On 13/01/2021 11:36, 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?

What is the state of your insulation?
- cavity walls? insulated?
- loft insulation? How thick?
- double glazing?
- draught proofing?
- air bricks?

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

Does someone in the HA get kickbacks from the installer who quoted
far more than he would get away with where a private customer is
concerned ?