Automated Dwelling 2.0 – #45 Actual World Air Supply Warmth Pump Prices for Full Yr & Vitality Knowledge for All Electrical Home – Automated Dwelling

Final August we took a take a look at among the choices that led us to construct a low vitality house. Now that we’ve been via our first full calendar yr, it’s time to disclose our vitality invoice and see how issues are understanding. I’ve separated out figures for the warmth pump versus every part else. However first a bit about our setup.

Financial system 7

As an all-electric home, it was essential to maneuver to an Financial system 7 meter which occurred just a few months after we moved in. This provides us separate Day and Evening charges for our electrical energy. Sadly good meters usually are not obtainable in Northern Eire but so there are at present no choices for half-hour metering, demand aspect response or agile tariffs.

The most effective factor we will do then is to ensure as a lot of our vitality utilization is pushed into the evening price, a 7 hour window which runs from 1am to 8am whereas we’re on GMT and 2am to 9am whereas on British Summer season Time.

All our electrical automobile charging is finished on the evening price and our Siemens good home equipment embody a Delayed Begin perform which has allowed us to set our washer and dishwasher to run in the course of the cheaper price too (we hardly ever want to make use of the dryer as garments dry simply within the heat ambiance in the home).

The graph under reveals nearly a month’s value of knowledge from the superb OpenEnergyMonitor (with extra sensors there’s a selected warmth pump measuring system obtainable too, take a look at this video).

The darkish blue strains right here signify the quantity of vitality we used on the cheaper price, and it’s straightforward to identify the 5 nights that the EV was charged throughout this era.

Throughout the yr a mean of 36% of our consumption was on the evening price, with the height in December at 48%.

Pricing & Masses

We’re on a 100% renewable tariff and whereas the electrons from the wind farms aren’t really flowing to our home, I consider selecting a tariff like this encourages the mills to spend money on extra renewables. And as we’re working our warmth pump, home equipment in addition to charging the automotive at evening, we genuinely are utilizing numerous wind energy. Round 50% of all electrical energy generated right here is renewable already, with targets for 80% by 2030, so identical to with an electrical automobile, an electrified heating system will get cleaner and cleaner over time.

Listed below are the main points of our present fastened price tariff (together with VAT);

• Day Price £0.1699 / kWh
• Evening Price £0.0784 / kWh
• Standing Cost £3.54 / Month

On high of the traditional fridge and freezer masses (each A++ home equipment), we even have numerous safety cameras, a 19″ rack with a server, 48 port PoE Change, NAS, 6-Zone Complete Home Audio amplifier, and MVHR (even our septic tank has a 24/7 draw), so our base load is excessive. The bottom determine I’ve seen from our vitality monitor is round 725 Watts, however extra normally the bottom line appears to sit down round 900 Watts. In order that’s round 22kWh per day earlier than we flip anything on. I’d prefer to look into this base load in additional element this yr and try to scale back it the place attainable.

Heating, DHW & Controls

The home is block development with a 150mm cavity, double glazing and has a B85 EPC ranking which ought to hit an A as soon as we add a photo voltaic PV system. Heating is from this 11kW Hitachi Yutaki M Monobloc Air Supply Warmth Pump which is sited on the rear of the home on the north dealing with storage gable wall.

Our Loxone house automation system controls the warmth pump through a TCP/IP Modbus Gateway (ATW-MBS-02). Each upstairs and downstairs use Roth underfloor heating fed from three manifolds round the home, utilizing Loxone valve actuators.

Loxone brings three, core heating / local weather management features to the system. The Clever Room Controller is accessible from the UI, and is used to view the present room temperature, change the set factors and timing and so on. Then the Clever Temperature Controller works within the background, grouping our rooms and UFH loops, controlling the circulate temperature required with a purpose to obtain the temperatures demanded by the room controllers. Lastly the Local weather Controller turns the warmth pump on and off, whereas additionally contemplating the skin temperature readings from our climate station. The warmth pump itself then does its personal resolution making round when to energy as much as enhance the circulate temps as required.

Inside the home, each Loxone gentle swap has a built-in temperature (and humidity) sensor which we use because the room thermostats. The Loxone system can common values throughout a number of sensors which is useful within the open plan barn for instance.

The Loxone system has been programmed to warmth the home extra on the evening price too, utilizing the thermal mass of our block development, tiled ground and inner stone wall to launch the warmth in the course of the day. Now we have experimented with a few of these methods during the last yr, tweaking issues to maneuver as a lot as attainable into the evening price, while sustaining consolation ranges in the course of the day.

The warmth pump additionally supplies our scorching water right into a Joule 300 litre DWH (Home Scorching Water) tank which is put in under the steps. There could also be a little bit vitality within the ‘Every little thing Else’ a part of the information under, for the uncommon event that the system activates the immersion heater if the warmth pump can’t refill the tank shortly sufficient.

Water heating makes use of a shocking quantity of vitality and warming 300 litres from an ambient of say 16° to our 45° goal makes use of over 10 kWh. The warmth pump’s COP (coefficient of efficiency) means we get round 3 models of warmth for each 1 unit of electrical energy consumed, so we might solely use round 3.3kWh on this instance. A floor supply warmth pump has a good greater COP than our air supply unit.

The system quickly raises our scorching water goal temperature to 55° each morning at 6:00am, whereas we’re nonetheless on the cheaper evening price, getting issues prepared for the morning showers. The goal is then set again right down to 45°. The chrome steel tank is rated to lose round 1° each 4 hours so, if unused, ought to take nearly 40 hours earlier than it cools again right down to our regular 45° goal.

The Loxone system additionally permits us to observe the standing of lots of the heating’s parameters, together with the compressor’s energy, pump velocity, circulate price, alarm standing, outlet and inlet temperatures, DWH temperature, in addition to the positions of the three port valve and motorised valves on the manifolds. It’s nonetheless a piece in progress, and we have to get a greater graphic, nevertheless it has proved to be very helpful.

Annual Heating & DHW Utilization & Prices

Whereas now we have actual vitality utilization figures for the warmth pump, I at present don’t have any straightforward strategy to break down what was on the evening price versus day. So I’ve used the annual common break up in our payments for this (64% Day, 36% Evening). This needs to be the worst case situation as the warmth pump is biased to run over evening greater than via the day.

It’s value declaring that I started recording this knowledge round 6 months after we moved in. Don’t be disheartened in case you are seeing excessive vitality prices along with your warmth pump and also you’ve simply completed constructing, as usually vitality consumption will be greater as the home dries out. Likewise, don’t decide your warmth pump payments from a single month as there’s a massive variation throughout the yr. See the fitting hand column within the desk under for our breakdown.

By way of single days, the best vitality consumption for the warmth pump was twenty seventh November at 39.4 kWh, whereas the bottom was an order of magnitude much less at 3.9 kWh on sixteenth July.

Complete Annual Vitality Utilization & Prices

The desk and graph under reveals our whole vitality used final yr in kWh, damaged down into 2 values, separating the vitality mentioned above that was utilized by the warmth pump for area heating and scorching water, from every part else.

You’ll discover a rise in consumption in March the place you’d have anticipated it to fall because the climate continued to heat up. This was as a result of our son got here house from uni and our daughter and son-in-law got here to dwell with us too (between home strikes). So we went from 2 adults to five in a single day, with all of the related additional vitality consumption (rattling that PS4).

So listed below are the vitality consumption figures for the primary full yr within the new Automated Dwelling;

Bear in mind, we aren’t burning something, we purchase no gasoline, heating oil, coal, wooden, petrol or diesel. In order that £189 (common) is our single month-to-month invoice for all our heating and scorching water, all our cooking and washing, all our Lighting and leisure plus our ‘gasoline’ for the Electrical automotive.

Comparisons to Final Home

The latest figures I might discover confirmed that 68% of properties in Northern Eire use oil as their main technique of heating (and amazingly 72% nonetheless use stable gasoline as a secondary technique). In our earlier house, 900 litres of heating oil would final us round 4 to five weeks over December / January. The present value for that one fill is round £440 – over half our annual heating value within the new home.

The previous home was an analogous dimension, 275 sq m / 3,000 sq ft (together with the built-in storage) and whereas I don’t have detailed knowledge, I do have entry to my previous payments they usually present we averaged 5 x 900 litre fills of heating oil every year. In vitality phrases, that 4,500 litres represents roughly 46,500 kWh and on high of this we used about 10,500 kWh of electrical energy yearly too, giving us these comparative totals;

• OLD Complete Annual Vitality Utilization – 57,000 kWh / £3,985
• OLD Month-to-month Common – 4,750 kWh / £332.08
• OLD Day by day Common – 156 kWh / £10.92

In financial phrases then, we’re spending nearly half what we did within the final home. However the financial savings are solely half the story, because it’s the rise in consolation ranges which are most noticeable. The final home was constructed within the late 90’s and its conventional development employed fundamental ranges of insulation and no airtightness measures. The brand new home is heat evening and day, in each room, we at all times have scorching water on faucet. It’s onerous to quantify the standard of life enchancment this brings. Stepping onto heat tiles on a rest room ground within the morning is fairly, fairly good.

Maybe extra importantly, now we have decreased our whole vitality consumption by greater than 70%, together with all of the related CO₂ financial savings and air high quality enhancements (take a look at this knowledge from our Airthings Wave Plus).

The newest figures I can discover (2019) present that 330 grams of CO₂ was produced per kWh of electrical energy generated in Northern Eire. Assuming a COP of three.2 which means lower than 100 grams of CO₂ per kWh of warmth. That’s round half the CO₂ emissions of a mains gasoline boiler and round a 3rd of an oil fired heating system (source). The truth is our bias for working the heating at evening, coupled with the extraordinary ranges of spare wind energy in NI, means we could also be doing higher than that.

The warmth pump has a 7 yr components guarantee (3 years labour) so hopefully there can be no main surprises any time quickly. Nevertheless, upkeep is the one side of the equation that now we have no knowledge on and it must be thought of.

A number of the unfavourable warmth pump tales I’ve learn point out that the UK and Eire have climates that aren’t appropriate for air supply models. Now we have not seen any of those points. The pump might reverse on just a few days a yr to defrost itself however normally the effectivity of the system is great (and we’ve seen temperatures as little as -6 to date).

Comply with Jan Rosenow for some nice factual data on warmth pumps and the vitality transition normally.

The Future

I’ve been gathering the information for this publish during the last 12 months and the final third of 2021 noticed unimaginable vitality value rises. Whether or not you might be utilizing electrical energy or burning gasoline or oil, costs have seen unprecedented will increase over this time. Whereas we’ve been fortunate to be on a fix-rate tariff, it will finish in the summertime.

We needed to minimize our Photo voltaic PV plans in the course of the construct to remain inside price range, however we hope to purchase a system, maybe this yr, to try to off-set a few of these value rises. As soon as put in, prices for the brighter months needs to be considerably decreased. A pal’s close by 4kWp system produced 524 kWh in June 2021 for instance, which (assuming the identical 87% self-consumption price as our earlier house) would have nearly halved our invoice for that month from £164 to round £86.

A home battery continues to be an attention-grabbing possibility too, both to retailer photo voltaic manufacturing or purchase cheaper electrical energy at evening to be used in the course of the day. As vitality prices rise, payback occasions for these applied sciences lower. And it’s not at all times in regards to the cash both, for some there can be an ethical crucial to try to additional scale back their emissions. Utilizing an EV for V2G (Automobile to Grid) and V2H (Automobile to Dwelling) goes to be an attention-grabbing possibility sooner or later too.

Some UK blogs discuss receiving £400 a month from their RHI scheme as an incentive to purchase a warmth pump. Nevertheless, Northern Eire at present gives no such assist to encourage householders to do the fitting factor. Let’s hope issues change right here within the close to future

Success

It’s essential to level out that these financial savings usually are not simply because now we have an electrified heating system. The insulation and airtightness measures within the new home are very important to the success right here. As is the involvement of the consultants we employed – Daly Renewables and Epitome Living. Many of the complaints I learn round warmth pumps are from tasks that didn’t have a correctly designed or fitted system.

Whereas there are many extra vitality environment friendly properties than ours, we’re delighted with the efficiency of the constructing and its cleaner, quieter, low carbon heating system. We’re having fun with a a lot hotter, extra comfy house with limitless scorching water, for round half the working prices of the oil fired home, all whereas producing far much less GHG and air air pollution than earlier than.

In case you are constructing or renovating and going the additional mile along with your insulation and airtightness measures, then take a critical take a look at electrified heating.

Are you able to afford to not?

UPDATE – see the figures for the 2022 right here

Bear in mind to check out our Instagram to comply with the venture, learn the remainder of the Automated Dwelling 2.0 weblog posts and discover the hyperlinks to all of the merchandise we’ve used in our self-build.