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Sounds like an ideal candidate for an ASHP, or ground source if you have the cash. Find a friendly MCS registered plumber to hang an old boiler on your wall and claim the boiler upgrade scheme grant too.
We don’t have a bit of roof with the right aspect so I’ve not looked into it much, but solar would be an ideal addition. Handily it can also be added later if / when prices come down. You could be off grid running the HP from a battery bank.
If you have to replace the cylinder (almost certainly, with an unvented type) I think there’s specific ones made for multiple heat sources, but that may be just direct solar hot water, like pipes on the roof type thing.
Ideally you’d have wet underfloor heating with a HP but big rads work fine too.
If you want to get into it Heat Geeks videos and website have loads of info as well as a directory of installers. We went off-the-shelf cheapest installer, as I’m really on top of things I think it’ll be fine but they’re defo working to a bottom line rather than super-efficiency, which is really the game with HPs. In retrospect I’d go with a Heat Geek expert person, but only found out about it after we’d got going.
A HP will do heating and hot water on its own no problem. Solar is a nice but expensive addition to go off grid.
Also worth looking into Octopus or British Gas ASHP installs, they’ll be the cheapest, but are very off-the-shelf and generally geared towards a direct swap for an existing gas boiler.
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dbr
Mucker
Awesome. Actually, I asked the wrong question I think but would really appreciate your opinion anyway.
We're (probably) buying a rural house. It is five miles from the gas grid so gas is a no go. It is currently reasonably well insulated (with lots of room for improvement) but with a little time and money spent should end up being well wrapped up.
Currently it is electric only throughout. I.e hot water cylinder and storage heaters.
If you have a rural home with no gas, does ASHP make sense for hot water and heating? Or should we be considering adding solar too?
We want to do this properly from the start which means doing disruptive stuff before we move our stuff in.