Stay switched on with air source heat pumps

Looking for a highly efficient, eco-friendly and above all cost-effective heating and cooling alternative for your home? Air source heat pumps could hold the answer.

Heating. Every home needs it. Wherever you live, in whatever property, whether it’s powered by gas, oil, LPG or electric, the requirement for heating and hot water doesn’t change. The cost and efficiency, however, can.

Air source heat pumps (ASHPs) are part of a new generation of heating and air-conditioning systems that use free inexhaustible energy found in the air to heat and cool one’s home. Easy to integrate into most heating systems and highly compatible with other renewable energy sources (including solar panels), air-to-water heat pumps can reduce your carbon footprint and fuel bills.

Oil, gas and electric powered heating systems are highly energy inefficient, expensive to run and environmentally unsustainable. Panasonic’s Aquarea heat pump is designed to be robust and quiet in operation. It has a low maintenance profile which helps to keep annual running costs down and contribute to significant annual cost savings, compared to other heat and hot water systems powered by fossil fuels.

Electricity is used to power the Aquarea system; however the advanced inverter technology used is so energy efficient that more than four-and-a-half times the input power in KiloWatt (kW) terms is produced per 1kW of electricity used. This is referred to as the Coefficient of Performance (COP) and is a useful benchmark against other heating systems.

Oil, gas and electric powered heating systems have a maximum COP of 1, which means that for every 1kW of power they use, they only produce 1kW of heat or hot water energy. This makes them highly energy inefficient, expensive to run and environmentally unsustainable. A higher COP value implies a higher (better) efficiency. The Aquarea 9kW system has a COP of 4.74 (A7/W35). This is equivalent to a 78% energy saving.

Government grants are available to homeowners to help with the installation costs for affordable renewable technologies, including air to water heat pumps. The Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) is a Government scheme set up to encourage uptake of renewable heat technologies among householders, communities and businesses through the provision of financial incentives.

The Government expects the RHI to make a significant contribution towards their 2020 ambition of having 12 per cent of heating coming from renewable sources. The Renewable Heat Incentive is the first of its kind in the world and is expected to open in spring 2014.

The announcement follows extensive consultation on how a financial incentive would work best for householders and takes into account lessons learned from the Renewable Heat Premium Payment grant scheme (RHPP) and the RHI non domestic scheme.

The Renewable Heat Premium Payment is a one-off grant designed to help towards meeting the costs of installing renewable technologies in your home, until the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) is introduced for domestic customers. The RHPP provides a one-off payment of £1,300 for installing air-source-heat pumps and £600 for solar thermal systems.

Who will be eligible to receive the RHI payment?

Open to homeowners, private and social landlords, third party owners of heating systems and people who build their own homes. Anyone who has installed a renewable heat technology since 15 July 2009 and meets the scheme eligibility criteria will also be able to apply.

Tariff payments

Payments will be made on a quarterly basis for seven years. In most cases, payments will be made based on estimated heat demand of the property combined with the estimated system performance, and will be made on the portion of renewable energy generated. An energy meter may also be installed under the metering and monitoring package, which offers an extra payment of £230 per annum. Metering is a criteria, which is necessary for second homes and bi-valent installations.

Scheme requirements

Applicants will need to complete a Green Deal Assessment before submitting their application. They must certify that the property is their main residence and that they have basic energy efficiency measures in place, such as 250mm of loft insulation and cavity wall insulation, where appropriate. All installations and installers must be MCS certified (or certified by an equivalent scheme).

Delivering energy efficiency in Devon

The decision to invest an air source heat pump was one taken by Debra Crome from Devon who installed an Aquarea 14kW High Connectivity Heat Pump with 300 litre water cylinder in her home.

“A friend of ours was building their home from scratch and were trying to make their home as eco-friendly as possible, my husband was helping out with the project and we were very intrigued at the technology they were installing to heat the hot water and for heating.” said Debra. “We explored more about the air heat pump solution they had installed and it seemed like common sense and a fantastic solution for us.”

An extremely compact plug and play heating system – the Aquarea heat pump will be able to fulfil heating demands even in temperatures as low as -20°C. Independent tests have also shown that Panasonic’s air-to-water heat pump is capable of saving up to 78% on heating expenses, and far more efficient than fuel-fired boilers, gas boilers and electric heaters.

It was these benefits that appealed to Debra and her family. “It’s easy to maintain, economical, environmentally friendly – it’s the perfect solution,” explained Debra. “We had a house full of family and friends staying for a long weekend recently which tested the system. We’ve yet to run out of hot water – we can run a bath followed by a shower– we have a power shower supplied by mains water and it supplies copious amounts of hot water.”

Debra continues “The Aquarea system allows us to control exactly how much energy we’re using over the course of 12 months. With our old oil based system we were totally at the mercy of the charges imposed by the energy supplier. We can now predict our energy costs as we can shop around for an energy supplier that can give us a good price for our electricity. The unit is so economical and is saving us between £600-£900 per year, just to do exactly what our old oil-fired system did before.”

To arrange your FREE home heating survey call 0800 316 86 86