Home power-generation dream suffers a blow

Aurora · Post by **Aurora** » 08 Mar 2010, 06:40

Times OnLine - 08/03/10

Red tape is strangling a scheme designed to encourage millions of families to generate their own green electricity with home-mounted solar panels, wind turbines and heat pumps, according to the UK’s biggest manufacturer of central heating equipment.

Starting next month, Britain’s 26 million households will be able to collect a fixed fee of up to 41p a kilowatt hour for electricity they generate from roof-mounted solar panels and sell on to the grid. Up to 34½p a kilowatt hour is available for home-mounted windmills.

But Worcester Bosch says that the scheme, which seeks to kick-start a boom in so-called microgeneration, is being hobbled by a chronic shortage of certified engineers who must fit the equipment for consumers to qualify for the payments.

“To qualify as an installer, it’s expensive, onerous and full of red tape,” said Neil Schofield, head of sustainable development for Worcester Bosch, which controls 28 per cent of Britain’s boiler market and is a big supplier of solar panels and air and ground-source heat pumps.

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snow hope · Post by **snow hope** » 08 Mar 2010, 09:01

Can anybody tell me if FITs apply in N Ireland?

contadino · Post by **contadino** » 08 Mar 2010, 12:28

Oooh, lets all shed a tear for all those ill-prepared MCS certified installation companies. The poor dears can't make money fast enough, despite having a strangle-hold on the market.

Ted · Post by **Ted** » 08 Mar 2010, 18:16

snow hope wrote:Can anybody tell me if FITs apply in N Ireland?

No they don't - only England, Wales and Scotland for the time being.

NI is stuck with ROCs.

ziggy12345 · Post by **ziggy12345** » 08 Mar 2010, 22:10

Forge the documentation...

I read the paperwork and the company only has to register not the installer. If a company has 200 people working for it it pays the same as a one man band. Thats easy to get around. Just setup a society of renewable energy installers and all join then register once.

mobbsey · Post by **mobbsey** » 09 Mar 2010, 10:35

Microgeneration is a sticking plaster trying to staunch the bleeding from a severed vein -- it's not impossible that applying a plaster will stop you bleeding to death, but in reality it will only work in a few cases.

I think the starkest example of the fallacy recently has been the "The Ecologist's Guide to Greening Your Home" -- http://www.theecologist.org/Guides/Ecol ... _home.html Lots of information about what to buy, but damn all relative context; e.g., turning down the heat by one degree saves about 10% on space heating, which is far more than most urban micro-generation schemes will produce (solar thermal excepted, which is usually 10% to 15% of the total) -- or the fact that your diet in most cases requires a little more energy, and emits much more carbon, than the impact of your home (per person per year).

If microgeneration made a meaningful difference this would be a significant issue, but it's a distraction hyped up to reinforce the mistaken notion that these measures will render the mainstream lifestyle benign.

biffvernon · Post by **biffvernon** » 09 Mar 2010, 11:37

But our solar panel allows us to have more, deeper, hotter baths (in summer).

PaulS · Post by **PaulS** » 10 Mar 2010, 10:30

Having insulated everything in sight, we have installed a heat store powered by 40 tubes and a wood burner.
The combination works a dream. I don't think we ever had such luxurious hot and deep baths, fantastic.

The heat store is also connected to the existing central heating circuit and a little pump drives the heat around under certain conditions, with the old oil-fired boiler knowing nothing about it. As a result the boiler almost never comes on.

I found that the positioning of the solar coils in the heat store is important.
Most installers place them at the bottom of the heat store, which is logical, but it does mean you often end up with enormous amount of lukewarm water.

We placed one coil at the top, followed by a coil at the bottom. That ensures that the top of the heat store is almost always hot even if the bottom isn't and you can extract that heat simply by running water slowly to pickup more heat through this hot layer.

We are so pleased with it, highly recommended

emordnilap · Post by **emordnilap** » 10 Mar 2010, 11:38

biffvernon wrote:But our solar panel allows us to have more, deeper, hotter baths (in summer).

And in winters such as these! I come home to a large cylinder full of scalding water even though the outside air temperature rarely reaches 7 degrees.

contadino · Post by **contadino** » 10 Mar 2010, 11:39

Paul, could you give me a few details? As in:

What capacity is the TS?
So do you have a 3-coil TS, with the middle one running rads?
How many kw of rads do you have?
What's the heat output of your stove?

I'm planning on replacing the tank we have this summer, mainly because the solar gain is boiling the water in our small tank, and need some way of working out sizes.

Many thanks.

ETA: Oh, and also is it one of those newfangled TS's where it heats the water on the way out via a heat exchanger, or is it just a big tank?

PaulS · Post by **PaulS** » 10 Mar 2010, 15:25

I got my system from Navitron and had it installed by the local plumber.

The heat store is 360 l, it has three coils: two for solar input, one at the top externally connected to the one at the bottom. And an output coil through the bottom half of the tank for the central heating. Plus of course the very large water heating output coil, which runs all the way from the bottom to the top.

The central heating connection is pumped and controlled - it comes on only when the water at the top of the heat store is over 75C (adjustable) to make sure when don't end up with a cold bath! We have about 12 rads but the heatstore generally only heats the 6 rads upstairs before running out of heat, which suits us as the rest of the house warms up directly from the woodburner.

The 6kW woodburner (3 to room, 3 to water) is connected to the heat store directly, taking cool water from bottom and dumping the hot water at the top. This was supposed to work by convection alone, but I decided to fit a pump activated by a pipe thermostat, because it seem quite slow and I wanted to extract as much heat from the wood burner into the heat store as possible. This still leaves enough to heat most of the house by simply leaving the door leading upstairs open.

Btw, the two banks of 20 solar pipes each are connected in series, which I thought would maximise the amount of heat collected on marginal days.

Our heat store is located upstairs, where there isn't enough space or carrying capacity to locate a much larger heat store. At some point I plan to get another heat store (or maybe just a large square steel oil tank covered by insulation foam) probably 1000-1500 l, located downstairs and connected to the existing heatstore. I would then feed water to the wood burner from this new tank and I would install one more solar coil and one coil for central heating in that tank. So the solar input, having passed through the top tank would also heat the new bottom tank.

The heat store controller box would take care of spreading the heat between the two stores. I would suggest something similar for your situation, if you have the space downstairs, contadino, if that all makes sense!

contadino · Post by **contadino** » 10 Mar 2010, 16:19

Many thanks Paul. I don't have space for a 360l tank - I think about 220l would be as big as I could fit in - but I doubt that it would be a problem. We only have 2sqm of flat plate, and the stove is the same output as yours. Also there's just the two of us here, and we don't use that much hot water. The 80l tank we have is big enough to meet our demand.

In actual fact we currently have 2 issues: Firstly, the tank isn't big enough to take the output from the solar in summer, and secondly that the single coil means we shouldn't really use the woodburner when the panel is running (long, ridiculous story.)

At the moment the pumped circuit from the woodburner goes through the tank, and then onto the rads before returning to the burner. This works OK, as when the tank gets to a certain temp profile, more heat goes to the rads.

It's interesting that you have a direct feed from the woodburner. I got a SS backboiler when I bought the stove so that it could be direct, but it's currently running indirectly. Based on that, I could get away with a twin coil tank - one for running the 3 rads, and one for the solar.

Apologies everyone for going off-topic.

RenewableCandy · Post by **RenewableCandy** » 10 Mar 2010, 16:51

I think you've raised an interesting point that isn't OT, which is where on earth would I find a plumber who could do all that??? They're hard enough to track down for conventional jobs!

contadino · Post by **contadino** » 10 Mar 2010, 16:55

If you do it yourself, you know how to fix it if something breaks.

Of course, there are all sorts of hoops to jump through with building regulations and other government anti-DIY legislation, but they only really matter if you want to move house.

RenewableCandy · Post by **RenewableCandy** » 10 Mar 2010, 17:02

contadino wrote:If you do it yourself, you know how to fix it if something breaks.

I'm happy doing electrical bits and tiling, but never having even witnessed the successful completion of a "small" job in plumbing I don't think I'd know where to start.