Hi John here and welcome to the next in the series on our heating update. This video will take you
through the pre-installation work that I did and getting ready for the actual installation of the
air source heat pump. To recap for you very quickly the last video which is up on screen
at the moment. The thumbnail and the link to it. I talked about the fact that we have an old gas
boiler and since May 2021 it's been set at its lowest temperature to try to understand if our
heating system could run at low temperatures. We heat our hot water with the immersion heater and
excess solar via the eddie. These are some of the tests I did just to briefly recap.
So 24th of January of 2023 0ºC outside and then I went around and took temperatures of
the radiators. The inlet and outlet temperatures to understand what the flow temperature was. The
house was warm and so that was fine. If you recall previously I talked about that we have microbore,
10mm microbore pipework running throughout the house. Underfloor heating wasn't an option because
we have solid wood floors downstairs, parquet flooring. And we obviously wanted to ditch gas.
I'd also gone round and measured up every room and and did my own heat loss survey. Created
a detailed floor plan for ground floor and first floor. We also had an EPC done which is needed as
part of the requirement to get the £5K grant from OFGEM off the price of the heat pump installation.
And I also showed you on the last video the review of the professionally done heat loss survey by
Mark from JMR Heating who are the company who installed the heat pump. This shows you,
just as a quick recap, these are the rooms where we're underpowered on heat loss. The
dining room being the worst room. Landing was okay and the rest of the rooms were
at jeopardy really. We needed to change the radiators in each one of those rooms.
I had the proposal through from Heat Geek as I said earlier we went with JMR Heating & Energy
Service who are a Heat Geek assured installer. and we got the proposal through from Heat Geek
which is very detailed. This is what we've got. The AeroTHERM+, Vaillant AroTHERM+ 7kW unit. The
Unistore 200 litre domestic hot water cylinder. The SensoCOMFORT controls and I'll show you the
total price on the next video. This is the quote which I accepted. And this was the spec that they
guaranteed they would work to. The bottom bit is the really the the key bit the 'New
Renewable System Information'. So air source heat pump, Vaillant 7kW and flow temperature 40ºC. The
heating SCOP 4.13 and the hot water 1.75. Those are the annual performance indicators the system
would work to. We had planning permission approved. Which obviously would have been
approved, a bit of a rubber stamp job as I think I said in the last video. It was just a case of
having to go through the motions. There was some caveats on there. It had to be in the location
that you'd identified on the plan! Then had a message from Mark to say that 30th June would be
the start of our installation. This gave me about 4 weeks to sort of get things sorted. First thing
I did was cancel our contract for our gas boiler. This is a full Domestic & General loyalty customer
type Platinum level service plan which covers an annual service. Up to £750 worth of approved
repairs. Nationwide gas service registers and it covers all parts labor and call out charges.
And the price had gone up considerably because obviously our boiler had started to break down.
So our annual premium, our last annual premium, would have been £539 which is
actually quite an expensive! So I canceled that and instantly saved £540! I also then binned
the instruction manuals for our gas boiler and recycle them obviously. Won't be needing those
anymore. Boiler had been turned off since April anyway we were getting to a point where we would
have a big space in the utility room where the boiler was. And this would be bricked up, the
vent outside. And eventually the gas meter would be capped and removed. So I said about radiators
we needed... we've got 17 radiators in total and all of them bar 1 were being replaced. Here's a
quick run through the radiators; so the ensuite. Master bedroom. Walk-in wardrobe. The landing and
you can see by and large they're just single panel K1s or T1s which is fine when you're dealing with
gas because the radiators run a lot hotter but for an air source heat pump they will be undersized.
So Lounge... number 11. Radiator 12. There's 2 here 13 and 14. Utility room 15. With office
16. And 17 in the toilet downstairs. This is the radiator that we weren't changing mainly
because we couldn't get to it! I had some concerns about the micro-bore and spoke to
Mark about that. You can see here that when they've fitted the micro-bore they've bent it
by hand what it looks like and got a kink in it so reducing the flow. Which would be a problem
with air source heat pumps because they rely on a good flow of water. Mark agreed that we would
change the tails on all of the radiators and go to 15mm. So keep the micro-bore which is buried
in the plasterboard but come off that with 15mml and plumb the radiators to 15mm. I also thought
well they're going to take all the radiators off so they needed to be clean. And when I started to
look at the radiators look at dust that builds up! It's amazing! I did this last year I've cleaned
all the radiators. Within 12 months they were sort of back to being really fluffy and filled
with dust again. So around with the hoover, the long brush to get rid of all the dust.
Quite satisfying actually. Even though I knew these radiators were going to be removed well
I might as well start off with a clean sheet when they're putting the new radiators in. For the hot
water I said earlier that we've been heating our hot water via the immersion heater and controlled
by eddie using the excess solar. I wanted to put in 2 of the sensors, the PT1000 sensors. Here's
one of them here. I already had 1 fitted but I wanted to put a second one in. So there's 1 in the
middle of the tank and 1 towards the bottom of the tank. It has a metal sensor goes against the tank
and then there's 2 wires attached to that which go into a little terminal block which then fits
into the eddi relay board. Then it's a case of pushing in the second green clamp under the board
and hey presto we ended up with 2 temperatures top and bottom. And you can see there's quite
a difference, I was quite surprised actually the difference between the actual temperature
that we've been using normally about 51ºC is the temperature that we heat the hot water to.
And the temperature at the bottom of the tank was sort of 20ºC lower and it's quite surprising this
stratification that occurred. Other jobs that I needed to do I wanted the heat pump to be on a LAN
network rather than on Wi-Fi which meant I needed to chase some network cables in the house. So I
had my trusty fisher tape out to be able to fish the cables through the house. I started with a
cable run on the outside of the house. I found it a lot easier to run network cables on the outside
of the house rather than inside the house because I had to go through 2 floors. The switch for the
network is in the office which is downstairs and then the heat pump controls would be upstairs in
the loft. it meant running through the house which was really quite complicated and I didn't want to
do that and it was actually all on one side of the house externally so it's a lot easier to do
it on the outside. And while I was there rather than just run 1 cable and I did 2 so I've got a
bit of backup. Initially I wanted to run it in the existing conduit that's there but it just wouldn't
fit there was too tight with the 2 cables that were already in there so I ended up running them
down the side of this conduit. It was external Cat 5 cable it was quite fine being outside. This
is up in the loft where it comes through at the top of the ladders which are on the other side.
And then this is coming out from the... just by the Powerwall actually
from the office and then running around the outside of the house. I did quite a bit of cabling
while I was there not only doing the cabling for the heat pump but I also ran external cabling
around to the television and 1 to the Freesat box. Here's the office office needed a bit of a tidy
up as a result of cabling and what have you. So initially a lot worse before things get better.
There we go all tidied up. I'm no network engineer. It was the first time I'd actually
done any networking of this type so that was quite interesting knowing what bits to buy and how to
install them and so I watched a lot of YouTube videos and got the bits I needed to do that.
These sort of keystones labeled those up these are the back of the keystones that
we just looked at with the cabling diagram there. I bought pre-fitted RJ45 cables where needed. And
tested all my cable runs with this cable tester which was a bit of a godsend. This is in the
office where I put in a 4 port plate. There we go Studio that runs out of the photography
studio. One LAN to the Tesla Powerwall. 1 to the heat pump. 1 of the master bedroom which
is the television in there. And then I also did one to the lounge TV and one to the Freesat Box.
I said about monitoring the heat pump. I wanted to make sure that we had a monitoring system in place
from day one. I purchased, and I'll put a link in the description down below, the open energy
monitoring setup which has a heat meter which is that big white box with the bit of brass tubing
in the middle. There's a closer look at it so that measures the the water temperature, the flow
return. Then got this clever box which transmits the the data. This is all the instructions for it.
This is a device that measures the amount of electricity the heat pump is using. That fits
in the consumer unit. So that was all sort of ready and I needed to do the LAN because the
emonHP box here has a LAN connection. You can do it by Wi-Fi but it's better to do LAN. It's
probably worth mentioning why I wanted the open energy heat monitoring system in place.
It gives minute-by-minute data, well second-by-second data, and it's realtime
so you can actually look at how your heat pump's performing. Up on screen is a chart showing you
the detail from the monitoring system. And I'll go through this in more detail in the next video. But
you can see here over between 6am in the morning and 7am this is running a heating cycle just to
test it. We have a COP of 5.56 in this particular window and it shows you the flow temperature,
outside temperature, room temperature, electricity usage, blah blah blah. Compare this to, this again
is our heat pump when we did some tweaks to it I say we, Mark did some tweaks to it and we found
that it was cycling. Down at the bottom there you can see those peaks where it's in and out,
in and out, in and out, over a sort of 15 minute window. And the COP there is 1.03. It
really affects the performance if you have a heat pump that's cycling continuously in a very short
period of time. And this was just doing hot water and no heating at all. So that's why I wanted the
open energy monitoring in place. We could actually monitor the performance of the heat pump in real
time and the tweaks that we're doing in terms of setting it up and commissioning and getting
it running to its optimum, we can see how things are happening with the changes that we're making.
Anyway talk more about that in the next video. The other thing I had to do was to lay out where the
heat pump was going to go. Another job I needed to do was clear out this sort of alleyway down
the side of the house. It had this fence which was a normal sort of lap fence so all the panels...
shiplap fence I think they're called. I changed that to allow a bit more air to get through. I
put some of the shiplap panels on one side and then some of them on the front to give
a nice airy breeze. And it really made quite a difference actually to the airflow in this area.
We needed a good airflow. This is down the side of the house... walking across the chimney breast.
My cabling. The position where the heat pump would be.
This
is looking back the other way.
And there's a good breeze down there now. And then looking up this would be where the pipe run would
be going into the loft and going off back into the airing cupboard. So they're all the jobs
I had to do. Quite a few actually and it's quite surprising how long that took to work all the way
through that. In the next video I shall take you through the install, day by day what happened and
show you the final product once it's installed. All right any questions give me a shout down below
I'll pick those up. Thanks for watching and I'll see you on the next video, bye.