Throwing some experience in the ring... My hole house is running on Herschel infrared. 1st things first the company were great to deal with and I would recommend them. 2nd the quality of the panels are great, iv had experience with cheaper variants and they are just not the same league. 3rd installation was straight forward. 4th though my electrical bill went up my overall outgoings have gone down, trying to break it down and my heating is around 30-40% cheaper than the oil heating I was using. 5th there are NO service costs and nothing to really go wrong with the system, add that saving to you annual bill and these panels really start to make sense! Now that's the boring stuff done here's the bits they did not mention and that for me have been a life changer. I live in an old building that has no cavity and mould has always been a problem, installing these panels has massively helped that issue!! I also suffer with sinus issues and conventional convection heating always make me stuffy and sets my nose off but these panels don't do that, in fact it literally just feels like a sunny day. Lastly, using these panels have meant I have loads more space, all radiators are gone and the pipes that went with them which gives more usable space and also helps reduce the risk of burst pipes or floods etc and I moved to localised tankless water heaters in the kitchen and bathroom so there is now just one mains water pipe that comes in the house, goes under the sink and then up to the bathroom. so all the tanks in the attic have gone too! There are some awesome company's out there doing great stuff but as its all a bit new i thought id throw my experience with infrared here incase it helps.
we need the big home builders to adopt these an other tech. The fact they remove the piping should be sold to them as simplifying the building of new homes. They should love that sort of that stuff.
Very interesting to hear! What are your energy costs per kWh ? In Germany we have the highest prices which might add a lot to the bill so it might only be an option with solar.
Dave, Can you give a bit more detail on size of property. Annual kWh used for heating and capital costs please. I am really wondering how to get rid of gas in my home. I have an EV , solar panels, Zappi and an Eddi. I like the idea of a heat battery for hot water twinned with maybe infrared heating. Need to compare with ASHP etc
@@DavidKnowles0 This is strictly worse than a heat pump you know? A heat pump should have less than a 1/3 of the annual running costs. That being the case, I'd want them to be installing a heat pump and underfloor heating on a new build. Just like 10 years ago I'd expect my new build to have central heating installed. As a retrofit option to an older property it may well be fine. it wouldn't / shouldn't be optimal for a new build though.
@@abdebee3221 I'm with an 100% renewable supplier that is currently charging a unit rate (per kWh) 18.0810p with a standing charge of 23.2890p per day. Ill defiantly be looking at getting solar down the line when I can afford to do so.
I'd love to see some of these competing technologies each fitted into one of a group of identical houses, run them for a year and compare costs/consumption. Fully Charged project?
Infrared heaters as all electric heaters has an efficiency of 100%. All the electrcicity is easily converted to heat. BUT compared to regular electric heaters, Infrared is super weak. 700W for a large picture. And you might need 3000W for a medium size room. So prepare to buy 5 large infrared pictures for a single room. And again, compared to heat pump, which has and efficiency of 400-600%, all those direct electric heaters are just a waste of energy with efficiency of 100%. When and If somebody finaly produce Quiet heatpump, that would use quiet rottary compressor instead of piston one, than finaly everybody could easily change their heaters and mount those quiet heatpumps in every room.
As said they are 100% efficient. As you are directly heating people and objects you can run IR at lower temps and still feel warmer than a conventional convection system. Also one thing to consider, for the cost of a heat pump system you may be able to have an IR system and solar pv installed with battery storage .
I've looked at infra red recently. It's literally instant heat as soon as they are switched on, so much quicker to get the room warm. I cant seem to get an answer to how quick the room gets to temp and how long the heat is retained to get a feel for running costs. I'm going to do as others have done and buy a couple to test it out. Its the only way to tell. Can't find much on the Internet to judge any other way...
@@TheJimurq It is always difficult to advise on running costs due to the many factors involved. With IR as you have said the panel warm-up time is 5-10 minutes so very quick. How long it would take the room to warm up would depend on how well it retains heat and the initial temperature when the system comes on.
Our one bedroom flat in central London, built 15 years ago, has an open vented boiler and bog-standard electric panel heaters on the walls. The boiler provides enough hot water for our family of three (it’s on a timer for two hours each night) including daily showers. The panel heaters are rarely used due to the excellent insulation in the building, although bear in mind that inner London is about 4°C warmer than the surrounding countryside. Going fully electric is fully achievable.
The tepeo and the warmstone are pretty much identical technologies right? Using electricity to heat a large mass of stone/metal inside a box then using that heat later to heat water to pump around radiators.
I really like the concept of using "batteries" in homes to generate both heat and hot water. Electricity at peak times is expensive so being able to time shift usage to when it is very cheap is an excellent idea. Be interesting to see how much energy is used by both system daily, as you could build up the heat over a few days on cheap rate in advance, then just top up recharge them during the heat cycle. The three systems in the show are very cool. ( so to speak )
The systems/should/ use the same amount of energy. and all /should/ be about the same as standard electric heating. They're all ~100% efficient. The benefits come from time shifting the energy use. Im not convinced by the first one. old 2 or 3 bar heaters were radiated heat. theyre useful for 'instant' heat. so you could have one in an unheated bathroom hooked up to the light switch, and youd feel the benefit in the 5 minutes you were in there. as a general whole house solution its going to be as expensive and efficient as £20 oil filled radiators.
@@benholroyd5221 I'm totally with you on this. The problem with the IR solution is that there isn't any energy storage system or thermal mass. It relies heavily on the insulation and air tightness of the building. Heating up thin plaster boards, wooden planks and carpet from the surface isn't going to keep the house warm. In short, it's just an electric panel heater.
@@kenneth6102 Not quite. A normal electric panel heater is using mostly convection to hear the air in the room. And IR panel is using radiation to heat the object it is pointed at. Less energy is lost to drafts or through lack of airtightness.
@@EP-bb1rm While it is true that less energy is lost to draft since the heat is transferred through IR, the effectiveness of the heater is hugely affected by the materials in the house. For instance, a white or light-coloured room with carpeted or shinny waxed wooden floor and wallpapered or thin plasterboard walls will basically render the IR heater useless. You would need huge thermal mass in the space with high specific heat capacity and it also need to be heat absorbent. If the materials (either due to the lack of mass or low specific heat capacity) raise a few more degrees with the same energy given, it would be more affected by air-tightness. I am sorry that I was jumping logical steps and didn't explain myself clearly. It feels to me that the requirements of the construction for this IR heating's effectiveness is set at a very high bar. An average house would need a lot of refitting in order to make the IR heating efficient and worthwhile. In a case of a newly poured concrete floor, for instance, one might as well install a sub-floor radiant heating system instead. The fundamental problem with heating is always energy retention or storage. Any solution that does not tackle this directly is pretty much missing the point. If I were to swap out my radiators for this thing, I might as well spend on improving the airtightness of my doors and windows. Moreover, UK's winter is miserably wet and cold, the humidity in the air would probably absorb a good amount of the IR. I am very sorry to say that this IR product is trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist.
Agreed.. Especially when it's worth about 7 power walls That's pretty damn good It'd be nice to use solar panels and then have the excess go into those waterstone things and use when needed.. And then use gas for any excess
This mini series has been truly inspirational. I follow renewables closely and was really keen to use some in a flat I just renovated. I wanted to try infrared but couldn't find anyone else to talk to about its use in residential. I also contacted SunAmp and hoped to use that for our hot water but received no response. Seeing this has made me realise that my expectations are ahead of where the technology is or was when I was looking 18 months ago. Please continue this side of fully charged. In my opinion it is as important if not more so than EV content. Fully charged was a pioneer in covering electric vehicles but there are lots of people doing it now. Please be pioneer of clean heat! Thank you!
I had similar experience as I wondered if the SunAmp might replace our ancient GEC Nitstor Electric Storage Heater to Water Heating System (before this video & hearing about the ZEB) they didn't know & suggested speaking to installers who wouldn't have a clue.
Why stop at 6 shows? A more indepth look at energy for homes would be very welcome. Fully charge do excellent reviews of EVs so why not more on home energy as this is what we all need. Not all can afford an EV but we all use heating of some sort. Boiler of the week?
Nice ray of hope that's run through this series. It's so nice to approach it in the way you have, educating us rather than the alternative. Thank you for the series, but please keep it going!. I'd love to learn more about Air Source Heat Pumps (probably the most viable one for our house) and how to correctly insulate your house - and if there is funding or help available. Please please keep this series going.
"We're aiming for a zero carbon society not a low energy society" Spoken by a true thermal battery salesman, who is not paying the electricity bill. Haha! I wish more coverage went in to the running costs of these technologies, because I feel it will be the main battlefield when the gas and oil taxes arrive.
If you have enough solar on your roof, it would be effectively free. Of course an issue with that is that the yield of those is pretty minimal when you'd most need it (i.e. winter evenings when it's dark, cold, and you are at home). But it's a valid point. Take cheap electricity off peak when you have the heating off and discharge during peak hours when electricity would be expensive. With lots of wind coming online everywhere, it's not going to be that expensive. But there's just a fixed number of kwh that you are going to need to heat your place no matter how or when you consume the electricity. The grid is probably not the cheapest place to get that for most people.
I think the point is you would be using off peak power, otherwise why would you bother storing the heat for later. Typical off-peak tariffs like octopus go would be 5p a kWh. I don't think we can expect to go much lower or zero carbon without some premium.
@@barriedear5990 Surely likely running costs should have been mentioned for a range of typical uk houses for each product. I’ve installed IR panels in a flat, They work wonderfully well, but to pretend that the work involved isn’t disruptive is disingenuous. Unless of course you don’t mind cable trunking all over your home. Love these new ideas, but average working people need accurate costings. Ps how many people’s existing boilers are anywhere near ‘washing machine’ size?
@@elminster8149 Ive seen it done locally they use the same rig as well drillers so you would need a garden/drive big enough to get the rig in, and then somewhere to fit a large water tank. The pluming part is very basic and the same as a ground loop system.
Our modest 4-bed house has an old equivalent to the Zeb a 'GEC Nightsor' which is very inefficient. It makes a good job of keeping our cats very warm in a utility room. I was interested in changing this heater to a Zeb (now available) but 'Tepeo' advised me that as we use too much energy the Zeb is unsuitable. From what I was told the Zeb would probably be suitable for smaller homes than ours perhaps up to 3 bedrooms. I discovered some storage heaters 'ECOMBI ARC' that are able to take energy from Solar Panels which would be interesting to review and could be scaled up to meet the demand of larger properties, although I don't know if they could make use of flexible tariffs. It looks likely that we will change to Herschel Infrared panels which appear on the face of it to be controllable and efficient.
Great series - its important that Fully charged provide this type of information for those of us sold on eletric vehicles and want to move further on towards zero emissions. Please ensure you keep home energy high on the editorial agenda please....
I would still pick air to water heatpump over those two option. Even if I had to swap some of the radiators for bigger ones to compensate for the lower radiator temp. I payed around 10 000€ for the heatpump indoor unit, outdoor unit and four bigger radiators. Saving is fenomenal, dropped from 18 000kWh/year to 6 000kWh/year.
Thought I was up to speed on new heating technology, this video proved me wrong. Fascinating and I've already made an enquiry to Herschel for their IR heating!
@@dodgydd 100%, the saving would be if you turned the house all off and had that pointing at you when you sit at your desk, its been on amazon for 5 years.
How about a graph showing running costs in a standard 3 bed semi compared to a gas boiler. And an initial set up cost comparison over 20 years with the usage. And that Warmstone isn't going into the space where my gas boiler sits. And how long will off peak last when everyone starts using it? I have solar panels with battery storage. You don't get much from them in the winter.
"Off peak" will actually become more flexible as it'll be when the wind is blowing, not a fixed few hours overnight when the nuclear power stations have nothing to do. That said, this would be a massive expansion in electricity demand and would require staggering improvements in the grid and a massive build out of wind turbines and solar.
@@paulgoffin8054 Build-out of renewable generation, definitely, yes. Grid upgrades, not so much. The average UK house, at least, has a 60A fuse and can easily be upgraded to 100A without replacing the low voltage hardware, whereas typical peak demand at the moment rarely hits 32A - tons of overhead for EV charging and heat devices, particularly off-peak. There will be some places where substations need adding or upgrading, but probably not as many as you'd think. Tangent: solid-state transformers are on the way. More expensive to install, but more efficient and therefore good for the grid. Moreover, ultra-high demand sites (e.g. service station with 32+ EV rapid chargers) can use AC-to-DC solid-state transformers to bring the efficiency up, connect to the medium voltage grid (eliminating the need for multiple dedicated substations) and simplify the hardware in the rapid chargers themselves (reducing cost).
@Glenn Lambert A proper comparison between some of these technologies in a sample of house types would be *amazing*. And doing them over the lifespan of the system would also be really informative. Here in the UK, at least, solar generation tanks during the winter, but wind generation booms. Electricity rates will probably move to hourly rates (for some customers, at least) - in the winter, these will inversely track the wind generation pretty closely, and battery-users like yourself will be able to fill up when the wind is blowing and the prices are low. This is, also, why I'm so excited for tidal and wave power - they generate more in the winter than in the summer, like wind and river hydro. Variable generation is not a problem if it generates more when you need it and less when you don't, and grids will need to bring serious energy storage on-stream anyway.
@@gigabyte2248 The limit isn't at homes, it's the grid interconnectors. We can't bring power from windy Scotland to calm England. We can bring power from the sunny South West to the dusk time North East. The grid wasn't designed to move power around that way.
I think you should interview many many people after they had these or other systems installed. And give the bare practice of there install and living experience. So we can learn what to expect.
As an ex gas fitter I found this really interesting. Seeing the change in technologies to reduce carbon emissions still further is exciting. I look forward to seeing more on these in the future, especially some of the specifications required before an install.
I work in oil and gas and love nerding out to this stuff. One thing with a lot of this stuff is there is less moving parts so there is less that can go wrong. I'm not really too worried about losing my job either since we are starting to slowly move over to hydrogen which will mean I've still got a job.
@@neddyl1225 Alberta Canada.... we have an election coming up and all the parties have put a priority on hydrogen. We already have a lot of the infrastructure in place to start ramping up production. The bigger companies will be doing blue hydrogen with carbon capture but a smaller company has figured out how to do the conversion underground and once the process is started they can use heat to produce power to keep the whole process going and if any co2 does come up they capture it and send it back underground.
Great episode, but this episode was mostly about products using direct electric heating. Which can work great, but lets be clear about one thing: They don't lower your energy need. So please keep that in mind. A heat pump isn't always applicable, but it would lower your heat requirement. However, if there is sufficient wind power for example, who cares how much energy it is, it is better than oil.
I like the look of the ZEB. I've already got a quote for a Mixergy boiler, and was looking at air source heat pumps to replace our gas boiler. I like the "plug and play" compatibility.
Good series Dan, unfortunately, about the only item relevant to me without central heating radiators was the infrared heaters. I'd hoped for more information on air to air heat pumps, even though these were specifically excluded from the recent government grant scheme. My current air to air heat pump is 15 years old and I'd hoped to learn what improvements new models can offer. Hopefully I'll see you again over the three days of FCL this weekend 😃
The village that I spent my summers growing up in is not on the gas grid and never will be. A lot of the houses are old, stone built and currently use electricity storage heaters. I can see some of the technologies in this video eventually making their way into the entire village. I hope Fully Charged does an update in about a year's time on everything in this series
More on ventilation, please and pretty-please! From the basic stuff on how to keep the air fresh and dry when the building is airtight through MVHR and active and passive cooling options with heat pump systems.
I kind of like the ZEB because it would compliment solar PV well as well as work well with my existing central heating with tank. But my boiler is in the loft, I worry about getting it up there if it's a dense lump of concrete! Unless I could get it into the loft then I am limited to Heat Pump because that can go on the wall adjacent to the tank. Our kitchen is cold and has no rads, so I am tempted by the infrared heater, but I didn't really get an impression of efficiency compared to other solutions? Still tempted by one panel. The Caldera stone thing is kind of a niche market, giant Zeb, but it looks good for big houses.
I have a heat pump with 180 liters in it. I have solar panels as well. I told my heat pump to make new hot water at 13:00h each day. Highest change for it to be done with the electricity from my own panels. You don't need the ZEB to store energy from the sun ;-)
@@StefanvanderFange yea, there are more aspects to the plumbing of a heat pump, plus the fitting externally, and the noise. Technically it also needs planning permission because it would be within 3m of a neighbouring property. But I really like the efficiency of an ASHP, don't get me wrong.
I was looking online at a different product and stumbled on something called thermaskirt, basically you replace the skirting boards in your property with a radiator. You can do standard pipes or electric elements and the whole lot is hidden away from everyone in the skirting board. It also uses radiant heat rather than convection to heat from the ground upwards and as it is in the room, it doesn't require the floor to be lifted. There seems to be a thing for surface mounted stuff, like the infra red panels. It may be worth getting a builder to recess them into the wall or ceiling so they are flush and invisible to the user.
That was a really interesting series, thank you. I hope in a future episode you'll cover home cooling, which would be of great relevance to a lot of places around the world.
[Disclosure: I live in the north of England in a 2-bedroom terraced house, built in 1913. There's an old-fashioned keeping cellar/basement, but I have no fridge or freezer; I use about 250kWh of electricity in a year, or around 20kWh per month.] Hmm. I said I'd watch this Home Energy mini series, and I have done. Thanks for making it, peeps. 🙂 Alas, I don't think any of it applies to me. I'm not destined to be part of the green, renewable future, because I can't afford to be. For the past almost 15 years I've lived on an annual income of £800. [Not a typo: annual income of eight-hundred pounds.] It's not fun, but it's tolerable. With reference to this final episode... It's more of the same, isn't it. I can't afford any heating. Nope. I wear plenty of clothes when it's cold, and treat myself to gloves and a woolly hat (no bobble on top) when it's really freezing. Knitting keeps you warm twice, by the way - once in the making, and again in the wearing. From my point of view, the clean, renewable future is something that's only going to happen to other people. My carbon footprint or whatever it's called is presumably already indescribably minuscule, but I'll continue to watch Fully Charged because I find its optimism amusing (sorry, that was a bit cruel 🤭). What I really want is for someone, somewhere, someday, to produce something - anything, ANY kind of technology - that's as useful, practical, cheap, efficient and enduring as a bicycle. No joy so far...
Fantastic series….thank you!! More please….comparisons of different solutions from up front costs and ongoing costs and energy efficiency etc. The thermal storage systems in this episode were very interesting but how do they compare in term so energy used to heat pumps. Similarly the infra red heating vs heat pumps etc. Some form of standard comparison across options in say a standard X bedroom house would be very interesting.
Like to see mini series focusing in apartments, holiday homes, "mobile" homes. More are going to live in apts vs houses and lots of old apt blocks out there
We have some infrared heating at home. They are quite good. The heat feels to come up very quickly compared to normal resistive heater and it stays comfortable throughout. For sure a bit more efficient than normal resistive heater although, I would like to switch partially to a heat pump to get much more efficiency. What is good is that you can heat really when you're there. However, we have a too big room with many panels installed on the same thermostat and this was I think a mistake. The most efficient would be really to have only the panel above you to heat. Would be maybe good to link it to an occupancy detector (although not sure how good it would work.
The more and more demands there are for "off-peak, low cost electricity" that come onto the market the less and less either off-peak or low cost will have any practical meaning.
There's no comparison. Heat pumps push heat up hill, from a cold to a hot. The further up you push it, the more energy it takes. So an air to air pushes heat up from say 0 degrees outdoors, to 20 degrees indoors. An air to water pushes from 0 outside to 60 degrees inside the hot water tank. Then it's allowed to slide back to 20 degrees on the room. It's inherently inefficient. It's like the difference between walking one flight of stairs, to get to the second floor, and climbing up four floors and then sliding down a slippery dip from the fourth floor to the second. It's just a waste of energy for no benefit.
@@gasdive That is a brilliant illustration, it is why I wonder why the UK and Fully Charged always push for air to water. I am thinking of getting a mini split HP for heating and solar for hot water but it is actually hard to find an air to air HP in Ireland
@@gasdive to be fair, the air to water one is giving you hot water as well. But if you dont use much hot water, a tankless water heater at each tap combined with air to air for space heating feels like it could be pretty damn efficient.
Wet radiators feel like a bit of a legacy problem in the UK. Because we have so many wet heating systems, theres a push for air to water heat pumps. Less of a perceived change.. but it doesn't half feel like an overcomplicated and expensive way of doing things!
I've only recently caught onto this show (and Everything Electric) and while the current UK government is doing pretty much zilch to encourage renewables and getting information out to the general public, Robert / Dan and the team are doing a fantastic job and for me it's a bit like seeing a modern version of the 'Tomorrow's World' TV show (it was on when I was a kid in the '70's). So do keep up the great work. Also, is it me, or is there a fox walking across by the back hedgerow (behind Dan) at 14:33? Guess I'll never know!🙂
I enjoyed this series but I wish they were more in depth. I would be happy to watch a 1-2hour video if it meant we could watch the technology working under different environments and being used in small, medium and large houses. I would like realistic prices for different projects and the potential savings. I am also interested in the efficiency rating and energy consumption. It would also be good to see comparisons between other technologies or watching them working together to improve on efficiency and running costs overall.
This is a great series. Thank you. I want to insulate without getting mould. Can you tell me how to do this without opening the windows and losing the heat.
I grew up in NZ with a “heat storage range and night store heaters” the night storage heaters worked great. Would be good for storing energy made from your solar.
Wish I'd looked more at ground source but I wasn't as informed then as I am now, assumed it was too expensive anyway and asked the wrong people about them (guys trying to sell us ASHP's). If I had another chance I would certainly have spoke to a couple of ground source installers - it still might not have been right for us but I'd at least feel good that I would have heard that from ground source specialists.
@@chrismartin2663 Yes, we came upon a way to install the ground loops cheaply and without distrubing the landscape. We also didn't have to drill expensive holes.
Excellent quality video with technology (sensible energy storage with resistance heating) of which I hadn't seen in commercial applications. Thank you.
Amazing series! Thanks so much to the entire Fully Charged team for the enlightenment and inspiration. We need more of this in Canada and the rest of the countries where heating is needed! Cheers
I’m looking at taking the next step in our home energy journey. We have a class Q barn conversion in Staffordshire, we have had underfloor (Roth Pipes) fitted a (Stiebel Eltron) ASHP together with hot water storage and underfloor heating buffer tank. We have carried out significant insulation using Kingspan and Extratherm insulation, and other methods of cold bridging preventative measures as we are principally an agricultural steel frame portal building with concrete blocks. We have had an air test @2.5 better than what we expected, and we are 100% electric on a three phase supply with 100 amps per phase available. For our next step we would like to convert/building a garage storage building to replace a tired steel frame portal building. With this in mind, we want to include all available technologies available make power to supply our home, and store energy to use at peak demands by ourselves. We are prepared to make an investment for the future to help us out of the current crisis we are in with high electricity costs. I’m really interested to hear what everyone’s thoughts are for our future opportunities and options.
They will clame 100% efficiency just like a cheap electric heater can reach 100%. A heatpump can get up to 500% through a COP of 5. So if you are going to heat a complete room to a certain temperature, the heatpump will just use less energy. However infrared can get you not to heat the whole room, but just where you are sitting, and it radiates on you and the couch for example. So in that sense it is better/more comfortable than a cheap electric heater. But really, it is best for some rooms you are not in all the time. And it saves on all the plumbing to a the rooms. For the living room at a constant temperature, in the end, 1 kWh in is 1 kWh heat with this. With a heat pump it is 1 kWh in and 3 to 5 kWh out.
Because IR will only heat an object with direct line of sight, and the radiation intensity just like light will diminish with the square of the distance, near objects will get hotter than far objects. Ceiling mounted IR emitter as demonstrated will directly heat you head but not your toes with an intensity ratio of about 4 to 1 because the relative distances between the radiator and the object. You are likely to get a hot head but only mildly warm toes. I have experienced this effect whilst working under IR tube heaters in industrial settings. By all means try it, but I suspect you will be disappointed with the results.
@@Zalgol Yes placement is very important. A hot head for longer periods can get you headaches and so on. And if you add room thermostat, it is going to heat up the whole room anyway, just like a regular electric heater would.
+1 for ventilations and heat-recovery ventilation! Preparing to buy a home, we're aware that summers might get unpleasantly hot for a bit, so we wonder about cooling as well as heating. Really helpful series, my favourite Fully Charged content for years! No really - once I had gotten a driving licence and bought a Zoe, the car content was more for other people than me. Now I'm buying a house, so this series was for me!
Great series. Well done! Building energy is the elephant in the energy transition room. 36% of energy is used by buildings compared to 25% for transport. Lots of great ideals here. Would have liked to see heat recovery ventilation covered.
I’m really interested in the simplest and cheapest gas boiler alternatives for a small house and I’m on a very low income When I come to replace the gas boiler I want to replace it with a zero emission alternative at an equivalent price of a gas boiler Without replacing pipes or radiators etc in the house
I read the Guardian article about microwave boilers. Please cover these as one article talked about the army trialing these and that they may become the easiest transition and cheapest solution forward (cheapest installation for low wage earners like myself)
We boarded up our unused fireplace and have a vertical floor standing far infra red panel. Works well, its 580 watt seems equivalent to the 1 kw oil filled rad we had before. Like being near a warm wall at sunset. Thermostatic remote control and only cost about £110 on line.
Just seal up the convection part of your radiators (the middle bit) if you want to try out infra-red heating at home, gaffa tape should work well for this...
It's the last episode in our Home Series - what have you learnt? which did you enjoy the most? what changes are you planning to make? Tell us below....
Not learnt much of use - it was a series of seeming adverts with very little info to offer a comparison with existing tech or their competitors. The channel made a similar error with the Swytch bike episode - more like an advertorial.
@@billybilly7100 I have to agree. It was all the positives with no negatives and no real comparison between the tech and what would work best when. I was disappointed. I ex3the only reason that all those things mentioned at the end (heat recovery etc) weren't actually covered is they didn't find a company to talk to in the same way!
Thanks it was all interesting. I knew an overview of most of the systems surveyed. But there were lots of small but crucial points I did not know. Like would Powerball require 3 phase supply, and should there be a mains supply failure, will the storage battery kick in ? As so many people have said against each of the episodes, need real life examples, with costs of install, retrofit and running costs as a minimum.especially after the post Putin invasion of Ukraine... Changing all the costs. As has been rammed home, insulate first, and therefore could we have examples and costs of retrofitting internal and external solid walls etc These would be my starters. Thanks
This series is likely to change the course of my home life in a very significant way for the next 40 years :) Do you guys know anything about cutting the walls in an old stone/cement home, just above the ground to isolate them from the foundation thermally? I need to figure that out. There will need to be a lot of retrofitting old homes like that in Europe.
your concern is with the surrounding ambient ground temperature and to stop the influx of it under your foundation, here where i live in Canada, most homes have basements or cellars as some people call them or slab homes like your homes in the UK are built , any foundation is usually excavated at the perimeter and cleared of any debris or obstructions and then is insulated from the bottom up to ground level where it will then be back filled with the material that was removed in the first place and it doesn't take allot to save energy and have warm floors and walls , the last home i designed had a basement and at the construction stage we put blue styrofoam insulation mounted to the concrete walls right from the footing up to ground level again, approx 2 metres, then it water proofing was done and back filled and during the winter months you could walk on the basement floor in socks and your feet weren't cold and thats with-25 celsius outside temps , my current house is like yours its a slab home concrete foundation with a wood frame construction walls and roofing with asphalt shingles, my heating is gas forced air with the ducting in the floors that was installed before the slab was poured, the bills are 96.67 sterling/month on equal payment plan based on 12 months, that is for both gas/electric and includes a very well insulted hot tub built on my deck outback, i am doing a new roof in September and in 2022 and 2023 i will do some new windows 1or 2 at a time and dig out around my foundation in install the blue styrofoam insulation {approved by code} around it and back fill over it, and i know it makes a difference my neighbour had it done and walk on their floors and it is a noticeable comfort almost 4 celsius when we measured it with a heat camera, the places it was cooler was at the doors, that was because the doors are 20 yrs old and are now changed in 2021, the material cost is not huge, looking at under 4500 with taxes CDN the material is erosion proof 20 yr warranty 2inches/50mm thick and is almost R20 which is more than what is in my walls so its not as difficult as some people think it is, more labour involved than anything really, and with my new roof i will also reinsert my attic space and add a new roof ventilation, here in Canada in winter it makes huge difference for us, remember our fuel costs here are less than yours and my house isa single level 7 room house 3 bedrooms, single bathroom, it sucks,LOL, kitchen, living room and heat or boiler room as you call it and large walk in pantry/storage room so yes it is small, so i would guess the work for is subject to access around your foundation ex: neighbours, fences and so on, you could even do some of it yourself with a few mates and mini diggers are cheap to rent and in most places there in the UK doesn't require you to have a license to operate one and are less the a metre wide and you can rent electric ones and plug them into your house, have fun, 👍
Clearly colder in north of Scotland, and warmer in south (London). In north of Scotland it's not unusual to hit -10, in London it's unusual to go under zero these days. We used to have snow in London 40 years ago. Nowadays children have never seen it !!!!! Fyi
Storage heaters had one major roadblock. Overnight "charging" meant cold snaps later in the day were harder to respond fast to plus they only heated the room air not deliver hot water. How does the efficincy of an air to water heat pump compare to these new storage heaters.
A flavour. How delightful! We crave a meal, we get the "amuse bouche". Light on numbers, light on facts. What would a house retrofit cost for IR panels, if one were to ditch radiators. Cost of electricity compared to gas in a year? This sadly borders on advertorials.
Thank you very much fantastic program I am always watching fully charge it is nice to know how to be environmentally friendly I am glad to say I do have electric car which is old Nissan leafy Everyone should watch this program I love fully charge thank you very much Hari Gurung🙏
I do wish the host would at least pretend to be a little skeptical when "interviewing" the vendor instead of sounding like your reading questions from their FAQ page for them to hit out of the park.
Don't you think you have missed something very important? i.e. efficiency... How is the heat being generated by the electricity? Via resistive load? Then it is the same as warming one's house using the electric kettle...
@@skybenedict it does depend on the project and if the ir panels are combined with solar and battery storage. The current issue with heat pumps is the capital cost and retrofit projects. New builds are ok but often the radiator system in a retrofit needs upgrading for heat pumps due to the lower water temps being used.
I really enjoyed the series and id like to see all and everything that you couldn't show. Thanks for the series and i hope you will be able to do more in the future. Takecare.
What can I buy and make my money back on in the shortest time? Electric/gas bill is around £75 a month so seems like it would take a long time to see any financial benefit
Good stuff Dan, thanks for the series! Could you add some graphics/ diagrams or animations to explain some of these systems in the future? A bit like what you see in the some of the apps you get that show you where electricity is flowing to or from - batteries, grid or load in the house, the same for hot water in say a heat pump. 👍🏻
Great series. We have developed an active ceiling solution which is a hydronic based system driven by heat pump, both radiant heating and cooling from a totally hidden system contained inside the ceiling structure.
Amazing series and finished on a high note. I don’t have the money for everything but I fully insulated my house with sheep’s wall and breathable membranes. £800. It’s lovely not having draughts and hopefully save up for some new tech! I have an electric car and looking for some kind of battery to charge off peak and use during the day so we are on off-peak 24hrs. I think it would be better than solar and can’t afford both unless the prices come down.
would love to install the Zeb, that with the agile go, with 4hrs of super cheap electricity every night. it's not a bad price as boilers go, but still a large chunk of money. Would save me a lot of money over my current electric heaters.
Gas combi boilers are very often (usually?) in cupboards on the wall. The extremely heavy heat storage units described in the video aren't not likely to be able to be installed there. I'd guess only Sun Amp would work there.
I'd be very sceptical about any heating system fitted on a ceiling, heat rises and to warm the floor from that distance means one would probably end up with a boiling hot head and freezing feet but it will be interesting to see how well it works
Having stone floors, with insulation under, would be taking advantage of the thermal mass. Similar with cavity wall that have cavity wall insulation. Carpets would act as an insulation barrier. The heat soaks into the thermal mass, then, as the lady said, convect back out when the air temperature is less than the wall temperature. These infra red heaters appear a great solution for flats.
Throwing some experience in the ring... My hole house is running on Herschel infrared. 1st things first the company were great to deal with and I would recommend them. 2nd the quality of the panels are great, iv had experience with cheaper variants and they are just not the same league. 3rd installation was straight forward. 4th though my electrical bill went up my overall outgoings have gone down, trying to break it down and my heating is around 30-40% cheaper than the oil heating I was using. 5th there are NO service costs and nothing to really go wrong with the system, add that saving to you annual bill and these panels really start to make sense! Now that's the boring stuff done here's the bits they did not mention and that for me have been a life changer. I live in an old building that has no cavity and mould has always been a problem, installing these panels has massively helped that issue!! I also suffer with sinus issues and conventional convection heating always make me stuffy and sets my nose off but these panels don't do that, in fact it literally just feels like a sunny day. Lastly, using these panels have meant I have loads more space, all radiators are gone and the pipes that went with them which gives more usable space and also helps reduce the risk of burst pipes or floods etc and I moved to localised tankless water heaters in the kitchen and bathroom so there is now just one mains water pipe that comes in the house, goes under the sink and then up to the bathroom. so all the tanks in the attic have gone too! There are some awesome company's out there doing great stuff but as its all a bit new i thought id throw my experience with infrared here incase it helps.
we need the big home builders to adopt these an other tech. The fact they remove the piping should be sold to them as simplifying the building of new homes. They should love that sort of that stuff.
Very interesting to hear! What are your energy costs per kWh ? In Germany we have the highest prices which might add a lot to the bill so it might only be an option with solar.
Dave, Can you give a bit more detail on size of property. Annual kWh used for heating and capital costs please. I am really wondering how to get rid of gas in my home. I have an EV , solar panels, Zappi and an Eddi. I like the idea of a heat battery for hot water twinned with maybe infrared heating. Need to compare with ASHP etc
@@DavidKnowles0 This is strictly worse than a heat pump you know? A heat pump should have less than a 1/3 of the annual running costs.
That being the case, I'd want them to be installing a heat pump and underfloor heating on a new build. Just like 10 years ago I'd expect my new build to have central heating installed.
As a retrofit option to an older property it may well be fine. it wouldn't / shouldn't be optimal for a new build though.
@@abdebee3221 I'm with an 100% renewable supplier that is currently charging a unit rate (per kWh) 18.0810p with a standing charge of 23.2890p per day. Ill defiantly be looking at getting solar down the line when I can afford to do so.
I'd love to see some of these competing technologies each fitted into one of a group of identical houses, run them for a year and compare costs/consumption. Fully Charged project?
Me too. Great idea, but would cost a lot to set up I expect.
I’d love to see the average consumer try to find the money to pay for it.
It would be a lovely test in a row of terrace houses. Great Idea
Yes pls. I hv a 3 storey townhouse in the Greater Toronto Area and am looking forward seeinģ solutions for smaller, more closely packed housing
Insulation! Insulation! Insulation! Please talk about it, especially the options open to retrofit into the old UK housing stock.
How can you not even talk about the efficiency of these infrared heaters? What is the energy consumption compared to traditional electrical heaters?
Very disappointed that we weren’t given any information on the power consumption and likely running costs.
Infrared heaters as all electric heaters has an efficiency of 100%. All the electrcicity is easily converted to heat.
BUT compared to regular electric heaters, Infrared is super weak. 700W for a large picture. And you might need 3000W for a medium size room. So prepare to buy 5 large infrared pictures for a single room.
And again, compared to heat pump, which has and efficiency of 400-600%, all those direct electric heaters are just a waste of energy with efficiency of 100%. When and If somebody finaly produce Quiet heatpump, that would use quiet rottary compressor instead of piston one, than finaly everybody could easily change their heaters and mount those quiet heatpumps in every room.
As said they are 100% efficient. As you are directly heating people and objects you can run IR at lower temps and still feel warmer than a conventional convection system.
Also one thing to consider, for the cost of a heat pump system you may be able to have an IR system and solar pv installed with battery storage .
I've looked at infra red recently. It's literally instant heat as soon as they are switched on, so much quicker to get the room warm. I cant seem to get an answer to how quick the room gets to temp and how long the heat is retained to get a feel for running costs. I'm going to do as others have done and buy a couple to test it out. Its the only way to tell. Can't find much on the Internet to judge any other way...
@@TheJimurq It is always difficult to advise on running costs due to the many factors involved. With IR as you have said the panel warm-up time is 5-10 minutes so very quick. How long it would take the room to warm up would depend on how well it retains heat and the initial temperature when the system comes on.
Dan you are superb in front of the camera as a presenter, and you should definitely do it more often. I loved this series
Our one bedroom flat in central London, built 15 years ago, has an open vented boiler and bog-standard electric panel heaters on the walls. The boiler provides enough hot water for our family of three (it’s on a timer for two hours each night) including daily showers. The panel heaters are rarely used due to the excellent insulation in the building, although bear in mind that inner London is about 4°C warmer than the surrounding countryside. Going fully electric is fully achievable.
The tepeo and the warmstone are pretty much identical technologies right? Using electricity to heat a large mass of stone/metal inside a box then using that heat later to heat water to pump around radiators.
I really like the concept of using "batteries" in homes to generate both heat and hot water. Electricity at peak times is expensive so being able to time shift usage to when it is very cheap is an excellent idea. Be interesting to see how much energy is used by both system daily, as you could build up the heat over a few days on cheap rate in advance, then just top up recharge them during the heat cycle. The three systems in the show are very cool. ( so to speak )
The systems/should/ use the same amount of energy. and all /should/ be about the same as standard electric heating. They're all ~100% efficient.
The benefits come from time shifting the energy use.
Im not convinced by the first one. old 2 or 3 bar heaters were radiated heat. theyre useful for 'instant' heat. so you could have one in an unheated bathroom hooked up to the light switch, and youd feel the benefit in the 5 minutes you were in there. as a general whole house solution its going to be as expensive and efficient as £20 oil filled radiators.
@@benholroyd5221 I'm totally with you on this. The problem with the IR solution is that there isn't any energy storage system or thermal mass. It relies heavily on the insulation and air tightness of the building. Heating up thin plaster boards, wooden planks and carpet from the surface isn't going to keep the house warm. In short, it's just an electric panel heater.
@@kenneth6102 Not quite. A normal electric panel heater is using mostly convection to hear the air in the room. And IR panel is using radiation to heat the object it is pointed at. Less energy is lost to drafts or through lack of airtightness.
@@EP-bb1rm While it is true that less energy is lost to draft since the heat is transferred through IR, the effectiveness of the heater is hugely affected by the materials in the house. For instance, a white or light-coloured room with carpeted or shinny waxed wooden floor and wallpapered or thin plasterboard walls will basically render the IR heater useless. You would need huge thermal mass in the space with high specific heat capacity and it also need to be heat absorbent. If the materials (either due to the lack of mass or low specific heat capacity) raise a few more degrees with the same energy given, it would be more affected by air-tightness. I am sorry that I was jumping logical steps and didn't explain myself clearly.
It feels to me that the requirements of the construction for this IR heating's effectiveness is set at a very high bar. An average house would need a lot of refitting in order to make the IR heating efficient and worthwhile. In a case of a newly poured concrete floor, for instance, one might as well install a sub-floor radiant heating system instead. The fundamental problem with heating is always energy retention or storage. Any solution that does not tackle this directly is pretty much missing the point. If I were to swap out my radiators for this thing, I might as well spend on improving the airtightness of my doors and windows. Moreover, UK's winter is miserably wet and cold, the humidity in the air would probably absorb a good amount of the IR. I am very sorry to say that this IR product is trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist.
Agreed.. Especially when it's worth about 7 power walls
That's pretty damn good
It'd be nice to use solar panels and then have the excess go into those waterstone things and use when needed.. And then use gas for any excess
This mini series has been truly inspirational. I follow renewables closely and was really keen to use some in a flat I just renovated. I wanted to try infrared but couldn't find anyone else to talk to about its use in residential. I also contacted SunAmp and hoped to use that for our hot water but received no response. Seeing this has made me realise that my expectations are ahead of where the technology is or was when I was looking 18 months ago. Please continue this side of fully charged. In my opinion it is as important if not more so than EV content. Fully charged was a pioneer in covering electric vehicles but there are lots of people doing it now. Please be pioneer of clean heat!
Thank you!
Looking at the views for this episode 3 weeks later i think they will stick with cars.
I had similar experience as I wondered if the SunAmp might replace our ancient GEC Nitstor Electric Storage Heater to Water Heating System (before this video & hearing about the ZEB) they didn't know & suggested speaking to installers who wouldn't have a clue.
Why stop at 6 shows? A more indepth look at energy for homes would be very welcome.
Fully charge do excellent reviews of EVs so why not more on home energy as this is what we all need. Not all can afford an EV but we all use heating of some sort. Boiler of the week?
This isn't a review, its a straight up twwenry minute advert/paid promotion, but they don't have the courage to be upfront about the fact
Nice ray of hope that's run through this series. It's so nice to approach it in the way you have, educating us rather than the alternative. Thank you for the series, but please keep it going!. I'd love to learn more about Air Source Heat Pumps (probably the most viable one for our house) and how to correctly insulate your house - and if there is funding or help available. Please please keep this series going.
Fully Charged Home channel?
"We're aiming for a zero carbon society not a low energy society"
Spoken by a true thermal battery salesman, who is not paying the electricity bill. Haha!
I wish more coverage went in to the running costs of these technologies, because I feel it will be the main battlefield when the gas and oil taxes arrive.
If you have enough solar on your roof, it would be effectively free. Of course an issue with that is that the yield of those is pretty minimal when you'd most need it (i.e. winter evenings when it's dark, cold, and you are at home). But it's a valid point. Take cheap electricity off peak when you have the heating off and discharge during peak hours when electricity would be expensive. With lots of wind coming online everywhere, it's not going to be that expensive. But there's just a fixed number of kwh that you are going to need to heat your place no matter how or when you consume the electricity. The grid is probably not the cheapest place to get that for most people.
I think the point is you would be using off peak power, otherwise why would you bother storing the heat for later. Typical off-peak tariffs like octopus go would be 5p a kWh. I don't think we can expect to go much lower or zero carbon without some premium.
@@barriedear5990
Surely likely running costs should have been mentioned for a range of typical uk houses for each product. I’ve installed IR panels in a flat, They work wonderfully well, but to pretend that the work involved isn’t disruptive is disingenuous. Unless of course you don’t mind cable trunking all over your home. Love these new ideas, but average working people need accurate costings. Ps how many people’s existing boilers are anywhere near ‘washing machine’ size?
Something I've noticed.
Electrical goods come down in price over time.
Also
flooding our cities will cost a fair bit too.
What I'd really be interested in is a walk through installation of a (bore) ground source heat-pump.
I think there are already some videos on you tube about this subject. Could try skill builder channel as a first call.
@@livingladolcevita7318 SB vid is 12 years old, sure times have moved on.
@@elminster8149 the was a episode about it being installed at Eden months ago /watch?v=o--vpET3e4g
@@That1ufo Yeah, I mean in a domestic install. Tight access etc.
@@elminster8149 Ive seen it done locally they use the same rig as well drillers so you would need a garden/drive big enough to get the rig in, and then somewhere to fit a large water tank. The pluming part is very basic and the same as a ground loop system.
Our modest 4-bed house has an old equivalent to the Zeb a 'GEC Nightsor' which is very inefficient. It makes a good job of keeping our cats very warm in a utility room. I was interested in changing this heater to a Zeb (now available) but 'Tepeo' advised me that as we use too much energy the Zeb is unsuitable. From what I was told the Zeb would probably be suitable for smaller homes than ours perhaps up to 3 bedrooms. I discovered some storage heaters 'ECOMBI ARC' that are able to take energy from Solar Panels which would be interesting to review and could be scaled up to meet the demand of larger properties, although I don't know if they could make use of flexible tariffs. It looks likely that we will change to Herschel Infrared panels which appear on the face of it to be controllable and efficient.
Great series - its important that Fully charged provide this type of information for those of us sold on eletric vehicles and want to move further on towards zero emissions. Please ensure you keep home energy high on the editorial agenda please....
I would still pick air to water heatpump over those two option. Even if I had to swap some of the radiators for bigger ones to compensate for the lower radiator temp.
I payed around 10 000€ for the heatpump indoor unit, outdoor unit and four bigger radiators. Saving is fenomenal, dropped from 18 000kWh/year to 6 000kWh/year.
Thought I was up to speed on new heating technology, this video proved me wrong. Fascinating and I've already made an enquiry to Herschel for their IR heating!
Im sure its only efficient as any bar heater 1kw = 1kw vs heat pumps at cop 3-6
@@That1ufo How sure?
@@dodgydd 100%, the saving would be if you turned the house all off and had that pointing at you when you sit at your desk, its been on amazon for 5 years.
How about a graph showing running costs in a standard 3 bed semi compared to a gas boiler. And an initial set up cost comparison over 20 years with the usage. And that Warmstone isn't going into the space where my gas boiler sits. And how long will off peak last when everyone starts using it? I have solar panels with battery storage. You don't get much from them in the winter.
"Off peak" will actually become more flexible as it'll be when the wind is blowing, not a fixed few hours overnight when the nuclear power stations have nothing to do.
That said, this would be a massive expansion in electricity demand and would require staggering improvements in the grid and a massive build out of wind turbines and solar.
@@paulgoffin8054 Build-out of renewable generation, definitely, yes. Grid upgrades, not so much. The average UK house, at least, has a 60A fuse and can easily be upgraded to 100A without replacing the low voltage hardware, whereas typical peak demand at the moment rarely hits 32A - tons of overhead for EV charging and heat devices, particularly off-peak. There will be some places where substations need adding or upgrading, but probably not as many as you'd think.
Tangent: solid-state transformers are on the way. More expensive to install, but more efficient and therefore good for the grid. Moreover, ultra-high demand sites (e.g. service station with 32+ EV rapid chargers) can use AC-to-DC solid-state transformers to bring the efficiency up, connect to the medium voltage grid (eliminating the need for multiple dedicated substations) and simplify the hardware in the rapid chargers themselves (reducing cost).
@Glenn Lambert A proper comparison between some of these technologies in a sample of house types would be *amazing*. And doing them over the lifespan of the system would also be really informative.
Here in the UK, at least, solar generation tanks during the winter, but wind generation booms. Electricity rates will probably move to hourly rates (for some customers, at least) - in the winter, these will inversely track the wind generation pretty closely, and battery-users like yourself will be able to fill up when the wind is blowing and the prices are low. This is, also, why I'm so excited for tidal and wave power - they generate more in the winter than in the summer, like wind and river hydro. Variable generation is not a problem if it generates more when you need it and less when you don't, and grids will need to bring serious energy storage on-stream anyway.
@@gigabyte2248 The limit isn't at homes, it's the grid interconnectors. We can't bring power from windy Scotland to calm England. We can bring power from the sunny South West to the dusk time North East.
The grid wasn't designed to move power around that way.
I think you should interview many many people after they had these or other systems installed.
And give the bare practice of there install and living experience.
So we can learn what to expect.
Are infrared heaters less efficient in lightweight construction properties such as timber frame?
As an ex gas fitter I found this really interesting. Seeing the change in technologies to reduce carbon emissions still further is exciting. I look forward to seeing more on these in the future, especially some of the specifications required before an install.
I work in oil and gas and love nerding out to this stuff. One thing with a lot of this stuff is there is less moving parts so there is less that can go wrong. I'm not really too worried about losing my job either since we are starting to slowly move over to hydrogen which will mean I've still got a job.
@@pin65371 Is that in North America or Europe?
@@neddyl1225 Alberta Canada.... we have an election coming up and all the parties have put a priority on hydrogen. We already have a lot of the infrastructure in place to start ramping up production. The bigger companies will be doing blue hydrogen with carbon capture but a smaller company has figured out how to do the conversion underground and once the process is started they can use heat to produce power to keep the whole process going and if any co2 does come up they capture it and send it back underground.
Last week we had gentoo, this week we have caldera... What will come next? Mandrake insulation? Slackware inverters? Turbolinux heatpumps?
I bet somewhere theres an electric boiler called a gnome. I'll have to do more research and suse it out.
Great episode, but this episode was mostly about products using direct electric heating. Which can work great, but lets be clear about one thing: They don't lower your energy need. So please keep that in mind.
A heat pump isn't always applicable, but it would lower your heat requirement. However, if there is sufficient wind power for example, who cares how much energy it is, it is better than oil.
I like the look of the ZEB. I've already got a quote for a Mixergy boiler, and was looking at air source heat pumps to replace our gas boiler. I like the "plug and play" compatibility.
Good series Dan, unfortunately, about the only item relevant to me without central heating radiators was the infrared heaters. I'd hoped for more information on air to air heat pumps, even though these were specifically excluded from the recent government grant scheme. My current air to air heat pump is 15 years old and I'd hoped to learn what improvements new models can offer. Hopefully I'll see you again over the three days of FCL this weekend 😃
The village that I spent my summers growing up in is not on the gas grid and never will be. A lot of the houses are old, stone built and currently use electricity storage heaters. I can see some of the technologies in this video eventually making their way into the entire village. I hope Fully Charged does an update in about a year's time on everything in this series
More on ventilation, please and pretty-please! From the basic stuff on how to keep the air fresh and dry when the building is airtight through MVHR and active and passive cooling options with heat pump systems.
Awesome series thank you. Would love to hear about hear recovery ventilation.
The final message about early adopters is really important - thanks for including it
Absolutely. Very succinct and very important.
I kind of like the ZEB because it would compliment solar PV well as well as work well with my existing central heating with tank. But my boiler is in the loft, I worry about getting it up there if it's a dense lump of concrete! Unless I could get it into the loft then I am limited to Heat Pump because that can go on the wall adjacent to the tank.
Our kitchen is cold and has no rads, so I am tempted by the infrared heater, but I didn't really get an impression of efficiency compared to other solutions? Still tempted by one panel.
The Caldera stone thing is kind of a niche market, giant Zeb, but it looks good for big houses.
I have a heat pump with 180 liters in it. I have solar panels as well. I told my heat pump to make new hot water at 13:00h each day. Highest change for it to be done with the electricity from my own panels. You don't need the ZEB to store energy from the sun ;-)
@@StefanvanderFange yea, there are more aspects to the plumbing of a heat pump, plus the fitting externally, and the noise. Technically it also needs planning permission because it would be within 3m of a neighbouring property.
But I really like the efficiency of an ASHP, don't get me wrong.
I was looking online at a different product and stumbled on something called thermaskirt, basically you replace the skirting boards in your property with a radiator. You can do standard pipes or electric elements and the whole lot is hidden away from everyone in the skirting board. It also uses radiant heat rather than convection to heat from the ground upwards and as it is in the room, it doesn't require the floor to be lifted. There seems to be a thing for surface mounted stuff, like the infra red panels. It may be worth getting a builder to recess them into the wall or ceiling so they are flush and invisible to the user.
That was a really interesting series, thank you.
I hope in a future episode you'll cover home cooling, which would be of great relevance to a lot of places around the world.
I agree, it'll be of interest to us as global warming sets in!
Yes please. 1st day of spring here in Brisbane Australia, at 1pm it was 27 degrees Celcius.
[Disclosure: I live in the north of England in a 2-bedroom terraced house, built in 1913. There's an old-fashioned keeping cellar/basement, but I have no fridge or freezer; I use about 250kWh of electricity in a year, or around 20kWh per month.]
Hmm. I said I'd watch this Home Energy mini series, and I have done. Thanks for making it, peeps. 🙂
Alas, I don't think any of it applies to me. I'm not destined to be part of the green, renewable future, because I can't afford to be. For the past almost 15 years I've lived on an annual income of £800. [Not a typo: annual income of eight-hundred pounds.] It's not fun, but it's tolerable.
With reference to this final episode... It's more of the same, isn't it. I can't afford any heating. Nope. I wear plenty of clothes when it's cold, and treat myself to gloves and a woolly hat (no bobble on top) when it's really freezing. Knitting keeps you warm twice, by the way - once in the making, and again in the wearing.
From my point of view, the clean, renewable future is something that's only going to happen to other people. My carbon footprint or whatever it's called is presumably already indescribably minuscule, but I'll continue to watch Fully Charged because I find its optimism amusing (sorry, that was a bit cruel 🤭).
What I really want is for someone, somewhere, someday, to produce something - anything, ANY kind of technology - that's as useful, practical, cheap, efficient and enduring as a bicycle.
No joy so far...
£800! I am amazed you can afford internet.
Fantastic series….thank you!! More please….comparisons of different solutions from up front costs and ongoing costs and energy efficiency etc. The thermal storage systems in this episode were very interesting but how do they compare in term so energy used to heat pumps. Similarly the infra red heating vs heat pumps etc. Some form of standard comparison across options in say a standard X bedroom house would be very interesting.
Like to see mini series focusing in apartments, holiday homes, "mobile" homes. More are going to live in apts vs houses and lots of old apt blocks out there
Would the installer or the ZEB not have to be gas safe certified to remove the old boiler?
Exactly, it's glossing over stuff like this that spoils the sales pitch.
@@elminster8149 yes or I would expect them to have gas safe trained staff so they can do the whole installation.
Thanks Dan. Very informative and gives us all hope for a zero emission future…looking forward to seeing these technologies at fully charged live…
We have some infrared heating at home. They are quite good. The heat feels to come up very quickly compared to normal resistive heater and it stays comfortable throughout. For sure a bit more efficient than normal resistive heater although, I would like to switch partially to a heat pump to get much more efficiency. What is good is that you can heat really when you're there. However, we have a too big room with many panels installed on the same thermostat and this was I think a mistake. The most efficient would be really to have only the panel above you to heat. Would be maybe good to link it to an occupancy detector (although not sure how good it would work.
The more and more demands there are for "off-peak, low cost electricity" that come onto the market the less and less either off-peak or low cost will have any practical meaning.
Great series.
I would love an air to air vs air to water heat pump comparison
There's no comparison.
Heat pumps push heat up hill, from a cold to a hot. The further up you push it, the more energy it takes.
So an air to air pushes heat up from say 0 degrees outdoors, to 20 degrees indoors. An air to water pushes from 0 outside to 60 degrees inside the hot water tank. Then it's allowed to slide back to 20 degrees on the room. It's inherently inefficient. It's like the difference between walking one flight of stairs, to get to the second floor, and climbing up four floors and then sliding down a slippery dip from the fourth floor to the second. It's just a waste of energy for no benefit.
@@gasdive That is a brilliant illustration, it is why I wonder why the UK and Fully Charged always push for air to water.
I am thinking of getting a mini split HP for heating and solar for hot water but it is actually hard to find an air to air HP in Ireland
@@gasdive well, when you out it that way… 🤔
@@gasdive to be fair, the air to water one is giving you hot water as well. But if you dont use much hot water, a tankless water heater at each tap combined with air to air for space heating feels like it could be pretty damn efficient.
Wet radiators feel like a bit of a legacy problem in the UK. Because we have so many wet heating systems, theres a push for air to water heat pumps. Less of a perceived change.. but it doesn't half feel like an overcomplicated and expensive way of doing things!
This segment definitely needs more videos - FullyChargedHome could be a new channel
I've only recently caught onto this show (and Everything Electric) and while the current UK government is doing pretty much zilch to encourage renewables and getting information out to the general public, Robert / Dan and the team are doing a fantastic job and for me it's a bit like seeing a modern version of the 'Tomorrow's World' TV show (it was on when I was a kid in the '70's). So do keep up the great work. Also, is it me, or is there a fox walking across by the back hedgerow (behind Dan) at 14:33? Guess I'll never know!🙂
That was very informative, thank you. I would really love to see more of these Home Energy episodes in the future.
I enjoyed this series but I wish they were more in depth. I would be happy to watch a 1-2hour video if it meant we could watch the technology working under different environments and being used in small, medium and large houses. I would like realistic prices for different projects and the potential savings. I am also interested in the efficiency rating and energy consumption. It would also be good to see comparisons between other technologies or watching them working together to improve on efficiency and running costs overall.
Excellent guys I am going to look at the info-red heat panels.
This is a great series. Thank you. I want to insulate without getting mould. Can you tell me how to do this without opening the windows and losing the heat.
Good point. I will give the insulated property down the street and ask them how it is going. Thanks
I grew up in NZ with a “heat storage range and night store heaters” the night storage heaters worked great. Would be good for storing energy made from your solar.
Very good series (even for us in the US). Thanks for doing it. We are net zero (ground source heat pump/PV cells)
Wish I'd looked more at ground source but I wasn't as informed then as I am now, assumed it was too expensive anyway and asked the wrong people about them (guys trying to sell us ASHP's). If I had another chance I would certainly have spoke to a couple of ground source installers - it still might not have been right for us but I'd at least feel good that I would have heard that from ground source specialists.
@@chrismartin2663 Yes, we came upon a way to install the ground loops cheaply and without distrubing the landscape. We also didn't have to drill expensive holes.
Great series, thank you.
Excellent quality video with technology (sensible energy storage with resistance heating) of which I hadn't seen in commercial applications. Thank you.
Amazing series! Thanks so much to the entire Fully Charged team for the enlightenment and inspiration. We need more of this in Canada and the rest of the countries where heating is needed! Cheers
Love the idea of the warm stone as we have as big period house, but looking on their website they aren't making one for home use yet. Such a shame.
I live in the south of France. What interests me is a system that gives me warmth in winter and cooling in summer (pus hot water). Thoughts?
Reversible heat pump (air sourced should do where you are) using an air system with MHRV in the system.
I’m looking at taking the next step in our home energy journey.
We have a class Q barn conversion in Staffordshire, we have had underfloor (Roth Pipes) fitted a (Stiebel Eltron) ASHP together with hot water storage and underfloor heating buffer tank. We have carried out significant insulation using Kingspan and Extratherm insulation, and other methods of cold bridging preventative measures as we are principally an agricultural steel frame portal building with concrete blocks.
We have had an air test @2.5 better than what we expected, and we are 100% electric on a three phase supply with 100 amps per phase available.
For our next step we would like to convert/building a garage storage building to replace a tired steel frame portal building.
With this in mind, we want to include all available technologies available make power to supply our home, and store energy to use at peak demands by ourselves.
We are prepared to make an investment for the future to help us out of the current crisis we are in with high electricity costs.
I’m really interested to hear what everyone’s thoughts are for our future opportunities and options.
Yes! Heat recovery ventilation!
With the ir heating, how does it generate heat? It is as efficient as a heat pump?
They will clame 100% efficiency just like a cheap electric heater can reach 100%. A heatpump can get up to 500% through a COP of 5. So if you are going to heat a complete room to a certain temperature, the heatpump will just use less energy.
However infrared can get you not to heat the whole room, but just where you are sitting, and it radiates on you and the couch for example. So in that sense it is better/more comfortable than a cheap electric heater.
But really, it is best for some rooms you are not in all the time. And it saves on all the plumbing to a the rooms.
For the living room at a constant temperature, in the end, 1 kWh in is 1 kWh heat with this. With a heat pump it is 1 kWh in and 3 to 5 kWh out.
Because IR will only heat an object with direct line of sight, and the radiation intensity just like light will diminish with the square of the distance, near objects will get hotter than far objects. Ceiling mounted IR emitter as demonstrated will directly heat you head but not your toes with an intensity ratio of about 4 to 1 because the relative distances between the radiator and the object. You are likely to get a hot head but only mildly warm toes. I have experienced this effect whilst working under IR tube heaters in industrial settings. By all means try it, but I suspect you will be disappointed with the results.
@@Zalgol Yes placement is very important. A hot head for longer periods can get you headaches and so on.
And if you add room thermostat, it is going to heat up the whole room anyway, just like a regular electric heater would.
+1 for ventilations and heat-recovery ventilation!
Preparing to buy a home, we're aware that summers might get unpleasantly hot for a bit, so we wonder about cooling as well as heating. Really helpful series, my favourite Fully Charged content for years! No really - once I had gotten a driving licence and bought a Zoe, the car content was more for other people than me. Now I'm buying a house, so this series was for me!
YES! Ventilation is a huge topic, and I'd love to hear more about active and passive cooling options.
Surprised no details on the running costs against oil-propane- Nat gas
Good work guys, please keep the updates coming!
How well do IR panels work with solar battery?
No mention of a fully electric combi boiler like from ehc?
This is the episode I have been waiting for
Great series. Well done! Building energy is the elephant in the energy transition room. 36% of energy is used by buildings compared to 25% for transport. Lots of great ideals here. Would have liked to see heat recovery ventilation covered.
I’m really interested in the simplest and cheapest gas boiler alternatives for a small house and I’m on a very low income
When I come to replace the gas boiler I want to replace it with a zero emission alternative
at an equivalent price of a gas boiler
Without replacing pipes or radiators etc in the house
Great piece, thank you. Learnt a lot.
I read the Guardian article about microwave boilers. Please cover these as one article talked about the army trialing these and that they may become the easiest transition and cheapest solution forward (cheapest installation for low wage earners like myself)
Hi iam looking at a trust electric central heating system,you guys have any thoughts.pete
We boarded up our unused fireplace and have a vertical floor standing far infra red panel. Works well, its 580 watt seems equivalent to the 1 kw oil filled rad we had before. Like being near a warm wall at sunset. Thermostatic remote control and only cost about £110 on line.
Dig into the HeatCycle from some Delft University students. It uses a heatpump to extract the energy from wastewater. Pretty cheap also!
Just seal up the convection part of your radiators (the middle bit) if you want to try out infra-red heating at home, gaffa tape should work well for this...
It's the last episode in our Home Series - what have you learnt? which did you enjoy the most? what changes are you planning to make? Tell us below....
Um... 😁
I have learnt I can't afford to go green.
Not learnt much of use - it was a series of seeming adverts with very little info to offer a comparison with existing tech or their competitors.
The channel made a similar error with the Swytch bike episode - more like an advertorial.
@@billybilly7100 I have to agree. It was all the positives with no negatives and no real comparison between the tech and what would work best when. I was disappointed. I ex3the only reason that all those things mentioned at the end (heat recovery etc) weren't actually covered is they didn't find a company to talk to in the same way!
Thanks it was all interesting. I knew an overview of most of the systems surveyed. But there were lots of small but crucial points I did not know. Like would Powerball require 3 phase supply, and should there be a mains supply failure, will the storage battery kick in ?
As so many people have said against each of the episodes, need real life examples, with costs of install, retrofit and running costs as a minimum.especially after the post Putin invasion of Ukraine... Changing all the costs.
As has been rammed home, insulate first, and therefore could we have examples and costs of retrofitting internal and external solid walls etc
These would be my starters. Thanks
Interesting series Dan, hope to see more next year ;)
100 kWh heat storage, now we are talking! Still, I'd go with ground source heat pumps if possible because of the higher efficiency.
I worked in a room with overhead heating. Constant headaches.
Thanks for the the great series... We have shared it with our friends
This series is likely to change the course of my home life in a very significant way for the next 40 years :)
Do you guys know anything about cutting the walls in an old stone/cement home, just above the ground to isolate them from the foundation thermally? I need to figure that out. There will need to be a lot of retrofitting old homes like that in Europe.
your concern is with the surrounding ambient ground temperature and to stop the influx of it under your foundation, here where i live in Canada, most homes have basements or cellars as some people call them or slab homes like your homes in the UK are built , any foundation is usually excavated at the perimeter and cleared of any debris or obstructions and then is insulated from the bottom up to ground level where it will then be back filled with the material that was removed in the first place and it doesn't take allot to save energy and have warm floors and walls , the last home i designed had a basement and at the construction stage we put blue styrofoam insulation mounted to the concrete walls right from the footing up to ground level again, approx 2 metres, then it water proofing was done and back filled and during the winter months you could walk on the basement floor in socks and your feet weren't cold and thats with-25 celsius outside temps , my current house is like yours its a slab home concrete foundation with a wood frame construction walls and roofing with asphalt shingles, my heating is gas forced air with the ducting in the floors that was installed before the slab was poured, the bills are 96.67 sterling/month on equal payment plan based on 12 months, that is for both gas/electric and includes a very well insulted hot tub built on my deck outback, i am doing a new roof in September and in 2022 and 2023 i will do some new windows 1or 2 at a time and dig out around my foundation in install the blue styrofoam insulation {approved by code} around it and back fill over it, and i know it makes a difference my neighbour had it done and walk on their floors and it is a noticeable comfort almost 4 celsius when we measured it with a heat camera, the places it was cooler was at the doors, that was because the doors are 20 yrs old and are now changed in 2021, the material cost is not huge, looking at under 4500 with taxes CDN the material is erosion proof 20 yr warranty 2inches/50mm thick and is almost R20 which is more than what is in my walls so its not as difficult as some people think it is, more labour involved than anything really, and with my new roof i will also reinsert my attic space and add a new roof ventilation, here in Canada in winter it makes huge difference for us, remember our fuel costs here are less than yours and my house isa single level 7 room house 3 bedrooms, single bathroom, it sucks,LOL, kitchen, living room and heat or boiler room as you call it and large walk in pantry/storage room so yes it is small, so i would guess the work for is subject to access around your foundation ex: neighbours, fences and so on, you could even do some of it yourself with a few mates and mini diggers are cheap to rent and in most places there in the UK doesn't require you to have a license to operate one and are less the a metre wide and you can rent electric ones and plug them into your house, have fun, 👍
That's not really practical. Which side of the wall is insulated? Maybe you can dig down on that side and insulate there.
what`s average winter temperature in winter in UK ? ? any -15 , - 20 Celsius happens in february - in my country it does.
Clearly colder in north of Scotland, and warmer in south (London).
In north of Scotland it's not unusual to hit -10, in London it's unusual to go under zero these days.
We used to have snow in London 40 years ago. Nowadays children have never seen it !!!!! Fyi
Storage heaters had one major roadblock. Overnight "charging" meant cold snaps later in the day were harder to respond fast to plus they only heated the room air not deliver hot water. How does the efficincy of an air to water heat pump compare to these new storage heaters.
The ZEB can provide hot water.
A flavour. How delightful! We crave a meal, we get the "amuse bouche". Light on numbers, light on facts. What would a house retrofit cost for IR panels, if one were to ditch radiators. Cost of electricity compared to gas in a year? This sadly borders on advertorials.
If you would like to know then please contact Herschel and I am sure we could advise.
What was the music track at the beginning of the video? Shazam couldn't pick it up.
So basically for warmstone is £0.1688p per KW during peak hours at 160kw to charge on install is nearly £26 but it lasts upto 6 months of heat
So what is Robert installing at his house? 😀
Thank you very much fantastic program I am always watching fully charge it is nice to know how to be environmentally friendly I am glad to say I do have electric car which is old Nissan leafy
Everyone should watch this program I love fully charge thank you very much Hari Gurung🙏
I do wish the host would at least pretend to be a little skeptical when "interviewing" the vendor instead of sounding like your reading questions from their FAQ page for them to hit out of the park.
Don't you think you have missed something very important? i.e. efficiency... How is the heat being generated by the electricity? Via resistive load? Then it is the same as warming one's house using the electric kettle...
IR panels are 100% efficient so 1kwh of electric provides 1kw of heat.
@@appaynter so still not as good as heat pump then?!
@@skybenedict it does depend on the project and if the ir panels are combined with solar and battery storage. The current issue with heat pumps is the capital cost and retrofit projects. New builds are ok but often the radiator system in a retrofit needs upgrading for heat pumps due to the lower water temps being used.
The whole idea of heat storage is to use cheap night time electricity.
I really enjoyed the series and id like to see all and everything that you couldn't show. Thanks for the series and i hope you will be able to do more in the future. Takecare.
What can I buy and make my money back on in the shortest time? Electric/gas bill is around £75 a month so seems like it would take a long time to see any financial benefit
Would like to hear more about microwave boiler.
Good stuff Dan, thanks for the series!
Could you add some graphics/ diagrams or animations to explain some of these systems in the future? A bit like what you see in the some of the apps you get that show you where electricity is flowing to or from - batteries, grid or load in the house, the same for hot water in say a heat pump. 👍🏻
Good luck with FC Live BTW, can't wait until the Amsterdam one.
I hope your listening as there are still no links to the products for further reading.
Why no info on running costs?
Now we're talking! This is what I want to see.
Great series. We have developed an active ceiling solution which is a hydronic based system driven by heat pump, both radiant heating and cooling from a totally hidden system contained inside the ceiling structure.
Good serie turned out.
Amazing series and finished on a high note. I don’t have the money for everything but I fully insulated my house with sheep’s wall and breathable membranes. £800. It’s lovely not having draughts and hopefully save up for some new tech! I have an electric car and looking for some kind of battery to charge off peak and use during the day so we are on off-peak 24hrs. I think it would be better than solar and can’t afford both unless the prices come down.
Anyone installed those infrared heaters in an 1890s South Edinburgh tenement?
The dry core heaters are a very old heating systems, not anything new, but they are bulky and expensive to run😢
would love to install the Zeb, that with the agile go, with 4hrs of super cheap electricity every night. it's not a bad price as boilers go, but still a large chunk of money. Would save me a lot of money over my current electric heaters.
Gas combi boilers are very often (usually?) in cupboards on the wall. The extremely heavy heat storage units described in the video aren't not likely to be able to be installed there. I'd guess only Sun Amp would work there.
SunAmps are _heavy_ as well.
I'd be very sceptical about any heating system fitted on a ceiling, heat rises and to warm the floor from that distance means one would probably end up with a boiling hot head and freezing feet but it will be interesting to see how well it works
Having stone floors, with insulation under, would be taking advantage of the thermal mass. Similar with cavity wall that have cavity wall insulation. Carpets would act as an insulation barrier. The heat soaks into the thermal mass, then, as the lady said, convect back out when the air temperature is less than the wall temperature.
These infra red heaters appear a great solution for flats.
@@johnburns4017 they may be a very good solution too if you have a heat pump and a seriously cold day. A secondary heat source to be used as a backup.
A very common misconception, heat doesn’t rise, hot air rises.
@@appaynter
Hot water rises as well.