Renewable Energy Systems


Solar hot water: - these will involve installing solar tubes or panels on to the roof of your house to enhanced the suns radiation and convert it to provide a large portion of you hot water, in fact according to recent publications this type of system can produce up to 70% of your hot water a year. Most of the hot water will be produced during the summer up to 90% so that means that your boiler will not have to come on as much as it needs to during the summer which will save you money, but contra to believe this system can produce up to 30% to 40% during the winter which will still save you some money because you are cutting down on your boiler running times for you hot water periods.

Air source heat pumps: - air source heat pumps are used in the same way as solar hot water to provide hot water but they take the ambient air temperature out from the room and run it throw a compressor to bring the temperature up to 60c. The main disadvantaged of these units are their noise although the more expensive ones tend to be more quite, that's why a lot of thought and planning is needed in the aspects of positioning and running times, even though the best selling points of this system is that you can provided most of your hot water needs through out the whole year with out the need of the sun and what ever the weather. They also have a 1 in 3 ratio, which means that every 1kw of power you use to run the unit it will normally give you a 3kw of energy back so it tends to pay for its self a lot quicker and your boiler becomes a back up for your hot water needs.

Combined solar and air source heat pumps: - believe it or not you can combined these two technologies together to produce all your hot water and most of your heating need together through out the year.

Ground source heat pumps: - ground source heat pumps work in much the same way as air source heat pumps but they take their heat from the ground by two main methods, boring one or several holes in the ground up to 200m deep or by digging an area up to two and a half times your ground floor area. Even thought this involves quite a lot of major work and be quite expensive to install this type of system will be able to provide all your hot water (up to 60c) and heating (up to 60c) need thorough out the whole needs, so if you have space or are planning a new build this will be one of the best types of systems to install.

Under floor heating and low water content radiators are best suited for distributing the heat from the combined and ground source heat pumps because of their low water content.