Farmhouse Refurbishment with GSHP

Mr & Mrs G were looking for a heating and hot water solution to cover two properties on their land. They live in an old Farmhouse with a family member living in an additional dwelling. They are planning to renovate their Farmhouse and therefore wanted to look at the heating and hot water supply for both properties before undergoing further renovations.

One property was serviced by an ageing oil boiler and the other had a boiler which no longer worked. They were interested in looking at all solutions, but were also keen to take advantage of any incentive paybacks available. They did not wish to continue with an oil solution due to the cost and instability of oil prices.

All the options available had been considered, Mr & Mrs G looked into Biomass, heat pumps and PVT. Mr & Mrs G wanted a system which did not require time and additional cost and supplies once installed. After lots of discussion, it was decided a GSHP, Solar Thermal & PV would be the best option.

Mr & Mrs G wished to use a Paddock for the ground collector pipes, however the paddock could not be out of use for very long as it was needed for grazing.

In this instance it was decided to use a trenching machine as opposed to a digger to speed up the ground collector work. The benefit of using the trenching machine meant it reduced the ground collector work from an expected 3 weeks work with a digger to 1 week. This was a less invasive process and therefore there was also less disturbance to the land, meaning it was ready to use again.

When calculating the ground collector area required to produce the amount of energy needed, Richard suggested increasing the area to enable a higher amount of collector to be laid. This ensures the collector temperatures are kept high. The expected heat pump efficiency using the standard calculated collector area would have been 400%, with the additional collectors the heat pump now works at over 470% efficiency.

R A Brown installed a NIBE F1345 40kw with a 500L Buffer vessel. Zero loss pipe was used to connect to each house as the Heat Pump and control units are housed in a remotely sited outbuilding. Due to different heat losses and systems in each of the houses a shunt system has been used to enable each dwelling’s heating to be optimised for the occupants.

Each house required hot water, therefore a 300/450 litre tank in tank hot water system was used, with each house having its own supply. Everything was brought up to modern standards to include, the cold water supply being centralised, with hard and soft water supplies and a hot water return system to avoid time delay and unnecessary water draw off.

R A Brown prides itself on being able to use their extensive technical knowledge and design expertise to offer a bespoke service to its customers. We often find customers will have initial ideas about what they require for their project, finding ideas from television programmes, research and other media. We make sure we sit down and discuss solutions and budgets which meet their needs, rather than just going with the flow on the customer initial requests.