Apologies in advance for my very lengthy post, but can I ask how is everybody finding the heating system (air to water heat pump) in Beresford/Beverton? I recently moved in to Beresford, and I’m expecting my electricity bill to be very large. I’ve checked my meter and I seem to be using around 30 kWh per day. The heat pump technology is completely new to me, so I’m probably using it wrong. When I first moved in I was putting it on from 5pm to 8pm each day, and the house would only get up to around 16 degrees. I was using 30 kWh per day (total household electricity consumption) however when I was doing this. I contacted a Panasonic engineer for some advice, who told me that was the completely wrong way to use a heat pump. He said they take a long time to get up to the set temperature and use a lot of energy in doing so, but a well-insulated house will hold the heat and they then use very little energy to maintain the heat at the temperature set by the thermostat.
So I then went and did a little bit of experimentation. I set my thermostat to 19 degrees and I have the heat timed to come on (downstairs only, I do not heat upstairs) from 02:30 to 7:30 and again from 15:00 to 22:30. This seems to use around 28 – 30 kWh per day, but the difference being that my house is very comfortable during the morning when I get up, and in the evening when I’m home from work. I have also run the system for 24 hours to see would that use less power, as it should only be maintaining at 19 degrees for 24 hours. That used 34 kWh though.
The next experiment I would like to run would be to use “set back temperatures”, as described on page 15 of this document from the SEAI:
http://www.seai.ie/Publications/Your_Ho ... logies.pdf
The thermostats in Beresford are manual, so I plan to run the system for 24 hours, only this time to lower the thermostat to 16 degrees before going to bed, and then turn it back up to 19 degrees when I get home from work the next day.
According to the SEAI, the annual heating bill for a 4 bed semi BER A3 is 700 euro. At my current consumption I will well exceed that. I would be grateful if anybody with more experience of the system can advise if I am doing anything wrong?