Anyone for Gas?

Use this board for general non-cycling-related chat, or to introduce yourself to the forum.
francovendee
Posts: 3145
Joined: 5 May 2009, 6:32am

Re: Anyone for Gas?

Post by francovendee »

mjr wrote: 19 Oct 2021, 9:12pm
francovendee wrote: 19 Oct 2021, 7:20pm I think you're right to be concerned. I've experienced two, one is at my daughters house and another when we were staying in a gite. Whilst I wouldn't say they were loud you can certainly hear them when in the garden. Far noisier than a gas boiler but quieter than an oil boiler.
How long ago and how old were the units? I think they're improving over time.
My daughter lives in a 2 year old house. The gite where we stayed I don't know, it certainly looked new but could be some years old.
My experience of most mechanical/electric appliances is they all get noisier as they get older, our fridge certainly has.
Maybe someone like Dyson needs to get into the industry?
Jdsk
Posts: 24478
Joined: 5 Mar 2019, 5:42pm

Re: Anyone for Gas?

Post by Jdsk »

"Noise in residential areas from industrial sources is normally assessed against British Standard BS 4142. If the difference between the Rating Level of the specific noise and the background noise is +5dB, it’s deemed to be of “marginal significance” and acceptable. However, a difference of +10dB or more indicates complaints are likely. Most local authorities will take action against the organisation producing the noise when it reaches this threshold."
https://www.soundplanning.co.uk/heat-pump-noise/

Jonathan
User avatar
mjr
Posts: 20297
Joined: 20 Jun 2011, 7:06pm
Location: Norfolk or Somerset, mostly
Contact:

Re: Anyone for Gas?

Post by mjr »

francovendee wrote: 19 Oct 2021, 10:15pm Maybe someone like Dyson needs to get into the industry?
Béimry, no. We don't need unhygenic fans or vapourware in this sector.
MJR, mostly pedalling 3-speed roadsters. KL+West Norfolk BUG incl social easy rides http://www.klwnbug.co.uk
All the above is CC-By-SA and no other implied copyright license to Cycle magazine.
Oldjohnw
Posts: 7764
Joined: 16 Oct 2018, 4:23am
Location: South Warwickshire

Re: Anyone for Gas?

Post by Oldjohnw »

Aren’t heat pumps only as good as the property is insulated? Which will no doubt rule out many of those which would be candidates of the government’s current largesse. Keeping the heat in would go a long way to cutting the amount of gas used and would benefit any future heating installation.
John
User avatar
Paulatic
Posts: 7796
Joined: 2 Feb 2014, 1:03pm
Location: 24 Hours from Lands End

Re: Anyone for Gas?

Post by Paulatic »

francovendee wrote: 19 Oct 2021, 7:20pm
pwa wrote: 19 Oct 2021, 8:01am I love the idea of a cleaner, greener alternative to gas for central heating, but I dread any of our neighbours getting an air source heat pump system installed. We live in the countryside and if I step out into the garden at 10pm, as I often do, and gaze up at the stars, it is often perfectly quiet. No human made noise at all. If our neighbours install what are basically reverse action refrigeration units in their back gardens that will be gone, forever. Outdoor silence will be replaced with a constant hum. I know it is coming and I find that depressing. I seriously hope my hearing begins to fail before that happens.
I think you're right to be concerned. I've experienced two, one is at my daughters house and another when we were staying in a gite. Whilst I wouldn't say they were loud you can certainly hear them when in the garden. Far noisier than a gas boiler but quieter than an oil boiler.
I would imagine that in crowded housing estates if everyone used them the noise would be quite noticeable.
I can help you with an experiment I did this morning.
The air at 7am was very still this morning and I was outside when my timed, ten year old, unit switches on at 7 am.
Walking within sight it is clearly audible up to 10 yards if you then cock your ears and tune in you can hear it between 10 and 15. Nothing beyond that. Walk in a direction out of sight I.e. down the side of the house and I couldn’t detect it at all at 10 yards.
If there had been any wind then I, from memory, think the noise of the wind takes over easily at 10 yards. There is a 'low outdoor noise' option on the remote which I don’t use because we have no neighbours and we never notice the noise when indoors anyway.
I then went to pick my breakfast raspberries and all I could hear was the sound of MWay traffic which is a railway line four fields and a river away. Half a mile as the crow flies.
Whatever I am, wherever I am, this is me. This is my life

https://stcleve.wordpress.com/category/lejog/
E2E info
thirdcrank
Posts: 36764
Joined: 9 Jan 2007, 2:44pm

Re: Anyone for Gas?

Post by thirdcrank »

Béimry
?

Noise can be very subjective. In my own case, I can hear most stuff but I'm profoundly deaf in one ear to certain pitches of sound and not much better in the other. With regard to annoying noises in residential areas, this means that I hear burglar alarms as a string of monotone notes, rather than nee-naw. So what? They do say everyman's home is his castle and as I've pointed out countless times when trying to sort out disputes between neighbours, they used to build castles miles apart and with walls twenty feet thick.

I'm not saying that this is any sort of reason to ban heatpumps but it's something to take into account when discussing residential noise
francovendee
Posts: 3145
Joined: 5 May 2009, 6:32am

Re: Anyone for Gas?

Post by francovendee »

Paulatic wrote: 20 Oct 2021, 7:28am
francovendee wrote: 19 Oct 2021, 7:20pm
pwa wrote: 19 Oct 2021, 8:01am I love the idea of a cleaner, greener alternative to gas for central heating, but I dread any of our neighbours getting an air source heat pump system installed. We live in the countryside and if I step out into the garden at 10pm, as I often do, and gaze up at the stars, it is often perfectly quiet. No human made noise at all. If our neighbours install what are basically reverse action refrigeration units in their back gardens that will be gone, forever. Outdoor silence will be replaced with a constant hum. I know it is coming and I find that depressing. I seriously hope my hearing begins to fail before that happens.
I think you're right to be concerned. I've experienced two, one is at my daughters house and another when we were staying in a gite. Whilst I wouldn't say they were loud you can certainly hear them when in the garden. Far noisier than a gas boiler but quieter than an oil boiler.
I would imagine that in crowded housing estates if everyone used them the noise would be quite noticeable.
I can help you with an experiment I did this morning.
The air at 7am was very still this morning and I was outside when my timed, ten year old, unit switches on at 7 am.
Walking within sight it is clearly audible up to 10 yards if you then cock your ears and tune in you can hear it between 10 and 15. Nothing beyond that. Walk in a direction out of sight I.e. down the side of the house and I couldn’t detect it at all at 10 yards.
If there had been any wind then I, from memory, think the noise of the wind takes over easily at 10 yards. There is a 'low outdoor noise' option on the remote which I don’t use because we have no neighbours and we never notice the noise when indoors anyway.
I then went to pick my breakfast raspberries and all I could hear was the sound of MWay traffic which is a railway line four fields and a river away. Half a mile as the crow flies.
That doesn't sound too bad. Maybe more of a problem if they were intalled at every house in a terrace.

We've had a bumper crop of raspberries but now they are not fruiting.
Normally the weather conditions here means we have a poor yield.
User avatar
Paulatic
Posts: 7796
Joined: 2 Feb 2014, 1:03pm
Location: 24 Hours from Lands End

Re: Anyone for Gas?

Post by Paulatic »

[quote=francovendee post_id=1647685 time=1634713040 user_id=


We've had a bumper crop of raspberries but now they are not fruiting.
Normally the weather conditions here means we have a poor yield.
[/quote]

I love my raspberries have them every morning on my porridge
July/August ive a plentiful supply of wild hedgerow to pick at
Sept/Oct cultivated autumn fruiting in the garden.
Frozen rest of year.
Wild we’re poor this year because of drought.
Whatever I am, wherever I am, this is me. This is my life

https://stcleve.wordpress.com/category/lejog/
E2E info
User avatar
simonineaston
Posts: 7993
Joined: 9 May 2007, 1:06pm
Location: ...at a cricket ground

Re: Anyone for Gas?

Post by simonineaston »

I almost cannot think of anything as utterly scrumptious as porridge & raspberries - I might if it was me, add a judicous amount of cream and honey. I must get out an envelope and attempt to calculate whether there is enough, oats, 'berries, honey and cream to go around all the people alive - and I must add that if a queque were to form, I think it only fair that the Good Folk in Insulate Britain should be first. Ah, what an inspiration they are to the rest of us, who sagely nod and agree that much must be done, but who mainly stick to reading the Guardian and thinking George Monbiot is spot on...
S
(on the look out for Armageddon, on board a Brompton nano & ever-changing Moultons)
User avatar
mjr
Posts: 20297
Joined: 20 Jun 2011, 7:06pm
Location: Norfolk or Somerset, mostly
Contact:

Re: Anyone for Gas?

Post by mjr »

simonineaston wrote: 25 Oct 2021, 10:41am [...]
that the Good Folk in Insulate Britain should be first. Ah, what an inspiration they are to the rest of us, who sagely nod and agree that much must be done, but who mainly stick to reading the Guardian and thinking George Monbiot is spot on...
Nodding and thinking doesn't mean doing nothing. For example, I increased my loft insulation on Saturday, taking the deliberately underinsulated area under the now-disused water tanks from 60mm to about 400mm. Sweaty work, moving materials into and around the loft with full body covered including mask, goggles, hood and gloves because they are an irritant while being manipulated and cut, but as well as the "green cred" or whatever, it should pay back over a single winter, unlike the heat pump's 7 years.

Why do British homes normally have water storage tanks uninsulated and outside the insulation, often over a gap in insulation so they don't freeze? That seems like a big design flaw.

Last week I replaced all but one of the surviving halogen bulbs that refuse to die (from the last generation of long-life bulbs and in less-used fittings like the loft) with LED ones.

What have others done to improve efficiency recently, especially those who like to criticise Insulate Britain?
MJR, mostly pedalling 3-speed roadsters. KL+West Norfolk BUG incl social easy rides http://www.klwnbug.co.uk
All the above is CC-By-SA and no other implied copyright license to Cycle magazine.
rjb
Posts: 7183
Joined: 11 Jan 2007, 10:25am
Location: Somerset (originally 60/70's Plymouth)

Re: Anyone for Gas?

Post by rjb »

Why are heat pumps so expensive. After all as those in charge like to tell us they are only fridges in reverse. My last fridge was £200. So what's the mark up. Can I install my fridge in the shed as an experiment with the heating coil inside and the chilled side open outside. Anyone tried this :lol:
Btw I've done all the simple stuff like low energy bulb, loft insulation, double glazing, draughtproofing. Next step is to insulate the concrete floor but as we have wooden boards and carpets it might not be very cost effective.
At the last count:- Peugeot 531 pro, Dawes Discovery Tandem, Dawes Kingpin X3, Raleigh 20 stowaway, 1965 Moulton deluxe, Falcon K2 MTB dropped bar tourer, Rudge Bi frame folder, Longstaff trike conversion on a Giant XTC 840 :D
User avatar
mjr
Posts: 20297
Joined: 20 Jun 2011, 7:06pm
Location: Norfolk or Somerset, mostly
Contact:

Re: Anyone for Gas?

Post by mjr »

rjb wrote: 25 Oct 2021, 11:30am Why are heat pumps so expensive. After all as those in charge like to tell us they are only fridges in reverse. My last fridge was £200. So what's the mark up. Can I install my fridge in the shed as an experiment with the heating coil inside and the chilled side open outside. Anyone tried this :lol:
Yes, it'll work and I'd love to see it :lol: but your shed won't be well-insulated and how big is the heated side of your fridge? Assume that the heating coil will heat a volume equivalent to that which it cools (which is wrong but will do to give the idea). Now scale that up to the volume of house you're wanting to heat. And I think it'll heat that volume up by roughly the difference between 4 degrees and air temperature, which might not be what you want. A freezer might work better. ;)

So yes, a heat pump is essentially a fridge in reverse, but it's a blooming big fridge and capable of generating a bigger temperature difference. I think that's the source of most of the cost. And then it has a big silent fan to blow the cold air out of the cooled space.

The next biggest cost source is probably silencing and ruggedising the outdoor unit. Fridge coils are fragile and there are dire warnings about damaging them. Fridges live a sheltered life. A box in the backyard in all weathers not so much, even before you get to things like defrost cycles and so on. Edit to add: and fridges are relatively noisy. If they were scaled up to whole-house size, without other changes to reduce noise, you'd get something like those industrial or farm heat pumps which no-one would tolerate inside their house or outdoors in a residential area.

And things like defrost cycles and even the basics like being able to heat a hot water tank to one temperature and heat radiators to a different temperature and possibly heat floors to yet another require more complicated control electronics and pump switches and so on. I don't think many people would now tolerate a 1-10 dial on their home heating like you still have on most fridges, or having to manually switch between heating and hot water like some boilers still required even in the 1980s.

The control units on heat pumps are like the smartest boiler controls, with such features as "weather compensation" mode, where it calculates the most efficient home heating based on the outdoor temperature instead of the old way of pretty dumbly chasing room thermostat cutoff settings, running the radiators very hot yet always lagging slightly behind what's needed when the temperature changes... but that calculation alone probably doesn't add much cost when the control unit has to be "smart" to deal with managing an outdoor unit and all the switching and so on anyway. It's a pretty big user benefit IMO, although not unique to heat pumps.

And then there's the internet-connected smart reporting and so on which government requires to get the full payout, which is another box in the water tank room and must add cost.
Btw I've done all the simple stuff like low energy bulb, loft insulation, double glazing, draughtproofing. Next step is to insulate the concrete floor but as we have wooden boards and carpets it might not be very cost effective.
Yes, somewhere around here I have an assessment for floor insulation (we have concrete slab too) but the payback time is poor. I think solar photovoltaic is the next best option, despite only having a small south-facing roof.

Edit to add: there's more explanation of "weather compensation mode" (including why some heat pumps run radiators at 37°C by default despite that being less efficient) by an ex-Samsung engineer at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/weather- ... ham-hendra and there are links to more at the end. Even if people stick with gas, requiring that mode and lowest-possible radiator temperatures on new boilers would help to eke out the remaining supply and reduce costs.
MJR, mostly pedalling 3-speed roadsters. KL+West Norfolk BUG incl social easy rides http://www.klwnbug.co.uk
All the above is CC-By-SA and no other implied copyright license to Cycle magazine.
pwa
Posts: 17357
Joined: 2 Oct 2011, 8:55pm

Re: Anyone for Gas?

Post by pwa »

mjr wrote: 25 Oct 2021, 11:23am
......What have others done to improve efficiency recently, especially those who like to criticise Insulate Britain?
Insulate Britain are irrelevant to me because I set about getting as much insulation as possible into our house when we moved in twenty odd years ago. Our last halogen bulb is a 12v one in the downstairs bathroom and it is only there because if I change it to LED, like the other five in that room, they all fail to work. The others have been LED for years, like every other bulb in the house. Double glazing all round, again for twenty years, some renewed a couple of years back. Thick curtains, including across the front door. And plenty of furniture. Furniture takes up space that would otherwise need heating. Carpeted floors in the large living room makes it feel warmer underfoot. But recently I have begun pondering what comes after gas. Wood pellets? Air source heat pump? I have no idea where I would put the outside gubbins for one of those. I wouldn't want in near a neighbour's windows, so that probably means along the back of my house. But every part of that is already occupied with something. Maybe on the front, hidden with shrubbery. I could imagine solar on our roof, even though we are not facing the right way for optimal capture.
User avatar
mjr
Posts: 20297
Joined: 20 Jun 2011, 7:06pm
Location: Norfolk or Somerset, mostly
Contact:

Re: Anyone for Gas?

Post by mjr »

pwa wrote: 25 Oct 2021, 1:37pm But recently I have begun pondering what comes after gas. Wood pellets? Air source heat pump? I have no idea where I would put the outside gubbins for one of those. I wouldn't want in near a neighbour's windows, so that probably means along the back of my house.
I don't know how Welsh rules differ, but in England, it's basically not legal to put it within a metre of the boundary with a neighbour. I was fortunate to have 1.30m of west-facing wall far from any neighbour, occupied only by pipe work and wiring, which was pretty much ideal for a 1m wide external ASHP unit. I suspect once the new grant scheme, which reportedly favours smaller properties more than the old one, is up and running, then we might see smaller external units marketed in the UK.

As I wrote recently somewhere on here, I feel the biggest problem isn't noise (and as mine beds in, it seems to be becoming even quieter: I have to look at the controller or the front of the unit to tell if it's on, even when standing beside it, even with just usual daytime background street noise around here) but that the current models are horribly horribly ugly. Most are arctic white, anthracite grey or some mix thereof, or a few have some mid or dark green bits, but all still seem to be undeniably metal boxes with grilles more suited for somewhere you don't see them, rather than the back of a home.
But every part of that is already occupied with something. Maybe on the front, hidden with shrubbery. I could imagine solar on our roof, even though we are not facing the right way for optimal capture.
Hiding with shrubbery may be difficult because most units blow cold air out the front and 1m clearance is recommended. Anyone know some good cold-tolerant plants, please? :) But in summer, there will be less cold as the heating runs less often, so it also needs to tolerate 30+ degree UK summer days in full sun!

And installing one on the front of the house usually requires planning permission (in England). https://www.planningportal.co.uk/info/2 ... at_pumps/2

Solar water is mostly only an extra, a pre-heat for whatever heating or primarily hot water system you have, or solar photovoltaic can help to power it, but the nature of heating is that you need it most when the sun isn't bright.

If heat pumps don't develop with smaller outdoor units, I suspect you may be a good candidate for hydrogen (and a hydrogen-ready gas boiler before that) once that becomes available, but that still seems to be under development.
MJR, mostly pedalling 3-speed roadsters. KL+West Norfolk BUG incl social easy rides http://www.klwnbug.co.uk
All the above is CC-By-SA and no other implied copyright license to Cycle magazine.
slowster
Moderator
Posts: 4612
Joined: 7 Jul 2017, 10:37am

Re: Anyone for Gas?

Post by slowster »

pwa wrote: 25 Oct 2021, 1:37pm Insulate Britain are irrelevant to me because I set about getting as much insulation as possible into our house when we moved in twenty odd years ago.
I think the issue that Insulate Britain is protesting about is relevant to every one of us.

Firstly, because it doesn't matter what we each do if UK housing overall continues to require excessively large and wasteful amounts of energy to heat it. That unnecessary and avoidable higher demand results in higher prices for all, and for many of the most vulnerable it will result in (increasing) fuel poverty. That will result in a return to the bad old days of more elderly people having to choose between heating or eating, and regular reports of deaths each winter/cold snap because they could not afford to heat their homes properly.

Secondly, the scope for people to improve the insulation and air tightness of their homes to the degree that is probably essential in the medium to longer term*, is greatly limited by the nature of our existing housing stock. Much of our housing is of poor quality construction, but more crucially the designs are very difficult/impossible to upgrade to the sort of super energy efficient housing that is likely to be needed, i.e. based on currently available and commercially viable technology. Adding more loft insulation, fitting new/better double glazing etc. is not going to be anywhere near sufficient. Heat is lost from homes like water from a bucket with holes, and to make the performance improvement required every one of those holes has to be identified and effectively sealed. The commercial sector currently cannot deliver that: it does not have suitable technological solutions to offer which can be delivered at scale, installed relatively quickly, and at an acceptable price. Only Government is in a position to make a difference to this, e.g. by funding research and development work by academics and the Building Research Establihment etc. For the last 10 to 20 years Governments have simply not been doing that (certainly not to the extent needed). Hence it is probably in all our interests that Insulate Britain succeeds in persuading the current Government to direct far more resources and effort into the field.

* Essential not just to meet carbon reduction targets, but also to ensure that the UK is much less vulnerable to large increases in the cost of energy and/or reductions in the supply of energy. For example, the UK only gets 5% of its gas from Russia, but much of the rest of Europe depends heavily on Russian gas, and if the price is increased then that would result in the price of other forms of energy increasing across Europe, including the UK.
Post Reply