By way of introduction to our new heating project, thought I’d give a bit of a run through of our house setup and current heating, or lack thereof. We are in a rural location on top of a hill, our house was built in 1914 and is mostly solid brick construction with no cavity to insulate. It’s had a loft conversion fairly recently, so the roof is very well insulated. Most of the ground floor floors are uninsulated and most windows are recent timber double or triple glazing. A recent single storey kitchen extension is very well insulated. We have been heating our house with a solid fuel Aga, an open fire and selected rooms/times with electric panel radiators.
We have had no working central heating system for over 5 years as the previous system died and was way beyond repair. The pipework/radiators/water cylinder from the previous system are all still present. All of which we presumed to be in serviceable condition as there were no leaks and had been working ok. A note on pipework here – which I may touch on again later – heat pump systems ideally like to pump a lot of lower temperature water through the system, so the bigger the better! By that I mean, in an ideal world there should be 22mm pipes (**Walls Sausage size) as the main backbone of the system, with 15mm (**Chipolata) to each individual radiator, and ideally copper piping. Many newer houses have had microbore piping installed (**Pepperami) this can be a problem for easy installations, I believe larger microbore has been accepted in some installations, smaller diameter needs replacement to be suitable for a heat pump. I would suggest contacting Octopus for their current guidelines.
**Well known sausages used for scale, other brands are available
