[Norfolk Newby]

Heat pumps are a fairly old idea. Its like a fridge but the thing works the other way round. Where a fridge has a cold box and a heated radiator on the back, a heat pump has a heated radiator (or two!) inside the house and cold pipes under the garden or in a neighbouring stream.

When the Royal Festival Hall was built in London around 1950, it was heated with a heat pump. This was a Rolls Royce Merlin engine using the supercharger as a compressor and the river Thames as the source of heat! It worked but the maintenance cost was too high to be worthwhile.

If you put a heat pump in your house, you use 1Kw of electricity to produce about 4Kw of heat. But this is with a new system and the effectiveness will drop. If you have a source of heat like a stream or river, it will work better than with the heat coming from the ground. You can get more heat if the source is warmer. This is measured as the system's 'Coefficient of Performance'. A figure of 4 is average and 6 is possible (but not with the ground as the heat source).

The pipes in the garden are a big part of the initial cost and usually make the system too expensive to be worth considering.

NN

[sagehen]

My OH actually thought of using a manure pit for heating the house, but the problem was in regulating the output, as well as the size needed to heat the whole house. I worried more about the methane emitted, and wasn't happy about the idea of a flammable gas present in the garden. WQe did think about channelling the methane, but it was too much of a complication.
I'd love an alternative electricity supply though, more than heating!

[kp]

If you google 'The power collective' or 'ridge blade turbines' you will find an alternative to the wind turbine, it sits on the ridge of the house and comes in 1.2 mt lengths, it's housed in a box type affair with long blade/paddles which catch the wind,the slope of the roof increases the wind speed and it works in very windy conditions without needing to be shut down. The guy who invented it is an ex rolls royce engineer working on planes, he lives on the North Yorkshire Moors and the price quoted for a two bedroomed semi was about £2,500 including the alternator, please don't ask me any technical questions as I'm rubbish at that sort of thing.

Regards Karen

[Greenerlife]

You might be better off starting with collecting information first.  I bought a mini weather station which I put up in the garden to see exactly how much wind we have - that way you'll know what you have to cope with.

CAT does fantastic courses on building your own turbine though - my OH went on one and still hasn't stopped raving on about it! 

[sagehen]

That's a coincidence. My OH was talking about getting a super duper weather station, and I told him not to waste our money  I think that's probably the way to go - collating all information before making any decision. Thanks!

[Pigtails]

Have you thought to look on Ebay, there is usually quite a lot on there for Alt; energy, Sterling Power are very very good,

[JL]

Hi Pigtails
can I ask what make your turbine is? I'm interested in getting one and £1000 doesn't sound to bad. We looked into a ground source heat pump but it was too expensive.

[Wizard]

I am one of the cannot be convinced its good stuff this FREE lectrick.Take the much publicised B&Q Wind mill If and I said if the wind is blowing at 28 mph the machine is alleged Oh I do love that word Alleged to produce 1 kw of power.Wonderfull Does that mean it will half boil a kettle? It will light 10 100w bulbs.or drive your 50" flat screen TV or will it is it a continuous 240v 50 cycle out put or does it fluctuate? £1498 seems a lot to me.I had quite a few tussles with the greenies on RCC about Free electric RC installed a wind Genny 6kw I said fine it wont cook Sunday lunch Drax No one seemed to know what that was so I had to explain That if it runs all 4 generators it is capable of generating approx 4 megawatts of power.7% of the country's power requirement So how long does a 30 ton lorry full of willow biomass last in a boiler of that size answer about 7 seconds think of the pollution from the lorries delivering to say nothing of the space to plant the willow.Complete idiots Go Nuclear go now build them slowly carefully and they will be ready to come on stream when required .Not get Fred Carno's army in to sling them up last moment and be followed by a terrible disaster.Do we need a new thread?

[Rumpleteazer]

For this to be effective do you need to find some sort of way of storing what you generate?? With our last lecky bill I would be really interested in doing this, but no cash available for initial outlay. I guess we will just have to get better at turning off those lights!

[Wizard]

I don't know of anything that stores 240/50 Volts AC at all bar the things in electronic devices.They're not capable of discharging at any appreciable useable kitchen power

[egbert]

As we speak the final adjustments are just being made to our new wind source heat pump. My OH knows all the details - I have tried not to absorb too much of the detail as it fills my head with more clutter 

However, he looked at turbines, but no good here as we live in a bit of a dip so despite me feeling like I live in a wind tunnel, we don't actually get enough constant wind for it to be viable.
Then he looked at heat pumps - this is the most effective system but would need a lot of room to dig trenches for the piping, or deep bore holes if you have less room. A neighbour recently had the bore hole solution fitted but the cost of just digging the hole was ridiculous.
So, we now have an air pump in the garden, which I am now looking at ways to screen, as the OH naturally put it where he felt it was most accessible, without thinking of aesthetics. We also have 3 solar panels on the roof which I believe are also contributing to the heating. It was on for the 1st time last night and is definitely providing lots of heat - the OH will be monitoring it over the next year to see how much power it is using and how much we save in oil (after this last winter our oils costs were ridiculous. The tank itself is in the garage and is huge - it takes up more room and has a lot more piping than we expected!
Also, the gov provided a grant to contribute to the costs and are paying some sort of annual grant/revenue for power saved (I am not sure how this works) which OH says, if they pay up as they have said they will, will make it more than worthwhile even if the leccy bill goes up.

Next thing we are considering is a solar panal PV array (?) in the garden for power, but the gov recently stopped the grants on this (the day we were going to commit darn it) so now reconsidering the costs . . .

[jonathan]

Hi everyone,

Just chanced across this great forum from a search on Google, I had to sign up to join this discussion

I note some of the concerns mentioned on here about wind power (cost, payback period and output), there is now another option. I'm part of a new company called SolarVentus Energy.

What we offer is a no cost, no risk opportunity to benefit from renewable energy. The way it works is simple, we find land owners with suitable sites. We install one of our turbines, we get the new feed in tariffs, the land owner gets the electricity, free of charge. Absolutely no cost or risk to the land owner. We maintain and insure the turbines.

The turbines we use are not the gimmicky stuff sold in B&Q, they are 18m tall (hub height) and would produce around 25,000kWh a year.

I'm sure many of you will have questions - please feel to ask me any questions you like.

Jonathan

[ser3dan]

I don't know of anything that stores 240/50 Volts AC at all bar the things in electronic devices.They're not capable of discharging at any appreciable useable kitchen power

Wizard, as far as I know, for people living off grid, the wind / water turbines generate power at 48v which is fed into a battery bank ( think electric fork lift truck battery ) and stored there. The output is taken through an inverter that steps up the voltage to 240, and changes the DC current to 50Hz AC.
There's a guy who lives on Raasay called Paul Camilli who's blog I read at Life at the end of road who has a wind generator and a water turbine which works like that.
For the people who live on grid and want to take advantage of feed in tariffs ( FiT's ), my understanding is that the DC current generated is stepped up and inverted to 240v50Hz and can be used in the household reducing the electricity bill - anything that is produced over and above the household requirements is fed back into the national grid and you are paid a rate higher than you buy electricity in at.
Does that make sense at all?

[Cobra]

Dont have one myself but found this as a was looking afew weeks ago.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSkrarYuD44

http://www.windbluepower.com/Wind_Generator_Tail_Vane_Wind_Blue_p/vane-alu.htm

Apparently these are every efficiant by all accounts. Hope it helps

[old geezer]

Hi everybody, I have been very interested in reading about all you power problems, I am not a smallholder but I have a large bungalow in half an acre, my self  sufficiency go's like this, I have been self employed since 1964 when I was 21 and got married, in all the years of self employment I have been a motor engineer  so I have never had to pay a garage for any kind of mechanical work, I have been a builder and so have never had to pay for any plumbing carpentry or any other work involved with my property, for about forty years I have burned timber for heat and hot water, I have a ferguson TE F20 diesel with a cordwood saw on the PTO, and several chain saws axes etc etc, I collect an abundance of old pallets from the local trading estates and cut up to burn,about a year or so ago I was given 2 very large willow trees to cut down and log for my future burning, I have a small villager log burner which I cut the complete back out of and I designed and fabricated a large boiler covering the whole of the rear of the log burner, absolutely fantastic red hot water all the time when in use, I also have a solid fuel Rayburn in the kitchen which I backed up the plumbing with the log burner, I have a sceptic tank and used properly it never has to be emptied, I collect rain water in large drums and tanks and use this to flush the toilet very simply with a bucket, I have a 500 square foot workshop 10 paces from my backdoor set up with all engineering and carpentry machines and tools that as I am now 67 and semi retired is my little extra as it wer, and to finish of my very very cheap way of living  I am just in the throws of setting up a CHP system with a Lister 6/1 diesel engine, an 8 KW generator and just today I have ordered all the steel fittings and tubing to fabricate an heat exchanger from the exhaust of the engine for heating of the water and radiators,so why am I reading about all these mega expensive wind mills, photo cell roof panels etc, why not build your own water panels for the roof, to heat you domestic hot water,so easy and cheap to build, you will get your money back in the first 12 months of use, its not rocket science, I hope this has not bored you all to much, but all these moder things are much to expensive when other much cheaper ways are available, good health all, Dodger.