Temperature and power monitoring for dispute with housing association

Skywolf

Don't use them as a primary part of your heating system would be my advice. If you can get em cheap you can use them to store a bit of energy but otherwise they are usually not worth the trouble.

Daddy k

hi.
i had issues with the boiler fitted in our house (a nibe 360p)

a lot of tenants had complained for 2 years prior to me moving in and were told they were using it wrong.

after a lot of digging i found out from the manufactures that the maximum size home it could heat was 80m2, our home is around 180m2.
the result was the immersion was constantly coming on to supplement it with it using unto 100kwh units per day!

after a lot of debate, me raising issues about how the house was even signed off with the heat load calculations bearing in mind the max size the boiler could heat, and other build related issues all adding up to the heating being appalling, it ended up on bbd rip off britain and a local mp got involved.


Pleased to say the whole of our development has just recently had all the boilers ripped out and replaced with good old tried and tested gas combo boilers.

out of interest is your boiler a nibe?

johntheexpat

I have a friend nearby who recently bought his place and has a few shillings to spend.  So he got a local engineer in to discuss heat pumps.  He was given the hard sell on the top of the range system, super-efficient, lots of heat, easy to service, yadiyadiya.  What the engineer failed to mention was that as a primary source of heat it was absolutely useless at outside temperatures below -10C.  So in the middle of winter, when you need lots of reliable heat on tap, your primary heat source would be providing zilch.  So, that would have been 10K € well spent!
I also couldn't believe that the guy did not mention, even in passing, that the heat pump could also be used for, and would be ideal at, heating the swimming pool.

Last time I saw this ex-pat, he was talking about getting a small wind turbine.  Disuading him from that is my next project.

Suddenly I don't sound very "green" at all

Skywolf

I don't think so, it seems like a really good boiler. The problem really is that my house is set up around the principal that if it gets cold I can just suck heat in from outside. It's the simple fact that if I really need the machine to heat my house there is nothing there for it to heat it with.

Yep, that's exactly it. I recently had a cold call from some 'Green Energy' people, I told them that if I 'saved' any more money on my heating system I would be bankrupt and asked if they could make my house less efficient so that I could spend less money on heating.

The problem with rolling out green power is that the systems tend to be designed to work in places like Italy where they have had it for years. If you install solar in Scotland you might as well install it in your cellar for the sake of keeping it out of the way.

Daddy k

is it an air source heat pump or a ground source heat pump??

do you have ceiling vents in bathrooms and kitchens of your house? if so thats what it uses to recover the heat..... in theory.

if its an air source heat pump and its costing a lot to run and its housing association its probably a nibe, as they managed to do quite well selling the apparent benefits of this system to may associations, who have then ended up replacing the units and taking nine to court.

in our homes they left a usb temperature logger in part of the house for a week, and connected an owl energy meter directly to the terminals of the boiler so it only took the usage of the boiler

Skywolf

It's an external Calorex Air Source pump with no internal vents, and the boiler itself is a Range Tribune HE. It's definitely not Nibe, which is possibly unfortunate as I could have used some precedent on this particular make of pump.

Skywolf

This is roughly what it looks like, though this isn't my one and it doesn't have the pipes on the right:

                                                                                                                                       

Daddy k

oh yes, not a nine, they were however considering docking one of those onto ours, however they sensibly agreed to stop trying to make everyones home a test bed for future tech and just put in tried and tested, and cheap to run combi boilers.