Highly Efficient Micro Bore Heat Pump. How does it work?

Microbore radiators with 400% efficient heat pump . How was it achieved?

Key considerations when choosing a heat pump, my thoughts:

Heat pump Design:-
 Improve insulation where you can
 Design the system for low flow temperatures
 Correct sizing of the heat pump
 Avoid a buffer tank also known as hydraulic separation.
 Do not re-plumb everything
 Avoid Glycol antifreeze
o Use antifreeze valves instead
 Use a zoning system
o But It is very important that enough radiators are left open (no restriction).
 Use a deaerator valve rather than inhibitor in the system

Heat Pump resources and links:-

 Open energy monitor live pages – see how real heat pumps are performing
https://heatpumpmonitor.org/

 Open energy monitor shop https://docs.openenergymonitor.org/applications/heatpump.html

 Heat Geek https://www.heatgeek.com/

 John Cantor https://heatpumps.co.uk/

 Energy Stats UK https://energy-stats.uk/my-5kw-vaillant-arotherm-heat-pump/

 University of Ulster study buffer tank performance degradation

How to correctly install heat pumps so that they work properly and efficiently

MCS Heat loss spreadsheet from here https://mcscertified.com/mcs-launch-new-improved-heat-pump-calculator/

Equipment installed:-
Heat Pump Monitoring device – This allows us all, installers and clients, to see how the system is performing – we installed a Level 3 Heat Pump Monitoring Bundle (emonHP) £458 (excluding VAT) – From https://shop.openenergymonitor.com/level-3-heat-pump-monitoring-bundle-emonhp/

Air Separator – SpiroVent® Rv2 Air Separator (£116.24 Ex VAT) – automatic venting mechanism and a SpiroTube which removes air and micro-bubbles from the water circulating in a wet heating system. From https://www.bes.co.uk/spirovent-rv2-22-mm-comp-21337/

Water in the closed system – What do I need to know?
“It’s much easier to fill with tap water (in most cases) and leave it and never really need to touch again then buying unnecessary inhibitor and testing it every year.” Says HeatGeek he gives an extremely detailed explanation here if you want to go in to the details. https://youtu.be/NJFU-nbliXw?si=7eOAhIhQpcHllxDl

In my opinion Octopus Energy are the most innovative supplier in the emerging green power space. If you are not with Octopus you can use my referral link and we will both get £50.
https://share.octopus.energy/good-finch-364

Contents of this video

00:00 Micro bore pipes and heat pump intro
00:56 Insulation, insulation ….
02:05 Which Heat Pump?
02:22 Heat Loss Calculations
04:07 Gas v heat pump decisions
06:30 My installation
07:38 Radiators
08:00 No buffer Tank
08:08 Constantly on radiators
08:28 No glycol
09:00 Microbore pipes
09:28 Open Energy Monitor system
10:52 Valliant’s control system
11.34 Installation Costs
12:14 Heat Pump Performance
16:46 Heat Pump varying output
19:14 Real time output
19:37 Two months summary
20:07 Costs v gas system
23:33 Microbore heat pump recommendations
24:43 Low flow tempertures
25:19 Radiator output
25:51 Correct size heat pump
26:28 Check heat lossa calculations
26:43 Iverter/variable output heat pump
27:20 No Buffer Tank discussion
30:34 Do NOT replumb heating system
30:53 No Glycol antifreeze
31:57 Dedicated open radiators
32:25 Heat Pump Installers
33:19 Open Energy Monitoring kits
33:58 UK wide Heat Pump performance site
35:46 Heat Geek
36:00 John Canter
36:32 Energy Stats UK
37:03 University of Ulster Buffer Tank Study
37:09 Valliant Performance App
38:43 What next?

That summarises the Microbore Heat pump after two months after installation.

So two months since I installed my heat pump and I thought it’d be a good opportunity to review the results of it now my house on the face of it isn’t a good fit for heat pump it’s built in the in the’ 40s um with poor insulation

Levels and also an extension was built which wasn’t well insulated either so not ideal the other big factor that is considered not ideal for heat pumps is has micro pipe so i’ got 10 mm pipes the central heating was replaced in the ’90s many plumbers will tell you that you

Can’t possibly run a heat pump with 10 mm MIM pipes I’ve got interim results for last two and a half months and the results are fantastic I’m getting cfish performance of over four so 400% efficiency so for every 1 kilowatt hour I put in and getting more than 4 kwatt

Hours out so really pleased with the system and you’re going to take us sure it explain I’ll take you through the details now yeah thank you okay so um as a sort of strategy first of all live taking a strategy of improving the insulation for the core of the house we

Spend the vast majority of our time in the living area study Kitchen in always and we tend to keep our bedrooms cooler anyway so I have taken an approach of improving the insulation in in the core areas so I’ve replaced the windows they were put in in the ’90s I’ve actually

Gone for triple glazing but you don’t have to Modern double glazing is is very good as well um it has cavity walls but the cavities very thin and not particularly well filled with insulation so where I can I’ve fitted internal wall insulation um I had a suspended Timber

Floor and i’ improved the floor insulation there and I’ve dra proof in a number of plac as well I don’t intend to go into detail here I can do a separate run through on how I did that and how I measured the results of it but it did

Have a very profound impact on the on on the the heat loss and the Improvement on on that uh the other thing is I did a lot of research on heat pumps due to the stories about the problems with heat pumps also frankly because of the poor knowledge of many installers about how

To install an efficient heat pump um and again potentially in a later video we could cover the detail of that a couple of examples of things I did I worked out the heat loss myself um and size the radiators again it’s not something for detail here but

It’s not that difficult to do working at a heat loss just taking one room for example you just have to work out the areas for the different surfaces the u values the amount of heat they lose and um from that you can work out how many watts you would you would

Lose for for your design point which would be typically when it’s minus two outside and 20° inside so I did that room by room and also calculated the the radiator sizing I would need for those rooms um as I said don’t intend to go into detail here but that allowed me to

Size the heat pump and size the radiators and work out which ones needed changing the other thing is MCS do their own their own spreadsheet authorize heat pumps and give give out the grants Etc and they have a an official heat loss spreadsheet is quite involved there’s a

Lot of tabs on it but um once you get the hang of it um it’s quite easy to put in and it does have some quite useful information so for example it does have um underf heating guide for example if you put in the details of your underf

Floor heating it’ll tell you whether that meets the requirements of the room it’s not as granular as the one I did so you have to use a universal figure for all the walls so you have to put a figure in for all your external walls downstairs in a house like mine that

Isn’t consistent some rooms have got internal insulation and some don’t but it’s a it’s worth looking at and you can download it from the MCS site put some links to all these very useful resources um at the end uh the other thing in terms of

Research I looked at my gas usage on the coldest day of the year and worked out how much heat I would need because with heat pumps you’re talking on the face of it of very low power devices compared to your gas heaters so I’m replacing a 36

Kilowatt gas boiler with a 7 Kow heat pump and on the face of that you think it’s not going to work but they operate in a different way and in the case of my heat pump it puts out a lot more heat than than than the 7 kilow it’s labeled

With so what I did was you can download all your smart metad data again I won’t go into detail here and from that you can convert that into the amount of heat that goes into your house so on the 12th of December to the 16th of December we

Had a cold cold period this was last year in December 22 yeah last year um and so the average temperature was was if I quickly look at that was yeah minus minus 1.44 if I look at the average down here um so during that period we were using up to 75 kilowatt

Hours of heat now we weren’t heating the whole house but we were heating the areas we wanted and then if you look at that and you look at a heat pump that would be an average output of the heat pump of about 3 KW so on the coldest day last year I would

Need to Output 3 Kow throughout the 24 hours to keep the house warm and the heat pump I’ve chosen can put up to 9 Kow out kilow out so again this is just a sanity check I just wanted to make sure that the heat pump I was choosing

Would be able to cope with realistic worst case conditions for for where we live and gave me more confidence that what I’m doing would be okay so I also wanted efficien system so I by the end of my research I knew what to ask for and frankly as I’ve said before many

Installers don’t understand heat pumps very well and apply gas boiler thinking um and typically they will over the size of the system and they’ll try and enforce changes on you that are not required so I had quite a few people coming to me saying that you’re going to

Have to R rip out every radiator every bit of Plumbing in the house um and I wasn’t prepared to accept that without them being able to explain to me and convincing me that that was required moving on to my installation uh I’ve got a five bedroom house I’ve put extra insulation in the

Core areas as I mentioned and I’ve chosen a veent 7 KW aerm plus monoblock heat pump and that’s capable of putting out 9 Kow at minus 2° Centigrade so this is the veent 7 Kow monolock heat pump and what a monol block means is basically that the full functionality of

The heat pump is in one box so the refrigerant stays in the box and effectively you pipe the water into the house so this is the hot water flow into the house this is the return so you can see the pipes are very well insulated because they actually take the heated

Water into the house this is a bit like your fridge yes it is it’s in that You’ got everything contained within the fridge that’s right and all your all your um gases compressors are all contained in here and this is is literally just where your water goes in

And out that’s right to the unit to the house and back again back again I changed quite a few radiators in the house I got seven new radiators and moved four so so you’re able to use the vast majority so yeah the majority is able to use and to be honest it’s a

Relatively small cost on top of installing any heating system not just a heat pump from an installation point of view if you choose the same form factor radiators it can be done extremely quickly and was a relatively trivial job to do I got no no buffer tank which

Involves an extra extra pump so no buffer tank sometimes called hydraulic separation so avoid that if you can um the other thing I need to do because I have 10 mil pipe I need to keep an area constantly open so I’ve chosen six radiators in the living area that will

Not be restricted by thermostatic radiator valves so that makes sure that the flow rate as I say doesn’t cause a problem for the heat pump have you had glycol in the system got frost Frost Frost protection valves instead I don’t know if you can see this this is the

Frost protection valve so I mentioned earlier the fact rather than having glycol you have a frost protection valve and what that does they’re not cheap units cuz they’re highly calibrated but what happens if heat pump fails and and there’s no power FR for prolonged period rather than freezing up and causing problems

With the heat pump it would just dump water out and then it’ be just question of refilling the system afterwards as I say I’ve got microbore pipes to each of the radiators but I have a 22 mil backbone distribution system so each radiator is plumbed in parallel from the

22 mil backbone and I did my own calculations on flow rate and I was satisfied that six radiators open would be ample flow rate to ensure that the heat pump was was happy the other thing I’ve installed is an open energy monitoring system I’ll take you through

Some details on that in the moment but it’s a very clever piece of kit that allows me to monitor in great detail the performance of the heat pump and know with confidence how well it is performing and and when it’s not performing so well this is the

Monitoring system I’ve got so if you look down here there’s a heat meter fitted and so that measures the flow rate and also the temperature of the water flowing back into the into the the system over here I’ve got another heat measurement pocket and that’s measuring the temperature of the water coming in

So this device knows the flow rate and the temperature of of the water connected to it I’ve got a a microprocessor Raspberry Pi based microprocessor provided by open energy Monitor and that then connects up into the metering system where I’ve got a metered electricity output and this measures everything to do with

The heat pump this consuming unit is a single box that has all the connections for the heat pump you know the controls and everything so it manages the total energy for the heat pump and and you’d recommend any system have to have a separate yeah I think it’s a very neat

Setup um rather than running several supplies from your consumer unit just have another box with various supplies other controllers I have is the standard veent sens of comfort which uses weather compensation so it’ll vary the temperature of the radiators depending on the outside temperature so that will

Effectively what it’s trying to do is make sure that the heat loss from the house is balanced with it heat coming in through the radiators and the lower you can run the temperature of the radiators the more efficient it is this is the veent aerotherm controller so this controller has the

Ability to measure the room temperature here also knows the outside temperature and can use weather compensation to heat the temperature the main part of the house at at the right rate so it’s it’s efficient and the costs for me after after the five k grant for this

Installation was less in real terms than when I changed the gas boiler about five or six years ago you hear stories of people talking tens of thousands for the installation mine was quite an involved inst installation with a lot of radiator changes and as I say um the the figure

After the grant was very reasonable and that that’s a 5k Grant we’re now getting a seven and a half that’s right yeah so that should make it even more affordable well that’s right to be honest I think you know it’s a great opportunity for people to think about getting it

Installed now is a good time what I was going to do now is just talk about some of the results after after two months I got two sources of data one one is veent to provide their own data so I can show you from the app the sort of

Information that veent produce this is of your heat pump of my heat pump yeah so and so they’re app produces it because they measure the same sort of thing and also the open energy monitor um now the data I’m going to show is going to concentrate an open energy monitor is

Giving slightly less good data than the veilance own information so this is you could argue the worst case data you can believe valant Instead This is the output from the open energy monitor system so this is a graph showing so this is showing back to September when it was commiss very hot

Weather at that time so it was just this is the usage during commissioning and then it shows every day uh coming forward and it show this big blue line shows the temperature so you can see high temperatures at this point this is outside temperature outside temperature

So the gaps that you’ve got here is why because it you didn’t need the heating on was it yes we were away I think okay so there’s no hot water or heating it wouldn’t need the heating at this time but there was no hot water either we

Just switch switched it off at that time of year okay so then if I come into a month you can see what you what you’re seeing here is each day and the if you hang over the day it shows you the total heat output 23 kwatt hours and the total electric

Unit which is 5.5 kilowatt hours so giving a coefficient of performance of 4.2 and the coefficient of performance in this month is 4.2 again so over 400% efficiency so that means for one kilowatt you’re getting over four kilowatts of heat out yeah kilowatt hours of heat y so if

I go to weeks and now I can look at today for instance I can double click on this on this figure and what it shows is great detail detail as to what’s actually happening with the heat pump so if I look at at the moment

I can see coming up from the bottom here how much electricity has been used at the moment so 1.4 kilow it’s doing a hot water boost which I just set up a lot of people home at the moment that 1.4 Kow producing 5.7 kilow of

Heat if I then move across this is the outside temperature 9.1 de the in inside temperature is 19.5 and then this provides the flow rate which is 47 degrees it’s getting quite hot because I’m heating the hot water and you heat the hot water a lot

More than the radiators and then this is the return rate so after it’s come out of the tank the temperature’s lower obviously it’s transferring heat in into into the tank so it’s literally heating the hot water that’s literally heating the hot water I can just zoom in a bit more on that

Which shows you those figures so at the moment flow is 50 return is 46 the other thing I’ve got here is the flow rate um so the veent flow rate is between 6 and 1.4 cubic m per hour so when it’s doing the hot water it has the highest rate

But here it’s doing a heating cycle and it’s well within the spec even with my micro P pipe so it’s it’s pumping comfortably well within the spec or flow rate that it needs so that’s a huge result from my point of view because I was quite worried about microbore given

Everything that’s been said about them and so to actually see this turned on and the monitor showing me that the flow rates are absolutely fine is it’s been a huge huge huge huge result for me and you’d expect that with other systems would you yes other systems won’t have a

Problem with flow rate at all if you got 50 mil pipe or but if I had microbore in my house yes I think the the rule of thumb is you need to have a a good number of Radiators on so I mean half a dozen radiators on open circuit so

They’re not restricted by trvs you can experiment it with a bit but I think that’s that’s more or less what what you need to do and that’s your living area that’s the living area so you got two in the kitchen two in the h Landing two in

The living room so that’s the six we need but we’ve also got the study in a a separate living room we use as well so it’s a fantastic piece of kit uh you know which is giving me these results uh what I’m just going to show here is

How the the boiler or the heat pump operates with lower loads or higher loads the top of this bar is the total heat that’s out the Orange is the efficiency gain if you like and heat put out by the heat pump by the heat pump so

34 KW hours in this day 8.6 of which which is the blue is electricity input the rest is heat recover from the air um so then you can double click on a particular day and it’ll show you what’s actually happening so this was this was

A day where there weren’t many of us in the house and you can see the heat pump is having to cycle because it can cut its operating rate down to 25% of its full power but even that is too much for the house at this point which is which

You have to expect to a certain degree so it’s heating up and then the circulation pump is continue to run and then when it gets to a certain temperature it turns back on but if I which is what you get with an oil fired or gas fired system anyway

You would and this heat pump modulates very well as I said it comes down to you know 25% so literally at this point it’s consuming if I hover there 600 watts of energy which is very small amount to produce you know two or three kilow of power but

Just contrasting that with another day if I go go back um so at this point we we had a lot of family homes so we’ve opened up all the zones in the heating system and actually this is a a period where we’re pre- heating the house for

Them for people coming back so all the spare bedrooms and that’s so had four extra bedrooms he bathrooms Etc and now the heat pump is generally running throughout the period it it has a knockback period here with a temperatures dropped a bit in this point it’s not cycling and producing you know

Very good performance I don’t know yet how much the cycling impacts performance theoretically it should but I haven’t been able to analyze the data to the depth to see just how much it it impacts performance but if you’re interested it’s a fantastic pie piece of kit it’s

Not particularly cheap but at the end end of the day it it’s um it’s providing fascinating insights into what what is actually really going on with the heat pump and as I say it’s independent from the heat pump manufacturer and this gives you more detail than the vant Zone much more detail I

Mean if I sorry go to an hour view this is literally real time so I told you I was had a hot water boost on you can see actually now it’s it’s stopped so obviously reached the required temperature and this is with not veilance this is this open monitor open

Monitor open energy monitor so you know if you look up to minutes ago using 1.8 Kow you know how much producing 5.6 it’s only two and a half months but in conclusion confidence is very high the heat pum is a good fit for the house also micore if you used correctly and

With the considerations I’ve outlined taken into account is fine and to me that’s a huge deal so many people have put off using heat pumps because they’re told they’re going to have to rip out all their Plumbing my cases I’ve not done that all I’ve done is Chang a few

Radiators and changed how I use them and it’s working incredibly efficiently you know what it’s actually costing you at the moment yeah um versus gas your initial thoughts yeah it’s it’s it’s very good but um we can do some quick rule of thumb things here so for example

This looks at the current day so I have a seven I have intelligent octopus so I have a 7 P rate from 11:30 till 5:30 so what I do is if you look here I’ll just zoom in on this I I run the hot water system and

Then I preheat the house or you know keep it warm it never got very cold but it it just keeps it warm and so I got a 300 L tank and I use 3 and 1 half kilowatt hours at night at 7 P so what’s

That about 20 24 p and for that you get a full full tank of electric full tank of hot water 300 kilow 3 300 lit yeah um and we’ve got you know grandchildren are home at the moment so there’s a lot of hot water being used it’s a big tank so

And then then the the house heated as well so I I think that’s a really interesting strategy because quite often Convent we we turn the heating off at night that’s right and the whole house cools down and then we switch it on when we get up in the morning we get up into

A cold house yeah and then gradually through the day it’s heating up whereas you’re you’re using the cheaper electricity to keep the house at a good temperature that’s right and and and the the cost is so cheap if you look at 21 P for 15 a half Kow hours of

Heat it’s almost nominal the cost it really is extremely low when you have the low tariff rate and the very high efficiency of the heat pump so why wouldn’t you do this I suppose the other thing to is if a look at the whole day

So I think I said three and a half so then there’s another 6 kilowatt hours used during the rest of the day but I have solar and I have a house battery so up to now I’m hardly touching uh high cost grid power at all it’s either coming being used at night when

It’s cheap or it’s coming from my battery and solar combination during the day so um it’s it’s going to be a SL slightly more complex analysis to work out exactly how much it cost me but I’ll have to look at my bills when they arrive and look at how much power I used

At different times but so so basically you’re running on low cost which is 7 Kow 7 p a Kow hour yeah um but the combination of your own batteries you’re heating through the day is coming off that price that’s right so the moment you know 10 kwatt hours that’s pretty

Well all coming from that rate so it’s about 70 P you know to run as I say we got a house full at the moment with lots of hot water being used and lots of rooms being heated I expect the cost to be very good with with the system it’s

Cutting down the heat pump cut cuts down my energy usage hugely obviously the energy costs a bit more on the face of it because you’re buying gas at 7 pen a kilowatt hour but bear in mind gas boilers are only 80 to 90% efficient so

That’s more like probably 9 point 9 p a kilowatt hour and I’m getting a kilowatt hour for probably a couple of pence in the night um and and through the day when I can use cheap power and even where it uses the full 30 P the kilowatt

Hour it’s you know that’s a quarter of that so it’s similar to gas even at that even at those rates um yeah fascinating so if I was going to install heat pump in a building which is an older building that had micr ball pipes based on your experience yes what

Would you recommend so first of all I mean I think it makes sense to improve insulation and it’s not just for a heat pump if you were to install a new gas boiler or oil boiler if you got a poorly insulated house you’ll need a bigger boiler and you’ll need bigger radiators

Than if you insulate the house but a heat pump particularly benefits from from putting sensible levels of insulation in so and it needn’t cost a fortune just you look at the sort of measures I’ve talked about with more modern glazing potential of internal insulation so really what we’re saying

Here is improve the insulation around around the living area yes where you’re going to be all the day yeah um and then if you want to continue it throughout the rest of the heart but focus on the living area first yeah that’s right and that leads to smaller heat pump and

Lower flow temperatures which all leads to much more efficient system and as I say that doesn’t just apply to heat pumps it applies to gas as well if you run gas spers are very high temperatures they’re very inefficient so yeah moves on to the next one which is design the temp the system

For lowf flow temperatures um try to aim for the radiat being 40° uh Centigrade when it’s minus two outside but with weather compensation they’ll often run much cooler than that because they don’t need to run that hot and so they’d be more efficient the cooler they are um yeah but with the

Warm it to me you can feel that they’re not cold but they’re not you don’t feel like it a gas radiator is positively hot yeah this isn’t it’s just trickling in the amount of heat you need into the houseold consider increasing radi radiator output particularly if you do a

Form factor for form factor change if you got single panel radiators move to type 22 your double panel d double convectors and that job if you do it with heat pump will be VAP free covered by the grant if you got enough leeway in there and it also helps to increase the

Volume of the water in the system which also helps so what you’re basically saying is increase the radiator sizes yeah if and and it needn’t be disruptive particularly if you’ve got single panel radiators the other thing is it’s very important to have a correct sizing in

The heat pump so it’s important that the heat pump meets your need needs but at the same time it’s not o overly big and there’s a particular danger I think your gain installers will tend to try and put a heat pump in that’s too big few and if

If it’s too big it’ll be doing a lot of cycling and its efficiency will will be impacted um that’s that’s sort of gas gas thinking is that’s right most installers come from a gas background and so you just shove in a big one and it you know customers don’t complain but

If you if you care about running cost and the efficiency of the system then make sure it’s it’s correctly sized so the installer needs to be do an accurate heat loss assessment so I think I advise you to question him on that find out how he’s done it question where the u values

Are come from if you got the time consider doing some work yourself an inverter heat pump most of them are now inverter just simply means you can the heat pump can invert and moderate modulate the amount of pirate put side so you what we’re really saying is

You’re saying 25% so heat pump can put out a low part 25% or go up to full power yeah depending on the the load with that’s right and if it’s and if the heat demand is less than 25% then it has to come on and switch off for a bit and

Come on and switch off which is inevitable sometimes of the year but you want to try and make sure there are long periods that’s running all the time and just staying within that 25 to 100% ra range another big thing is all the installers I’ve come across by default

Want to install a buffer tank also known as hydraulic separation there’s a particularly good study which in this article by renewable heating Hub um which is conducted with the University of ster where they had a very controlled environment and they looked at heat pumps with buffer tanks

And without buffer tanks and without a buffer tank in their setup your energy cost would be something like 35 to 40% lower than than using a buffer tank 35% that’s right that’s a massive difference it is a massive difference so so this is a test rig so everything over to the

Right here is effectively the test rig thing is pumping hot water into here that’s right and there’s no coils in there no so it pumps water into this tank yeah the heat pump is pumping water in and then out again in parallel there’s another pump here which is

Pumping water out of the tank around the system and back in so these two pumps are both putting water and taking water out of that’s right this tank and there’s no coils or anything no coils they just literally it’s a tank full of water this article explains it very well

So I won’t go into too much detail but you get in all sorts of adverse mixing effects the heat the pumps won’t run at the same rate you’ll get the heat pump recirculating hot water back into itself and so forth do you understand where that thinking came from their conclusion

Is it’s a foolproof setup so whatever anybody does on on the other side of the buffer tank the heat pump will operate so if you switched off every single radiator until the heat pump to give you full power the heat pump would just try and poop and it would still operate so

As long as you’re sensible about how you you operate the thing what you’re saying is by having your radiators open in the house by defining your living area yeah you don’t need a buffer tank you don’t need a buffer tank so their second setup they’ve got two or three setups but the

One with direct heating is this so again what you have here is the heat pump effectively pumping hot water into the house so and that would be around all the radiators or the tank and then back out so the heat pump is its own water circulation pump and it’s more efficient

The heat pump has complete control of the flow rates and also you don’t get any of this mixing and that’s what you do with a gas boiler it is what you do with a gas boiler oil boiler yeah the modern boilers have all the have the

Pumps integrated and then as I say that gives the control of the pumps to the heat pump so if I come down just quickly to the co the performance so the best performance for a buffer tank system was a curve patient of 3.4 and then with a direct system it was

4.71 so 3.4 to 4.7 it’s a massive this is a big difference 38% more power used for the buffer tank and what we’re saying is many installers and I think you said all the ones that quoted wanted to put the buffer tank in to a greater or lesser degree some were very easily

Persuaded not to as long as you understood what you you know you need to leave some radiators on all the time but they I think they take the point that most people won’t know what the efficiency is and it doesn’t matter matter it just makes it makes it

Absolutely foolproof from their point of view just continuing with the advice don’t replum everything it’s very unlikely you have to do that even if your conclusions are slightly different unless you’ve got micro you know very badly setup system you should be able to just make targeted changes to get the system to work

Well avoid glycol which is an antifreeze because monolock system actually has has water running out of the out of the house to the heat pump you do need to frost protect it but glycol has significant disadvantages um increases the viscosity of the fluid which adversely affects the pump pressure and

Has lower specific heat so it’s better to avoid it avoid it and modern systems use antifreeze valves now instead which means that in the worst case where the heat prump fails and you’ve got a long park at then to protect the heat pump it’ll just drain the system down and

Glycol is different too a rust inhibitor it is yeah and what’s the so you’d still have the rust inhibitor in the solution stops corrosion of your reg well actually I would use a deor rather than an inh inhibitor so again very clever device modern device which takes out all the oxygen from the

System so without oxygen in the water it can’t corate the pipes as previously discussed you need to have an area where you have the heat pump controlling the temperature and running whenever it all the time so you’re living your living area that’s right all the time that the the weather’s cold

Then there’s nothing to stop you doing something different in the bedrooms as long as you have a big enough core area and I think that’s an efficient way of doing it so you’re able to switch them on and off switch them on on and off you

Know if people aren’t home put them on a frost protection level if they home adjust the temperatures according to their likes the capability of the install varies hugely I’d done this research and one of my first tests was whether they knew more than me and and the ones that

Didn’t obviously I didn’t really want to deal with anymore but the the ones that did were the ones that I took to the next stage um I literally had people coming in saying they wanted to replum the whole house and and when I said why they

Said well they had a bad experience 15 years ago and that’s what they do now I mean to be honest it it almost felt like two stages there was if elimination stage where I I ended up having to go to quite a few installers because some of

Them just didn’t convince me they knew what they were were doing and asking me to do things like replum the whole house I wasn’t prepared to do and then I got into a list of more serious ones who I felt knew what they were doing and

Probably I ended up with four or five quotes from people who knew what they’re doing but they varied a lot so it is worth keeping looking around um because in the end the quote I took was quite a lot lower than the one I was seriously considering before that this is open

Energy monitoring and they do a number of monitoring kits um so I’ve chosen 11 three this is the schematic so they put a heat meter on I can show you some video of it actually fitted so it measures the flow and return temperature and the flow rate and from

That it can work out the amount of heat that’s going into your house has a SE separate meter for the electricity so it knows exactly how much power you’re using from both your indoor unit and and from the heat pump directly and from that it provides the sort of data I

Showed you earlier on but not only that you can go to a site where a number of us including myself have made our heat pump data available to anyone to look at so um just quickly flicking through it so you can basically sort by location or

Installer or rating so um if you for example you’re looking for 7 kilow heat pump or something around that rate you can come down and see what people have got fitted and and the sort of performance they’re getting from it so if you if you pick a particular he um so

Went to a veent 7 KW this one is in five in Scotland you can you can literally see data on the installation of the house you know outline information in information you know how big their tank is um their design flow temperatures what they what their minimum design because this is

Five is five – 5 or is it’s minus two for here he’s using glycol um number of zones is Etc so it’s fantastic information and as you say as I say you can go through all these different systems and see how they’re doing down here you’ve got the coefficient of performance and you’re

5.7 4.8 yeah all over four by long way so you could you could investigate it so I suppose you can say well what’s happening with this 5.7 makes a lie of some of the stuff that’s being said in the press it does about heat pumps and here there’s a site

Where you can go and look at ofat PS performing at over times efficiency so you’re getting 1 Kow and you’re getting more than four kilow and sometimes 5 kilow in certain situations this allows it does anyone to look at this before they make any decisions so that’s that’s one of the

Links heat geek do a number of very informative videos on how heat pumps operate so if you if you’re interested and have the time I’d suggest you look at some of their videos they explain a lot of this information in more detail John caner I’ll just bring up his site

John caner is a heat pump expert and he does a number of very interesting things for example he does a heat app simulator so you can vary things like the um the power input and you can see and see the output from your radiator you can change

The radiator sizing so you can rather than doing the calculations yourself you can do some reviews as to whether your your radiator put out power and there’s a lot of other resources on his site and that it’s worth a look at energy stats UK again extremely useful site um the

Individual here is an Enthusiast and he has a lot of information so he’s got information not just about heat pumps but different tariffs he’s got his own heat pump he’s got a 5 kilowatt veilance installed and he’s explained exactly how he’s installed it tremendous amount of very useful information here he’s got

Information on how to control the heat pump um so I suggest that’s another one that if you’re interested you have a look at and I and I mentioned the university I’ve asked a study on the buffer tank so I’ll the link for that will be here I

Could just show you what the veilance shows yeah one of the questions is why is the heat monitoring thing giving a different performance to the Vance one do you know the answer to that I don’t this is my my heat pump so if I look at

A a week and this is where your monitoring thing this is with monitoring system so what it’s saying at a coefficient of 4.36 with your your independent monitoring that’s right now if I it’s not that far off but the veent allows me to look at all this data

So it’s got um this is Heating and hot water which is what that is and this is say saying I’ve got a coefficient performance of five so it’s saying electrical consumption of 6.2 and output of 25.4 that would be for the heating and then so vant is giving you a figure of

Five yeah and this independent monitoring is giving you 4.36 that’s right so that’ll be F fascinating to see if you can work out why it is interesting because basically to do that you need to know the flow temperature flow and return temperatures the volume of water pump published and the amount

Of electricity you use and they both measure that so it be interesting what I’ll have to do is look at what the veent thinks the flow temperature is versus what the heat meter thinks it is but it’s either way if this is the worst case it’s fantastic if it’s more nearer

The veil think it’s even more fantastic but what’s really fascinating is these guys with the independent monitoring aren’t overestimating no perfect thank you very much what’s coming up next I need to monitor the system on colder days I’m almost at the point where I’m hoping for Colder Weather so I can see

How the heat pump runs I’m sure it’ll run very well given how low a rate is having to operate at the moment um it’s interesting to see how less cycling but colder air changes things colder air will tend to make the heat pump a bit less efficient but the less cycling

Should make it more efficient so it’ll be interesting to see how that trade-off Works um I need to think more about how to use the heat pump with my solar system house battery and very low tariff rate at night so I have a 6-h hour very

Low cost tff at night and what I’m aiming for is lowest cost rather than highest performance of The Heat pump so on the face of it you wouldn’t run your heat pump at night because the air is cooler you’d run it more in the day but

Because I get such a lowc cost tariff it makes sense to do that so your next one will be when next one on the heat pump I guess would be after the winter but I could do more detail on other aspects of of things like um the preparation side

Of it the insulation insulation how I insulated how I measured the effects of the insulation and any other areas that people ask for yes if you and again you I’d be very interested to know if you’ve got any comments or suggestions on what I should do or what I should look at

With the monitoring equipment I’ve got please please advise certainly open to any suggestions to other things I should experiment with so if you got any ideas on what I should look at or ways to pull the data please let me know