Mysterae

My son asked me "Where does poo come from?". I was a little uncomfortable but gave him an honest explanation. He looked a little perplexed and stared at me in stunned silence for a few seconds and asked, "and Tigger?".

Her name! https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-50989594

This has been a popular subject, so glad I posted this! So much knowledge and experience, I thank you all for your insights. @MPx Many thanks for sharing your personal experience, it's precisely the kind of scenario that I'd want to avoid, that's a huge cost and would break me! This is about saving money on the energy we use to heat our home and to get away from the burning of logs, making a cleaner home. You've certainly opened my eyes to the possibility of it getting out of hand. Our house is smaller than yours (290sqm) with a combined heating and hot water demand of under 40,000 kWh per year, before insulation improvements. The already assessed and planned loft and cavity wall insulation will bring that down to around 33,000 kWh per year (still 3,000 kWh above the current DRHI cap). I'm not sure how those numbers stack with a single phase GSHP system; like you I'm unlikely to put in a 3 phase supply. You still sound positive about it though, but would you do it again if you knew the final cost! @Dan E Not sure, search for NIBE on Rip Off Britain on youtube. They ended up ripping out the systems and fitting normal gas boilers in a lot of the homes. @62dave It's an interesting ideal to compliment the existing setup with an ASHP system. In our current system, when the biomass boiler is running this takes priority over the oil boiler, and when the biomass can no longer provide enough heat it automatically changes over to the oil boiler. Putting another heat source in to the circuit sounds plausible, I would need to work out if an ASHP would work all that well - it has dropped below 0c more than a few times this winter and I suspect it's not yet over! @Bravo73 We have the land space for the pipework and is just soggy grass at the moment - I was planning on digging it up anyway and laying a few french drains. There's roof space for solar panels, either for electricity or thermal gains. I used to run a few crypto miners so I know what high electricity bills are like! As I mentioned before the house is scheduled for insulation but what irks is you won't know what RHI payments you qualify until you've done the installation, could be much lower than hoped for. All these responses have certainly opened my eyes and made me more cynical to all the hype. I've got a lot of research still to do. What a minefield!

@Barrykearley For sure Barry! In my research I came across a BBC documentary about a housing association estate where most of the houses were built with recovered air sourced heating from NIBE. Poorly specified, poorly utilised and understood, it was meant to provide the tennants with cheap heating but ended up costing them thousands. The electrical element of the boiler was practically running 24/7. Quite the sad story.

@pete That was certainly the case a few years ago but modern systems are said to be able to cope with the hot water side of things. Some systems do have an immersion type heater integrated for the hot water side (boosting it kinda thing), or you can fit solar thermal panels exclusively for the hot water tank, which is DRHI eligible too.

@DDubya Encouraging words Danny! £65 a month sounds fantastic, to put it in to context we burned through 1,800 (£900) litres of heating oil in just under 3 months. Yikes! Now there's a few reasons for this - it's a big house, un-insulated at the moment (the loft and cavity wall insulation are being done early next year) and we treated the system like our previous house that was smaller, gas heated and very well insulated. Plus it was winter and we just weren't familiar to using the system. I've since installed a 2-zone Hive heating controller which has much better control but being realistic it's not going to drop our usage massively. You mention underfloor heating and that is what they recommend with GSHP systems. In traditional radiator systems the water circulated round the radiators is around 70 degrees C, whereas in underfloor heating it only has to be 40 to 50 degrees C. You can use radiators with GSHP systems but you have to increase the size of the radiators by around 20%, either by new or additional radiators, not exactly ideal. So I'm looking at the idea of retrofitting underfloor heating to our concrete floors or fitting bigger radiators. Both options increase the cost of the job but I'd much prefer the underfloor heating, and the level of control (get you with your 10 zones!). Was that £15k for just the boreholes? I've seen some mental prices for borehole digging. I'm not considering the borehole option, purely the horizontal array because it's cheaper and also while the digger is doing it's work I'll add in some french drains to dry out the bit land so it's not the quagmire it currently is . @Barrykearley Yes, biomass boilers really do burn it quick. Plus you have the storage and drying of the wood and the handling of it all. Open the furnace door to top it up and breathe a 20 pack worth of smoke! It was quite romantic at first, look as us being all renewable and one with nature, but once you've wheelbarrow'ed your tenth load through it's just a pain. I'm also fed up of smelling burnt every time I come from the garage! I thought about a wood pellet hopper type biomass boiler as a replacement but ideally I want to remove both the oil and wood boilers. The current system isn't eligible for the DRHI as it was installed by the previous owner many years ago. At the moment I'm still at the feasibility stage but watch this space. After the new year I'll contact a few MCS installers (Microgeneration Certificate Scheme) and go from there. Another thing worth mentioning is that you don't even have to pay for it - by utilising Assignment of Rights (AoR). Assignment of Rights is essentially when a nominated party pays for the installation of the GSHP (so you get it for free) and in return they receive all of the DRHI payments. Sounds great, but if your system costs £20k to install and the DRHI payment is £28k, you've lost out on a potential £8,000. A nice investment for them!

Does anyone have any experience of Ground Source Heat Pump systems? I'm currently researching GSHP systems as an alternative to heating the house we recently moved in to in the Highlands. At the moment there is an old oil fired boiler and a biomass boiler with a massive accumulator tank fitted: The old oil fired boiler (small green thing with the hose on the left of the image) could do with replacing but heating oil is so expensive (approx 49p per litre) and going by our current consumption I estimate that we'll consume around £3,000 in oil a year . The biomass boiler, a fancy name for a wood burner (the red/black contraption in the middle) is much cheaper to run but takes quite the bit of effort to keep going in the winter - it eats logs for breakfast, lunch and dinner! I reckon we'll consume around 20 tonne of wood a year (around £1,500 worth without cutting our own) and although wood burning is sustainable and is seen as a form of renewable energy, it's stinking, dirty and high in maintenance, and we'd need the oil boiler as a backup if we were ever to go away for more than a few days in winter. A Ground Source Heat Pump system seems like the ideal replacement if you've got the land to lay the ground source pipework. It's low maintenance, environmentally friendly and highly efficient - depending on the efficiency of the system, for every kWh of energy you put in, you get up to four times the kWh of energy out. Yes, you read that right - more energy than you put in, effectively cutting energy costs down by three quarters. The catch? It's stupid expensive to install, requires land and significant ground works (unless you want a 150 - 200 metre bore hole drilled which is even more expensive). From what I've read, the system I'd need could cost somewhere north of £20,000.... The good news is that with Ofgem's Domestic Renewable Heat Incentive, they'll pay me back up to £28,000 over seven years: It's a no-brainer. A few months ago I thought my first big project was building a new garage, but no, it's going to be a GSHP system. Perhaps I can route some of that pipework to underfloor heating in the new garage too . So, as my original question, does anybody have any experience with Ground Source Heat Pump systems? Are they really that great?

Here's a few pictures I should have put up ages ago since our move from the south of England to the Scottish Highlands. I've been quite busy during all this time, honest! Robin's Rescue: Where's my new garage going to be?!

That's shocking! Edit - beaten to it!

Neil, these are the guys - https://www.cyclonebuildings.com/ that I've shortlisted for my garage build next year. I can't vouch for them as yet, but they seem good.

@march Thanks for posting the images and description. I think I'll go for a 5ft ish insulated door and a personnel door as well. Due to be moving in a few weeks and then I'l start the planning later in the year.

Extreme stupidity! Has he not heard of a pen?

Saw this on Reddit, makes me flinch!

Moving from Swindon, Wiltshire to 30 miles north of Inverness, about 550 miles in total. Quite the trek towing a car at 60mph!