It was a freezing Friday evening early in February 2023, when my boiler broke. An engineer was called, several cold days passed, and his declaration came in sombre tones: ‘uneconomic to repair’. Li…

  • wewbull@feddit.uk
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    9 months ago

    I saw that about at week ago. Seems to be getting pushed in the algorithm.

    The TL; DW for people:

    • The installer didn’t place the heat pump on a solid level base. This resulted in the unit not being level, which caused bearings to wear at a highly accelerated rate. Killed the unit in a couple of years.

    • Hugely over-complicated plumbing install which introduced unnecessary heat exchanging between water loops and mixing of heated & return water. All introduced losses. The unnecessary components in the system just added expense.

    • Due to the unnecessary losses, the heat pump had to run at a higher temperature for the system to work. Hence the heat pump was a much more expensive unit than really needed. (Dual stage with two refrigerants rather than single stage).

    • The water tank used was unsuitable for a heat pump fed system, having too short a heat exchanger for the water temperature being fed to it.

    • The system was set to a fixed temperature with no weather compensation curve. The system was always working as if it was a really cold day, killing its efficiency and putting it under more load than necessary.

    The fix would be to simplify the system and reinstall the unit on a proper base, replacing it with a smaller cheaper one. Basically the guy was completely mis-sold by a dodgy company.