If you are interested in getting a hot water system for your home from renewable means then one of your options is go get ground source heating from a ground source heat pump. There are also air source heat pumps and solar thermal panels will do the same job with solar energy. We’ll be looking in to the financial benefits you can accrue in this way.
Efficiency of Heat Pumps
Although usually it is the efficiency of different types of energy generators that we talk about, when it comes to ground source heating that is not the most interesting thing to consider. That’s because the efficiency of a system has got to consider all energy inputs, and then say how much useful energy actually comes out of that.
With a boiler, we have to provide all of the energy that is used to get useful energy so efficiency is the proper term to use. With a heat pump though, the point is that the heat energy comes from natural resources that we do not have to provide.
The more accurate term to use with heat pumps then is “coefficient of performance”. This describes how much energy we get out as opposed to the amount of energy that we had to supply to it. So that is the best way to measure the performance of a heat pump.
When you look at a ground source heat pump you are going to see that you get out 3-5 times more energy than you had to put in. This means that it is has a coefficient of performance of between 3 and 5. A boiler would have to be 300-500% efficient to match that.
It is impossible, of course, to be more than 100% efficient as you can never get more energy out of a system than what is put in. That is one of the main physical laws that we have, so there is no way of getting around that. Clearly then, no boiler can ever be as efficient as that so you’ll need less energy to heat your home with a heat pump.
Financial Considerations
What this means for your finances is that you will immediately be making savings on your energy bills by using a heat pump. That’s because for every unit of energy that you have to pay for, you get 3-5 units of energy free out of the system.
When it comes to the precise savings that you’ll be making though, this comes down to so many different things that it’s impossible to make any sort of precise calculation. Some of the things that have to be considered are how well insulated your home is, how much you pay for your heating presently, how big your property is and so on.
Soon, however, it is not just the savings that you make on energy bills that you are going to have to rely on. The government is going to introduce the renewable heat incentive soon, which will pay you according to each unit of energy that you produce with a heat pump.
If you want to get a better idea of how this works, just look at the feed in tariff, which is already in place for the solar energy you get from PV solar panels. In that case it is the electrical energy that you are paid for producing. Note that you still get to use it and save money on energy bills, but you get paid for the production as well.
The result of the feed in tariff is that it makes solar energy in to a better investment, and the renewable heat incentive will do the same thing for ground source heating as well as other kinds of renewable heating systems.
If you’re interested in learning additional info regarding heat pumps, it’s possible to do so at http://groundsourceheating.org.uk, which is where author Dylan Cox writes more on the subject. Also go to this company should you do have an interest in getting a free quote for a solar installation.
