On Wed, 13 Jan 2021 11:36:56 +0000, Theo wrote:

Funny Lingus wrote:
I have lived alone in a three bedroomed association house for 17 years
and now there is a plan to replace all the storage heaters with a hot
water system. This seems to be initiated by a government directive to
make home heating more efficient by using a heat pipe. Any efficiency
gain would obviously be lost by transmitting heat using water, rather
than direct electricity.

Do you have mains gas? No mains gas in village

What is the state of your insulation?
- cavity walls? insulated? yes
- loft insulation? How thick? 12"
- double glazing? yes
- draught proofing? some internal doors
- air bricks? Bathroom and kitchen

ASHP can be 2-4x as efficient as pure electric heat so, while there are
losses in a wet system, they are likely to be overridden by the heat
pump efficiency. On the other hand, if your house is poorly insulated
the heat pump may not be able to keep up (unless you fit a huge one,
which is costly).

(ASHP can struggle in freezing weather, but it's hard not to beat pure
electric heat)

I am proposing that the installation of new radiators are fitted behind
inward opening doors in the bedrooms and living room, this is all dead
wall space and doesn't interfere with existing fitments. The upstairs
landing will be housing the electric boiler and would facililitate
short runs of pipework to the bedrooms, making a cleaner, more compact
job.

It depends on the heating system as to the flow temperature. I'd expect
that putting a radiator behind a door is going to be less effective if
you leave the door open most of the time. Obviously it'll put heat into
the room eventually (nowhere else for it to go), but spend a while
heating up the door first.

My wife, who lives in the next village has had such a conversion, but
with gas as the heat source instead of electricity. This keeps breaking
down and the (engineer) has to come out to fiddle with the boiler, at
least a couple of dozen times now since 2019.

That sounds like a regular wet system with a gas boiler, as used by
millions of people. They don't keep breaking down, which suggests some
problem with the (quality of the) installation. Was that fitted by the
same HA?

Theo