Specialist Heat Pump & Solar Panel Installers

While Heat Pumps might sound like a new technology, the principle behind them was discovered more than 150 years ago and is used in more than one billion devices around the world.

If you’ve ever felt behind your fridge while it’s turned on, you will have noticed that it can get warm. This is because the heat pump in your fridge extracts heat from inside your fridge and dumps it into the air behind.

An air source heat pump uses the same tried and tested technology as your fridge, but on a much bigger scale, to pull heat from the air outside into the hot water that heats your home.

You might not think there is much heat to extract from the air on a frosty winter night, but the heat pumps we install still work at any temperatures we experience in the UK.

Using the heat in the air in this way, a heat pump acts as an energy multiplier, turning one unit of electricity into more than three times as much heat for your home.

Batteries have become increasingly popular over the last few years. This has been due to the recent increases in electricity costs and reduction in the costs of batteries. 2 years ago only 10% of our new solar installations included a battery, that figure is now 85%.

A solar battery is charged when the PV array generation is greater than the electrical demand in the building. Once that demand in the building is greater than the supply from the array, electricity will be supplied from the battery. Without a battery that additional electricity required would come from the grid.

So, the first point to make is that the cost-effectiveness of a battery is based on how much excess electricity your array is going to generate, and therefore how often it is charged and discharged – the harder it works the more money you save. This will come down to the size of the array versus the projected energy usage in the building.

The second consideration is whether you are going to use your battery for cheap overnight charging. There are now several tariffs available which enable you to charge your battery overnight at a reduced p/kWh price, which is particularly useful in the winter months when the amount of electricity that will be generated by the array will be lower. Using a tariff such as this ensures you are getting maximum benefit from your battery investment.

In our quotations we can model the financial implications of including a battery in your solar design, showing your projected bill savings by storing excess electricity and charging overnight. Contact us today so we can start this process for you.

A south-facing roof will generate the most electricity over a 12-month period, compared to any other orientation, however the general rule is that any roof is viable with an orientation between 90 (east) and 270 (west) degrees.

The downside of a south-facing roof is that the output over a day will be shaped like a bell-curve, with a very high peak output in the middle of the day, which is when we tend not to need most of our electricity. A battery, however, can be very useful in these circumstances, so the excess electricity generated can be stored and used later in the day.

The benefit of panels on an east-facing roof means the array will start generating earlier in the day, and panels on a west-facing roof will continue to generate later in the day, compared to a south-facing roof. We tend to use most of our electricity at the start and end of the day, so the benefit of east and west-facing roofs is that the proportion of solar generated electricity that is consumed directly in the building can be greater than electricity generated from a south-facing roof, so the bill savings can be higher.

If you have both east and west-facing roofs then installing panels on both these elevations can lead to brilliant results. Your array will start up early and continue generating late in the day, and it won’t have that high peak output in the middle of the day that south-facing roofs have, reducing the amount of excess electricity being produced.

In 2012 we installed arrays on neighbouring houses in Bristol. On one house 16 panels were installed on a south-facing roof, on the other 8 panels were installed on each of the east and west-facing roofs. Although the south-facing array generated more electricity through the year, the customers with the east/west array actually reduced their bills more!

So don’t worry if you don’t have a south-facing roof, speak to us today and we can look at a Google Earth image of your house whilst you’re on the phone and advise the best options for locating panels on your roofs.