Immersun with electric boiler

[Energetic]

I've heard rumours of people using the Wooldridge controllers with an electric boiler. In my time contracting i have never installed or even seen an electric boiler for a domestic property but i am assured such things do exist and as it's a resistive load can be wired through the controllers.

Anyone looked into doing this? Wondering if such a setup might be a suitable replacement for an oil or LPG combi as no tank is required?

 

[yellowvanman]

The Electric Heating Company

Bit bigger (electrically) than the controller can handle directly - the electronics associated with it would need to be on a seperate supply (I guess).

 

[BruceB]

I had a PV & ST customer last year who wanted to install an electric boiler in a new house. But he was on the end of a long piece of thin electric string in the country and Western Power would not let him. He went for LPG eventually.

 

[Worcester]

If you watched the BBC programe on the badly installed and badly specified Exhaust Air Heat Recovery Heating systems from NIBE (Rip Off Britain) these are really just air / water heat pumps with back up in line immersions, and the immersions were running nearly all the time ...

in fact all (nearly) heat pumps have an in-line immersion heater to boost the output, so I can see no no reason why you couldn't retrofit an in-line immersion on the cold feed to a normal boiler, of course you'd neet to sort the appropriate safety measures out...

Or ... go via a thermal store, which could be heated by an immersion.

Long chat with Gledhill about thernmal stores the other day, seems like it was never really envisaged they'd have to cope with renewables !!! - the idea was just to smooth out the boiler running so it didn't switch on and off all the time !

We're going down that route as we add in more and more renewable power sources .. Solar PV, Solar Thermal, Heat Pump and Wood burner.. gotta store / grab the heat when it's available to use when we want it Mind you we may end up talking of a series of interlinked thermal stores in excess of 2000 liters, (wont fit in the understairs cupboard)