What’s the average gas and electricity bill in Great Britain? If you are anything like me, you won't know. All we tend to know these days is that energy prices are going up. So, lets look at some statistics, first from the British Gas site: They state that according to Ofgem, the average British household uses 2,700 kWh of electricity ...

It's been a while since I last posted (...life etc!) but now is a time to look at some statistics for the first 12 months of the retrofit system. First 12 months As shown in the plots below, there's been a lot of activity. In the first 12 months (taken as April 2022 - March 2023) close to 6500 kWh of electricity were used by the house....

One app that has been really useful over the winter months is Hugo. This is an app that you install on a mobile device (Android or iOS) and with some simple setup questions and permissions granting, it links directly to your smart meter data*. In much the same way as the in-home display units do. It then shows information on consumptio...

In the UK, we had a couple of cold spells this winter - one in early December and one in late January. It looks like we might have another one next week. I'll do a specific post about the energy usage during those periods in the next couple of weeks. This post though is about the Daikin service support that we got regarding some questi...

This is a really good video from EVM: https://youtu.be/wBnHi4Iowak It explains the set-up that suits him, his family and his home. He is at pains to explain that he isn't trying to force the idea of a heat pump onto anyone. This is great, and exactly what is needed. The future of home energy will be a mix of technologies depending on t...

One of the things that you'll need to call upon when you are looking to add renewables to your property is the experience of others. There are lots of folks on the internet with opinions, but what you are really after are people who have either taken the step and are ahead of you and can advise on what to do / not do, orpeople who are ...

Since the initial install in January 2022 there have been a few tweaks that have needed to be made, issues checked and problems solved. Nothing major, but just a few things to get the system running as advertised when we were getting quotes. I have to say that the customer support that we have had from all of the companies involved has...

First published on Wordpress in October 2022. Everything has been in and running for a little over 6 months now, so I thought it would be useful to have a look at some statistics. I’m going to take a ‘clean’ dataset that runs from April through to September as this removes some of the things that were happening in February and March ar...

First published on Wordpress in April 2022. TL;DR: It’s another long post, but essentially we’ve started minimising our intake from the grid and hence reducing our operational costs. Best day so far… £0.11 electricity imported. We’ve now had 2 full months of data which seems like a good opportunity to start looking at some numbers. But...

First published on Wordpress in March 2022. Everything we needed doing on the retrofit was completed back in January 2022. We’ve been living with the system for a couple of months, so here are some thoughts on the different components. Solar panels Love ’em. They look pretty sleek and there are a stack of them (20 in total) and they ha...

First published on Wordpress in March 2022. This blog post is being inserted into the series because it’s relevant, although it’s chronologically in the wrong place. The work it discusses actually took place after the heat pump had been installed, although ideally it should have been undertaken before we started any works. But we had o...

First published on Wordpress in January 2022. Wow! This has been a mammoth effort by the installers. Originally it was planned that the retrofit would happen in two phases: • the solar panels and battery in January, and • the heat pump and hot water cylinder in February. As it turned out, everything went in at once in January in six da...

First published on Wordpress in January 2022. Here are our choices and some thoughts about why we made them. Installation Company We came across Ecobubl on YouTube and had been watching their videos about heat pump installations for some time. They came across as professional yet easy going, and very knowledgeable about the systems the...

First published on Wordpress in January 2022. TL;DR - do your research, get multiple quotes, go with the one you trust most, prepare the ground for installation. Finding information One of the key things when starting a retrofit project (in my mind anyway) is to do some research on what the options are. Before settling on the system we...

First published on Wordpress in January 2022 Previous property In the summer of 2021 we moved house. Our previous property was a 1980s (originally 2 bed) end of terrace and was nothing special, but we had done a lot to it. The property was N-S oriented, with a roof that faced south, and it had a long thin garden edged on the western bo...