Heat pumps to be sold ‘smart-ready’ in plans to save households money
Heat pumps to be sold ‘smart-ready’ in plans to save households money
inews.co.uk
Heat pumps to be sold ‘smart-ready’ in plans to save households money
12 comments
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Smarter devices support demand side response, which is welcome to make the grid more efficient. A good local energy-efficient solution includes in my experience three key ingredients.
First you need local energy storage to allow for extra flexibility to handle life's ebbs and flows. This could be an EV or dedicated storage battery, which can be charged when electricity is abundant, and discharged when supply is tight and something energy hungry needs doing.
Second the grid side will not know when I’m planning to do something energy hungry, or when I want the EV battery full instead of the usual 80% charge. Therefore some way of providing input is needed. It might be possible to learn reasonable local demand forecast models reflecting local behaviour patterns, but I’m not yet convinced about this and tend to trust human guidance more.
Third you need intelligent control to respond to grid signals (e.g. price changes) and combine those with local inputs and any local consumption and production (e.g. from solar panels or micro wind turbines) forecasts.
Energy companies will of course want to have the intelligent control in their hands as it creates them price arbitrage. For majority of consumers that will be the best solution. Some of us will not necessarily want to give them that control and prefer a local solution.
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This will be a welcome move if it let's people get better control of their energy. I think someone has posted on here about their smart home setup that allows them to monitor their green energy production and usage.
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Could have been me. I’ve been working on this as a hobby for over five years yers since we got solar panels, EV and a dedicated battery for storage.
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12 comments
As long as people think it's too cold in the UK for them to work or that you need to insulate your house to a level that'll make you drown in black mould, I don't have much hope
'You'll need new radiators, and ideally more insulation'
"Utterly unworkable, now fit me a new gas boiler"
(Imo, the thing really holding ashps back is the costs. Companies treating installation like a dark art, and using the government grants to print money)
We also have an issue that much of our housing stock is really old and actually relies on leaks for propper air circulation, properly insulating these houses leads to damp and mold problems as OP mentioned. Huge swaths of housing in the UK are just fundementally unfit for purpose.
Too cold in the UK for them to work? We run them in MN where it can hit -25C in winter. On the coldest days they can't be the sole source of heat but they work just fine in the cold.
I know, I'm not saying that that makes any sense 😅 just seems to be a common thought here