Table of Contents
- Who Are We?
- The Heat Pump Experiment in an Uninsulated Property
- What Are the Results of Our Heat Pump Experiment?
- Watch Our Live Heat Pump Data Feed
- What’s the Take Away / Conclusion For Heat Pumps in Uninsulated Properties?
- What’s Next?
Heat Pump efficiency is a hot topic. In this video I'm going to show you how we got 600% efficiency from a heat pump installed in an uninsulated and neglected 1960s building which also happens to be our former office.
Who Are We?
If you're new to the channel, we are Heat Geek. We’re the UK’s leading experts in high efficiency heating systems, and particularly renewables, in fact we are currently training the next generation of heating engineers. Why am I telling you this?
The Heat Pump Experiment in an Uninsulated Property
Last autumn we installed a heat pump to heat our offices. This was partly an experiment as we have poor double glazing, our radiators were absolutely tiny, far too small for a heat pump typically, no cavity wall insulation and it turns out...
These last two things are below the absolute minimum requirement to get a heat pump under a government grant.
That winter we also installed Specific 3rd party measuring equipment from an Open Energy monitor, which to many peoples amazement measured a COP of over 3 or 300% efficiency, in the cold month of December! This could have been even higher, however, we do have solar thermal heating the building on warmer, sunnier days and we had an issue with a zone valve.
During this summer we completed an incredibly important improvement. Now we haven’t installed cavity wall insulation, we haven’t increased loft insulation, we haven’t replaced the 1,2,3,4,5,6 blown double glazed windows we have in the building, or improved the draft sealing (shots of draft stuff if any). Infact, the only thing we have changed is the radiators… and 2 other small changes which I’ll tell you about in a bit…
We removed all of the unusually small and often single panel radiators and replaced them with these radiators here. These radiators had a dramatic effect.
What Are the Results of Our Heat Pump Experiment?
We’re now approaching mid november and can begin to measure our system efficiency which has had unbelievable results. On October the first we turned on our heating and after 42 days we have an average COP of 5.16! In Fact after some tweaking from mid day of the 5th of november till mid day 7th of November the heat pump sat at an average COP of 5.9 despite the outside temperature constantly sitting between 9.5˚c and a max of 13.5˚c.
Watch Our Live Heat Pump Data Feed
Now don't get me wrong, this will drop in winter and bring our average COP down and then late winter and spring should swing it back up again. But don't take our word for it, check out the link in the description and watch this happen with us live, on our open energy monitor live feed! After following the link just click on the bar chart to drill down on more data. https://emoncms.org/heatgeek
What’s the Take Away / Conclusion For Heat Pumps in Uninsulated Properties?
The incredible lesson here is, you don't need a Scandinavian super house to make heat pumps work! In fact 50% of existing housing in the uk is just like ours and has no cavity or solid wall insulation, just imagine how efficient this system would be with insulation!
Only 40% of homes have 200mm or above of loft insulation, we have half of that and again wouldn't be allowed the heat pump grant unless we did.
And our double glazing is blown.
Yet we're still on track for an incredible scop. Poor insulation will have lower efficiencies but they mainly show up bad design and commissioning issues, they don't prevent heat pumps from working.
It's getting to the time where opinions need updating to account for good design and improved modern heat pump efficiencies.
A few things worth noting. The two additional changes we made was to drop our weather compensation from 0.8 to 0.6 and we adjusted the balancing slightly which can improve SCOP in some scenarios (we’ll have a video on how to do this soon so make sure you’re subscribed).
It’s also worth noting that this heat pump and control system are particularly good and the heat pump does not do our hot water which would probably shave around 0.25 off our SCOP.
What’s Next?
The next step in our efficiency journey is to install cavity wall insulation, loft insulation and to repair our windows.
In the meantime, however, if you would like to follow our live COP throughout the winter, check out the Open Energy Monitor link in the description and why not engage with us about it on twitter.
If you would like to know more about how we achieved such high efficiencies, watch our 3 steps to maximise heating and our best heat pump settings videos. If you are an engineer who would like to be able to install systems to this standard or higher, just check out our course over on courses.heatgeek.com.
That’s it for this one, see you in the next one!
