This new build house has been constructed to a Passivhaus standard of energy efficiency. The space heating and a proportion of its hot water requirements are supplied by a ground source heat pump (GSHP) located in a small plant room inside the house.
We installed a 6kW NIBE F1155 heat pump with a 300 litre unvented DHW storage cylinder. The ground collector consists of three x 150m ground loops supplying a 3-way external manifold with header pipes connecting to the plant room. Heat is distributed by underfloor heating throughout the ground floor, with towel rails in the first floor bathrooms.
A 5.94 kWp PV array is spread across a south facing roof and the upper roof linked to the grid by a SolarEdge HD Wave inverter with mitigates the impact of partial shading. This helps to offset the electricity consumed by the heat pump, both by generating power at times when the heat pump is operating and financially through Feed-in-Tariff payments.
During late spring, summer and early autumn the majority of the hot water requirement will be met by an Immersun PV switch which diverts surplus PV to twin immersion elements in the hot water cylinder, firstly to the top of the cylinder, and subsequently to the lower part of the cylinder.
