Solar Voltaic Panels & Air Heat Pump Combination |
Page Update (Dec 2019) with full baseline 5-Year Data Set 2013-17
This page describes personal experience of installing solar panels on our roof together with a small air-to-air source heat pump. How we cut our domestic carbon footprint by 64%, have a warmer than ever house, and incredibly low bills. It gives summary data over the first 5 years 2013 - 2017 inclusive, and a link to an article that has extensive technical and financial endnotes. Subsequent solar energy production has been: 3251 units (2018), 3309 units (2019).
At the start of 2013 we installed 4 kW capacity of solar panels on our roof in Glasgow. The deal with feed-in tariff is that it is assumed that you will use half the power you generate and that the other half will be sold back to your electricity provider. In practice, most homes that try to live a green lifestyle will consume nothing like half of what they generate. Yes, if you put the kettle and the toaster on when the sun comes out, but for the mostpart, you will be drawing a baseload of a few hundred watts and giving away the rest unless (like somebody I met) you're heating the swimming pool. When we installed our panels and I saw how well they were working, my thoughts turned to how we could use a greater share of of our power. I researched the options, and we ended up installing a small heat pump that takes heat out of the outdoors air, even when the temperature is below freezing, and pumps it indoors at an enormous gain to the energy put in. If that sounds contrary to Newton's laws, then realise that what you're doing is using energy not to produce heat, but to move it, like when you pump a bicycle and the end of the pump gets hot because you've compressed the heat that was in the air of the full pump length into a smaller space. I published the story of what we did in a little journal with which I have a long involvement, and here you can download the Reforesting Scotland article: Wood, Wind and Sunny Govan (5 MB). On this page, you will also find pictures of our system, and a table with summary statistical information for the past 4 complete calendar years. I doubt that I will update this further, because I have produced this data on a constantly shifting backdrop of changing energy prices, modes of use of our house where we work from home, and increasing wall insulation. What I've tried to do for these years is produce a reasonably standardised view and to draw averages based on prices, tariffs and carbon intensity standardised to what they were in 2013. You'll see all those assumptions at the foot of the table. The bottom lines are:
Alastair McIntosh (Author of Hell and High Water: Climate Change, Hope and the Human Condition Last updated: 02 April 2021
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