and distant past, I seem to remember that halving the distance to them quadruples the increase in heat - someone correct me if I'm wrong). This means that if you are sat in a meeting and are very near them, you quickly get too hot (think midday sun), but if you sit farther away then you take longer to warm up, so the units can't be turned off because some people are too hot. The only thing you can do is move away from their direct line of heating.
I'd be interested to hear anyone's recent experience with infrared panels (the units above are quite old - perhaps things have improved?)
I think you are right, the problem lies in having the panels too far apart. For an even warming by infra red radiation you could consider yourself to be on the edge of a sphere with the IR heater in the centre. The inverse square law you remember is really obvious if you imagine many people around a traditional single bar electric radiator. The intensity of the light from a point source is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the source. Nearest is warmest.
If they "glow red" then they are infra red, rather than far infra red - that would definitely be different, but principle of near/warmer still applies. I think that's down to design though, and also cost, so might be the system design in the church was a compromise on capital cost.
no whiteboard of truth ?? you could have used the sofa of sucess instead :) :)
In canada, a lot of people love the look of radiators. There are companies that refurbish radiators with electrical elements. So you keep the radiators, but replace the plumbing with electrics to connect them up. Now every radiator is it's own zone. There's no way it will ever be as cheap as a heat pump, but as supplemental heating in a prticular area, it can make sense.
EVM do you have a hot water tank.? you already have solar panels so get yourself a Solar iBoost to heat your water for free. And as you have a home storage battery, in the evening you can hit the 'boost' button and it'll top up your hot water (if it needs it) in only minutes. We've had ours for over 4yrs now and its saved us an inordinate amount of electricity and given gallons of hot water.
No need as the battery soaks up more than the panels produce.
You've said you'd need a spark to run power to each ceiling for IR panels. Yet you'll also have to pay 10s of K for an ASHP, by the time you've upsized the pipework and rads (potentially) and the equipment itself..
The point I was making was that they’re seen as a cheap install, when they’re not. Cheaper, but not cheap.
@@ElectricVehicleMan however, to be fair, evm, some people will be happy to simply screw them to the wall and plug them into the nearest wall socket! So it CAN be a very cost effective solution......
You can get infra red panels that are pictures or mirrors…..heat pumps are fine on a new build that is made for a heat pump…..but on existing UK properties they aren’t so good.
I think im going to go down this road: heat pump ducted fan unit in the loft (with heat recovery) providing hot/cold air into the bedrooms. Air con fan units in the downstairs rooms supplying hot and cold air. For hot water, use solar to completely heat a cylinder every day. Maybe keep the boiler snd rads for a few years just in case. I dont understand the british obsession with sticking with radiators.
Solar won’t do hot water in winter in the UK.
I am looking at fitting one IR panel in our kitchen extension which haemorrhages heat from every orifice and has one wet radiator that is clearly inadequate. However my wife asked me a question that totally foxed me, when you leave food to cool in a rack, for instance biscuits, does the IR panel heat them up.
It won't even heat your room up. Let alone your food
This is great, thorough thinking around heating. We are currently looking at the heating solution in our 14th century church and it's a biggie. The (oil) boiler died and the tank needed replacing, the (victorian) radiators are badly placed and the pipework is broken (unded the floor) in many place, oh and there is no insulation and the roof is 30-40 metres high.
So, given all that we are looking at under floor heating with some form of heat pump to get the building above the dew point 24/7 (needed to prevent the, grade 1 listed, building degrading any further) and then IR heating for when there are people there. Problem is this will cost an enormous amount and we have no funds available so serious fund raising is needed. Currently we have a string of temporary near IR heaters which got us through last winter without having to close so we know they are a possibility for comfort but the need to keep the floor and walls above about 10 degrees all the time is trickier but also ideally suited to a fairly small air source heat pump (ground source is not really an option due to all the archaeology and graves in the church yard).
I am in a likewise situation, except it's a house. Don't worry, the temps can go below 10, why not? I have quite a few centuries old paintings, as well as some centuries old musical instruments including a 4/4 double bass, and they are doing just fine. Humidity must stay right, but old stone structures do that very well.
Thanks for your video and have to say I am somewhat confused as in your previous video you clearly said AHP does not work for you and it’s better to stick to gas boiler for the time being. I also had a look into AHP and found that the COP rating was good in summer around 4:1 but can drop as low to 1:1 in winter which is when you need it most and therefore cost more to run in winter. I noticed that you have been looking at a smaller AHP 7Kw is that because it works better than a larger unit? What size is your Gas boiler you plan to replace?
May I draw your attention to what he actually said; he said, "CAN drop to 1:1", did NOT say drops to 1:1 for the entirety of winter, as you interpret, he said CAN drop, that means, occasionally. In real use, is mostly above 1:1. Only on coldest days does it become 1:1. Better, a high efficiency model can get more heat out of the lowest temperature air. However, it does this by running the fan more, so elec goes up a bit to power that.
Real-world users are reporting that they pay slightly less overall than their old method of heating (unspecified, presumably oil or gas, although it is not identified whether they accounted for the elec use of the fan or pump of their old system when comparing expenses; it may be even cheaper to run a heat pump if they are not paying for the fan pr pump and their elec bill now is still lower, even without a gas or oil bill) ,.
Unfortunately, heat pumps heat slowly, like over an hour if temp starts from cold inside, and so they must be left on at room temp all the time, even at night or at work. Also, people sneak in the air conditioning they never had before. So very comfortable, but always on, no quick body warming by standing in front after being frozen when coming back in from outside, and they offer 'additional feature of air conditioning, and humidification; but not so much on monthly savings.
I think you were over thinking this, panel heating could be the perfect compromise for old houses that cost a lot to heat.
Both is ideal. The infrared panels work well. You can get a picture heater on the wall and heat one room instant for 500 watts instead of 2000 Watts for heat pump that takes twice as long much more energy and wear moving parts.
2000 watts is my heat pump doing the whole house and max. It uses a lot less than that for the whole space so 500W for a room is very inefficient.
I have an infrared heater in my home office. Its on the right side of me so the right side of my face gets really warm while the left does not. It feels very weird. Placement is much more important then people might think. Also i think its bad for my skin.
How far is it from your face?
I think its aprox 2 meters. I know its too close but its a very small room.
Well, I actually hate the idea of heating entire house all the time, especially now when both myself and the wife work from home. Having 2000 square feet to heat up just soy feet in the study don't feel cold is pure madness!
We already did total refurb few years ago and installed new gas boiler... So I'm not too keen on total rip out.
My plan at the moment is too invest in further insulation, get solar panels with battery storage and install IR panels to work in tandem with gas heating during coldest weeks, and alone during 5 and above.
My problems with the heat pump is:
- massive capital expenditure and labor
- 200 pounds a year for servicing!!
- I would need massive rads, mine are all slim now
- even with my new gas boiler it takes ages to heat up the house, it's not going to be better with ASHP...
- per room thermostats and Google assistant control are awesome, and will allow each of us to set temp they like (wife is ok with 15, I need 22 ;)
Like someone else said below - if I'm to spend money it really needs to feel better.
Bigger radiators make gas boiler cheaper too.
@@ElectricVehicleMan Using my own free solar electricity for 90% of heating should be cheaper still, especially with current gas prices. I hope it works out, need to design and calculate the system with Herschel and our local solar guys...
Very informative, I’ve been waiting for that thanks. I’m now looking at ASHP but in a 1930s house the insulation despite being upgraded is pitiful
Unless your ( improved ) insulation can be further improved, you may be on a hiding no nothing. Good insulation is needed for heat pumps. I explored sprayed on foam insulation e.g. in loft but rejected that solution as it now has a very poor reputation, not helped by underfinanced suppliers who tend to go serially bankrupt.
I've just bought a 1930s house that is in need of renovation, including replacing all the double glazing which is end of life, improving roof insulation, fixing electrics, and deciding what to do once I've had the back boiler ripped out. I was going to get a new gas combi (£8k - 10k for installation and conversion) but this video has got me thinking again - is it the right choice? Having said that, @Richard Cope points out that insulation has got to be very good for heat pumps to be effective - and they're so expensive to install. I don't have the £20 - 30k needed (and the rest!).
Why can you not use Infrared to heat water? would it not be easier to be more cost effective
i think i missed the "need" to decommission the radiators? why can't they be left in?
Interesting and balanced video. Like everything, life is shades of grey and all tech has pluses and minuses. You demonstrated that well
i make enough money not to care. convenience is king to me. i just set my entire house to one temp and it stays there all the time. you guys waste too much thought on these unimportant things.
And the prize to the most arrogant person goes to…..
Interesting topic; word of caution on the matter of redundancy, don’t rely on one source for space and water heating especially if the latter is used for showers. If the heat source fails you have lost everything. I have an electric shower now after my last oil combi boiler electrics failed.
1 heat up your house with a tradiational radiator..2 put it to 15 degrees celcius .... and heat the rest of the time with infrared heaters........ 1000 percent cheaper.. gas : 1m3 now 3 euro in the Netherlands. electricity 1kwh now 30 cents in the netherlands.
At about 6:30 you talk about hot water. Our house is three floors and the water heater (currently a combi gas boiler) is on the top floor while the only places that use that hot water are on the first floor (bathroom) and ground floor (kitchen). What I have noticed is that if we have to run hot water in the kitchen, the time to get hot water from the time is fairly long. So we are running away water (actually we try and capture that and put it to use in the garden) and then we get hot water, more commonly we tend to save doing the washing in the kitchen until just after someone has showered so that the time to get hot water in the kitchen is less. Obviously either way a large volume of hot water is going to go cold in the pipes between the top floor and the kitchen. Our alternatives are to install an electric water heater in the kitchen and bathroom, or to move the hot water system from the second floor to the bedroom that is adjacent to the bathroom and above the kitchen. We could simply install a heat pump water heater in the current location (second floor) and use some clever electronics to use solar power to heat that on a sunny day. Some complex calculations need to be done here.
Not really suitable for retro fit, but my house has long pipe runs, the hot water is plumbed as a "loop", and there is a pump. In bathroom there is a switch to turn on the pump (5 minutes or so, or until the "return" detects heat), and only then turn the tap on.
A 6KW heat pump with the rest of your house electrical items will consume 20-25 kWh a day over winter. Your 8kWh battery will NOT cover you all day…. Consider doubling your battery capacity and adding Solar.
Great video and well researched as always. I am also thinking about retrofitting an air source heat pump to my house. I wondered whether you had considered a Tepeo Zero Emission Boiler? This would replace your gas boiler with minimal interruption to the existing heating system in your house. You can charge it on a cheap rate electricity and it provides 40kWh of storage. I would like to see your thoughts on payback of the ZEB v an ASHP. That would be a great video!
It looks like a sun amp? But a bit more expensive.
@@jaydode6601 Sunamp has a maximum storage capacity of 12kWh, which is fine for domestic hot water but too small to provide space heating in most houses. The Tepeo has 40kWh which should meet the space and water heating requirements of many normal size houses. For bigger houses, you can get 100kWh of heat storage using a Caldera heat battery.
You can get more than one sun amp you can have multiple and setup in series. But insulation is the key to any heating system, and it helps to have a small house or flat for this system. I don't know what the average house size is? I just like having any no maintenance or noise (fans) if I want hot water and not costing a huge amount.
@@TheBigT. caldera are just massive for maison and hotel and puplic buildings, love the tech simple and effective but expensive it be great if a couple household got together and share the heating.
Tepeo ZEB and ASHP both uses electricity but ASHP has benefits of the CoP of 3 compared to 1 for the Tepeo so it is likely to cost 3x more to run than ASHP.
I can’t decide whether your clock has run out of battery power or you took the battery out to make editing easier.
Not worked for about 5 years!
(Cheaper running costs too!)
@@ElectricVehicleMan what an amazing answer! I love it.
It's right twice a day!
One of the biggest problem people have is they have become wedded to this ridiculous whole house heating. Let alone to crazy high 20C.
Never used to be that way. Used to be one fire in the main room. Things like cooler bedrooms are actually good for your sleep too.
In part this odd modern attitude is shown by you wearing only a T shirt. I Never have!
I have one wood burning stove. That is it. Only used a few hours in evenings, if it actually gets cold, single figures C, which is very few weeks a year in recent winters. I am retired and live there all the time.
I'm in a t-shirt as it was summer when it was filmed.
You've never worn a t-shirt in summer inside a house becuase it's just warm!?
@@ElectricVehicleMan No. I have never owned or worn one. Wrong generation I guess.
What about the bedroom? If you microzone the bed, you can basically not heat the bedroom ever. During the night in particular this can prevent quite a lot of heat loss, as you probably keep a window open for ventilation (the warm air heated by radiators would escape). The door to the bedroom probably stays closed most of the time, so zoning works. Matter of fact, it SHOULD stay closed for fire safety, if nothing else.
You're simple if you think an electric car will ever work out cheaper than an ICE vehicle.
So when the CEO of VW says they will by 2025/6 you know more than him?
Who’s simple? 🤦♂️
I’m heating my house with 3000 Watts. 6 zones. I’m still on my same tank of oil for the last two years. I used 3/4 tank in that time. House uniform temp is 73 F. Mass is heated / radiated. Not air. The fenestration issues of incoming air is pleasant. Temp doesn’t drop. It’s a pleasant heat. I’m trying different transformers. The system - works really well. I’m not using a panel. I’m using a foil and it’s painted over. Invisible. I’ve pioneered a Carbon Nano tube liquid coating for glass. All windows are coated. 99% UV shield. 90% Heat block in summer. 90% IR Mirror in Winter.
You aren't getting anywhere near 400% efficiency out of a heat pump. Not even close. In extremely perfect laboratory conditions, most heat pumps were shown to give around 125% efficiency.
Mark my words, a decade away or so, you'll be seeing endless adverts for 'were you mis sold an air source heat pump' claims.
I’m getting that now so how’s that work?
And the countries that have ran them for decades, that’s just a myth too?
You’re thinking of these as new tech, they’ve been around ages.
About 4:30 in you say that it is a relatively modern house so you expect to get 400%. I don't understand how the efficiency of the heat pump is related to the style of the house. Surely the pump would be just as efficient attached to a barn, it's just that the heat would immediately escape. However I do like these discussions as we are looking to either go the heat pump or infra red route (or a combination) and the other channel you mention are also really interesting to watch.
The better the insulation, the lower the flow temp can be, the lower the flow temp, the more efficient the heat pump can run.
@@ElectricVehicleMan the lower the flow temp can be for a given radiator size. You can heat a leaking, uninsulated, single glazed, solid walled building with a flow temp of 40 if you’ve got space for large enough rads. The rad sizes determine the flow temp.
@@dorsetengineering And the insulation determines the radiator size (if aiming for low temp). Putting in massive radiators isn’t something most people would consider.
A modern house with good insulation should mean an easier/cheaper install and lower specced heat pump.
@@ElectricVehicleMan swapping a manky old type 11 or a type 21 to a type 22 is usually all that’s required. The latest changes to part L will require proper heat loss calcs and designing for 55 flow anyway so people will get used to larger rads as we move forwards.
@@ElectricVehicleMan ok I get your point now. Obviously you could install a 40 degree system in a barn and the efficiency of the heat pump (the energy output compared to the input) would be identical. However if you want to achieve the result of heating that barn then you would need a higher output temperature and that is where you lose the efficiency. Actually I think most people agree that insulation should be step 1 for every heating type. The lower the required heating, the lower the bill.
heat pumps are ok but when it gets cold they don't work very well. I have had them over the last 20 years in New Zealand. Our climate is better than the UK. We use log burners which makes the house warm, in comparison the heat pumps are just so, so.
@@stevehorner8302 Of course they work in colder climates. Thats why they’re the most common heating type in Scandinavia.
@@ElectricVehicleMan bull shit
@@stevehorner8302 Have you not heard of search engines?
www.euronews.com/green/2023/10/30/do-heat-pumps-work-in-winter-experts-explain-why-nordic-countries-have-installed-the-most-
Took about 10 seconds to find this bullshit. 🤦♂️
Heat pumps makes a lot more sense than IR radiators. However if you went IR why take out the old radiators? Just drain down and leave in place. That would leave the future option of heat pumps without having to put in new radiators and piping them in everywhere.
I agree that heat pump is the way to go. Thoroughly researched on your part. Go for it!
Dutch new homes lose heat leze than 0,5 gr C a day, yours is not very air thight and or well insulated, given the heatlos in a couple of hours. Maybe improve there too?.
It all boils down to unit cost of gas and electric, the current wholesale gas price is 16.48p pkwh so at least 20p pkwh by the time it gets to your house, electric is about 50p pkwh.
Heating oil is very expensive at the moment, about 80p a litre, but that works out at 8p pkwh, 2.5 times cheaper than gas, but by the time you fitted a new boiler and a tank you are looking at around 4k, but payback could be as little as two years.
Solar is useless for heating in the winter, batteries or no batteries.
The only thing i saw that made a bit of sense to me was these electric heat storage units, they store about 50kwh of heat on cheap rate electric and provides CH and hot water just like a normal combi boiler.
It's one unit that's not much bigger than a gas boiler and the only difference is it must be floor mounted, as it's bloody heavy.
They cost about 5k so about the same as a decent battery, If you have solar but no battery this could be a better idea to spend your money on, any spare solar can be fed into the unit and top it up on cheap electric at night.
In the summer you may loose a bit to feed in, but even then you use hot water and have showers, and remember this is 50 kwh the same money will get you about 10 kwh of batteries.
I do wander how long cheap rate electric is going to last.