High Electricity Bills?

Air source heat pumps and high electricity bills

As experts in the diagnostics and remedial work of ASHP, we have been receiving several calls recently from customers who have purchased new build properties that have had an ASHP fitted. Many experiencing high electricity costs.

We have recently assisted one customer who, since moving into the property, has had consistent electricty bills of upwards of £300 per month!

The System:
The customer had a 12KW LG ASHP installed. On a new build of a similar size we we would expect an electricity bill of about £850 per annum, so a bill of £300 plus per month alarmed us somewhat! The customer agreed to an ASHP Health Check…here’s what we found…

1. Flow Temperature
Generally speaking the flow temperature should be set at 50 degrees. We discovered on this installation the flow rate was set at 57 degrees!

2. Immersion
Because the flow rate had been set so high the system was constantly trying to play catch up. The immersion was running to compensate for the high flow rate settings.

3. Dirty System
The original installers has clearly not cleaned the system after installation which meant that all the filters and flow meter were very dirty.

4. Solution
We spent almost three hours with the customer carrying out a normal ASHP service, in which time we cleaned the filters out. We changed the flow rate to 50 degrees, rest the thermostats to between 19 and 22 degrees (depending on the room), reset the main system settings to ensure the immersion carried out the weekly required Legionella purge, and demonstrated to the customer how the system worked.

Follow up works
We have advised that the system should be flushed through to prevent/minimise the filters becoming excessively dirty…

Energie Solutions have many satisfied ASHP service customers, many of which have signed up to our ASHP service plan. For further information please call 01206 396901.