Restoration is easy.

[Radio Fixer]

If I couldnt do gravity HW and was installing another system I wonder if its worth bothering with a valve or valves? Boiler and pump for the rads and an immersion heater for hot water. Really simple. Dont even need a programmer: time clock for boiler and pump, the boiler has it own stat and the room stat controls the pump directly.

I havent done the sums but for two people only having a few showers a week, and all washers cold fill anyway, the cost of the electricity over using gas maybe minimal.

Gary

[pwdrive]

On the face of it that would work ok but you would need to check out any safety aspects concerning a pumped only system such as possible flow blockage (sludge) pressure relief and auto boiler shut down if things get hairy, I am not a guru on that as all the systems I have done use the HW tank as the main heat sink ie: our woodburner is on gravity HW, CH is pumped, I have a cross flow boiler so no injector tee needed.
Imersion when no kids is ok and won't break the bank, we use ours mainly in the warmer months when woodburner isn't lit, three quarters of an hour switched on does a bath, half an hour switched on does the dishes or a quick wash.

I like Nicks system, our garden is big enough but underground is now mainly taken up with the drainage field for the septic tank effluent, ground source heat pumps are getting quite popular down here as are domestic solar installations and solar farms, could do with a couple of deep fractured holes in the granite as the temp down there is hot, the air temp down the tin mine I worked down was 30 to 40 c in many places.

Lawrence.

[Radio Fixer]

I see no problem Lawrence. There would be the normal feed and expansion tank and it would be just like shutting off one of the valves, in a two valve setup. Used to keep the rad one shut all the time in the summer.

Yes! Nick's heat pump is impressive, neat installation. But as said you need the land (No! not enough) and the number of years (No! not enough) to pay back the high cost of installation.

On changing parts, or stopping leaks I know of two ways and my knowledge is only with non pressurised systems. I used the frozen plug method (gusset of insulation and freezer aerosol) a few times but you need good access to a length of pipe and around motorised valves and thats not normally the case. The other way that came along later, and I havent tried, are two purpose made rubber bungs. One is screwed in the expansion pipe and the other into the outlet from the header tank. I'm told that as air cant get in then the water doesnt come out !! So I was told you can change a rad for example.

But I guess most plumbers are just going to shut off the rads, tie up the ball valve and drain. They dont care if the anti corrosion liquid is lost, most customers wont know they ever had it and probably didnt unless they knew about it and asked.

Gary

[Nick]

Yes! Nick's heat pump is impressive, neat installation. But as said you need the land (No! not enough) and the number of years (No! not enough) to pay back the high cost of installation.

Installation was the same as a standard boiler - the ground-works were done in a morning - I admit, I had the diggers on-site as we were rebuilding the house at the time - 3 x 50mtrs trenches, 1mtr deep, 1mtr wide with 4 inches of sand in the bottom - each trench has 200 mtrs of alkathene pipe laid in a "pushed over slinky" - each trenches' pipes are in parallel and fed back to the heat pump - pipes were in and trenches backfilled by end of same day.

I monitor all power & energy use in the house and log it - for every kWh we put into the system, we get over 3kWh of energy out - a CoP of 3 - the heat pump system, compared as best I can with the previous oil-fired condensing boiler, paid for itself in just under 3 years, 6 months.

Not bad at all... and far far better than normal solar heating (payback about 21 years).

You can also get "air source" heat pumps that do not use underground pipes - not as efficient, but pretty good none-the-less... a heat pump uses normal plumbing (unlike roof-mounter solar heaters) and is generally a "set-and-forget" type system - it learns the thermal characteristics of your property and adjusts accordingly...

I spent a while at the Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales before doing all this - they agree that heat pumps are the only system that make sense both technically and economically on a domestic scale... (forget wind turbines, roof solar cells and electric solar panels - all madness).

EDIT: You do need the right sort of house to get the best from a heat pump - its a very slow & gentle heat - if the house is poorly insulated or draughty then the heat pump is a no-go. When we rebuilt it was to modern insulation standards and the whole of the new part of the property is built as a concealed thermal store - the floors are basically 2'6" thick storage heaters... (block&beam, UFH & screed)

See http://www.heatpumps.org.uk/PdfFiles/The...tPumps.pdf for more info.

[pwdrive]

"I see no problem Lawrence. There would be the normal feed and expansion tank and it would be just like shutting off one of the valves, in a two valve setup. Used to keep the rad one shut all the time in the summer"

That sounds about right Gary, our present system has worked fine so far but as the building has progressed I have replaced the old radiators as we went along which for me means draining down the system which is no problem, the problem arises when the system is re filled as in trapped air. Because the building isn't very high the header tank is barely above the flow and return pipes, originally there was a Baxi open fire back boiler fitted for the HW and CH it worked ok but open fires arn't very efficient, the previous owner had used 15 mm for the main flow and return which ran through the ceiling they then dropped down to each radiator with that bendy 8mm small bore copper pipe.
We decided to replace the open Baxi with a woodburner and also replace the radiators as they were well past it.
In general the 15 mm flow and return pipes that ran through the ceiling were pretty inaccessible for replacement with 22 mm but the T junctions feeding the 8mm pipe to the radiators were, so we left it at 15mm for the main flow and return and changed the T junctions for 10 mm ones and dropped 10 mm copper bendy pipes down to each of the new radiators. All this works fine, the Grundfos CH pump is set to the slowest of the three speeds, in fact the Grundfos is the original as fitted by the previos owners. From the boiler to the CH pump and the CH pump to the start of the 15 mm flow and return (just before it dissapears into the ceiling is 22 mm pipe.
Getting the trapped air out after a drain down and refill normally takes around a week, I always use plenty of inhibitor.

Lawrence.

[pwdrive]

"the floors are basically 2'6" thick storage heaters... (block&beam, UFH & screed)"

Gosh Nick how deep are the beams or/and the screed, the ones we used to put in were around 6" deep with 4" block infill, the usual back then was 75 mm kingspan then 65 to 75 mm screed over the pipes. I suppose the only limit is practicality and load bearing capacity, the thicker the store the longer it takes to initally to get up to temp but once up to temp there's plenty stored.

The plumbing for solar heating panels is not yer standard copper I think it's some kind of stainless they use down here.

For varoius reasons I could not do mass thermal store floors here so I did suspended wooden floor with insulation between the joists. Managed to get 6" of insulation in the walls though.

Lawrence.

[Nick]

The block & beam is about 18", then there is about 6" of screed & UFH. On the underside there is insulation & an air gap which is where the remaining bit comes in. Takes 2 days to heat up, but after that the temperature stays pretty much fixed +/- a degree or so all year round.

On the CoP front, a typical OFCH boiler has an efficiency of between 0.8 & 0.9, which means that efficiency wise, our GSHP is about 3.5 time more efficient. Yes, the pumps aren't cheap, but they typically have zero or very very low maintenance costs over their life and are really simple, proven, technology. The pay-back is very quick...

[pwdrive]

That's certainly a deep beam and block, did you manage to obtain a cold break when fitting the beams or was that loss factored in.

Lawrence.

[Retired]

Hi,

I took Bron over to Boundary Mills in Colne today as planned for some well deserved retail therapy. The journey to Colne was scary with lots of heavy snow falling and the main street in Brierfield near Colne was sheet ice. What a difference the return journey home was; all the ice had disappeared along with most of the snow because it was lashing down with rain. I no longer cared what the weather was doing and was fed up being held prisoner at home because of it.

I've just been catching up on this thread which has rapidly moved forward. What a lot of useful information has been added regarding heating a house. I would never ever allow solar panels to be fitted to our roof as I think them to be nothing other than a gimmick with neighbours copying each other thinking they are missing out. I would be very worried about the attachments causing leaks through the roof and this alone is enough to put me off; living here on the exposed valley side the panels would be subjected to very strong winds.

Wind turbines I also class as a gimmick and would never want to own one unless it was one I had put together from scrap just for the fun of it.

I can see the benefit of installing heat pumps such as shown by Nick. Unfortunately although our rear garden is plenty large enough it is steeply sloping with lots of big trees putting out lots of roots; it's impossible to dig in the garden without hitting roots.

Our recent gas bill was something like £320 which considering Bron and I are at home retired and like to be warm isn't too bad; the central heating sure is convenient and having a combi boiler means constant running hot water when needed. Our boiler has a remote control which remains in the bedroom; we only use the remote for switching the heating on or off as the radiator valves control the room temperatures; all the system is frost protected; the boiler automatically fires up at temperatures below 5 degrees and the radiator valves if turned off are set for frost protection; the entire system works well for us. Apart from the boiler breakdown it is now wonderful to turn on the radiator in the workshop; this quickly brings the workshop up to comfort as I fitted a decent sized double radiator and I'm sure because it is part of the central heating it will be cheaper to heat the workshop this way than previously with electric heaters.

Recently there has been advertisements on TV where a brand new quality boiler is fitted and the cost is spread over ten years this being from £17 per month; we are now paying £21 per month just for boiler insurance so the new boiler and insurance appears to be a terrific bargain?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1tHfd4qIaw

British Gas are always on our street in fact I'm surprised British Gas doesn't have a permanent engineer here; over the last few weeks at least four of our neighbours have had British Gas in. David sums up British Gas very well indeed. British Gas are always available whenever I ring with a problem; the engineers are quick to locate and fix the fault; the engineer fixing our boiler even had the correct diverter valve in his van so our boiler was fired up in minutes; it took him longer to do the safety tests. I doubt I would have saved much money by shopping around but by going straight to British Gas I sure saved myself a great deal of unwanted hassle.

Yes it was the outer electrical part of the diverter valve which failed and this was dead easy to get to being changed in about a minute; the engineer checked his lap top for the price of this item saying it is £100. I'm not surprised because a few years ago I changed the pump and this too cost around £100; it was most annoying at the time because Screwfix sell pumps for less than half this amount but their pumps don't fit. It's a good little money earner for the boiler manufacturers to fit bespoke pumps?

I've forgotten what this thread was about but it's interesting.

Kind regards, Col.

[pwdrive]

Hi Col, keeping the rain out when fitting solar panels on to a roof is no problem if done correctly, it's no different than stuffing an insulated flue up through the roof or anything else that needs flashing such as a chimney stack etc you just have to figure out how and where the water runs or blows.
Lot's are going for solar voltaic down here, I think the idea of generating some of your own power is a good one although I am not absolutely convinced of the design life span of some of these panels, I did consider evacuated tube solar collectors for the hot water but decided against it as we do not have the room for a large scale HW tank, it's a pity because when it's out we get the sun all day on the front slope of the roof.
I, unlike many others like wind turbines, if I had the room I would have a small scale one no problem and convert all my lights to 12v. I know it's a big argument but more renewables will be required that's for sure wether it's liked or not, in my opinion we havn't seen yet the real rise in energy prices which are yet to come, living in old buildings will be for the rich or the extreem poor.
External wall insulation is gathering a pace down here on out dated buildings, outdated being the operative word so far as the consevation of heat goes.
Anyway £320 a year don't seem to bad Col for your gas, it would probably cost more than that if you were wood fired heating. We have bottled gas for the cooking hob that is now £35 a bottle, I remember when it was nine quid, still it lasts from 2 to 3 months.

Lawrence.