Air-to-Air heat pumps in Ireland

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lff12

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Trying to find info about air to air heat pumps here, but very little information available almost 100% of the SEAI site and related discussions relate to "wet" systems moving from traditional gas or oil boilers connected to an immersion tank and radiators. There's literally nothing about the Irish experience of moving from electric storage or panel heaters (or nothing at all) to air to air heat pumps.
The little I have managed to figure out is that these largely resemble multi split air conditioners with a similar feature set and prerequisites - so you have an outdoor unit and ducts to indoor wall units. From what I can see mostly these don't do hot water, although I see Daikin advertises a version of their multi split that allows you to have either 5 indoor units per outdoor system or 3 plus a heated water tank, which sounds very appealing.

Is anybody au fair with this or have any info on case studies - I'm guessing apartments with electric heating would have been a huge potential market, but can see almost zero on the SEAI website which seems skewed almost entirely towards homes?

The reason I ask is because my house was built without a "wet" system - I have electric storage heaters downstairs and panel and convector heaters upstairs with an electric immersion. It seems almost impossible to get a rough idea of the cost of replacing such a system, though I suspect it is probably a good bit cheaper than retrofitting in underfloor given the nature of the building. I've solid wood flooring upstairs which would add to the complexity to top it off!

Any hints or experience?
 
lff12 said:
Is anybody au fair with this or have any info on case studies - I'm guessing apartments with electric heating would have been a huge potential market,
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I'd reckon the challenge preventing that gaining popularity is that apartment owners would not be permitted to put in the required duct work.
 
Leo said:
I'd reckon the challenge preventing that gaining popularity is that apartment owners would not be permitted to put in the required duct work.
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That's a fair point, but I would imagine this would be a negotiable with the OMC, given that there are other reasons why you may need to open up a wall?
 
lff12 said:
That's a fair point, but I would imagine this would be a negotiable with the OMC, given that there are other reasons why you may need to open up a wall?
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No direct experience but from threads on here and talking to a few friends in apartments, OMCs are reticent to allow even minor works, let alone allow multiple internal and external holes required for the duct work and that's before you consider placing the outdoor unit that might require planning in an apartment setting.
 
Just to reiterate this is a sort of a terraced (actually a back to back, well 4 houses together on each quarter) and not an apartment. There is up to 6.5m from the furthest point away from the boundary with each neighbour, so drilling holes etc not a problem.
 
lff12 said:
Just to reiterate this is a sort of a terraced (actually a back to back, well 4 houses together on each quarter) and not an apartment.
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I was responding to your comments on why they were not a more popular retrofit in apartments and not your particular situation. However, with 4 houses on a block each face of the building will be the front or side, and so planning restrictions will be a factor.
 
lff12 said:
Just to reiterate this is a sort of a terraced (actually a back to back, well 4 houses together on each quarter) and not an apartment. There is up to 6.5m from the furthest point away from the boundary with each neighbour, so drilling holes etc not a problem.
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I know somebody who is having mini-splits installed in a couple of the larger areas of their house as a way of easing into an air-to-air setup, would that be an option for you? Get one just for the kitchen or living room and turn off the existing radiators in there.
 
Zenith63 said:
I know somebody who is having mini-splits installed in a couple of the larger areas of their house as a way of easing into an air-to-air setup, would that be an option for you? Get one just for the kitchen or living room and turn off the existing radiators in there.
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Yes! Someone kindly suggested this to me last year, but it was a bit expensive to start up. All the existing radiators downstairs are old electric storage heaters and all are broken, so there is power sources if it is possible to duct through to near their wiring. The quote I got was 2.5k for just the large living room, the duct work of course could be re-utilised if its in an optimal position for airflow. Unfortunately the company who gave me the quote no longer seem to be trading.
 
Leo said:
I was responding to your comments on why they were not a more popular retrofit in apartments and not your particular situation. However, with 4 houses on a block each face of the building will be the front or side, and so planning restrictions will be a factor.
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The sides on my side lead into a walled off patio, so actually shouldn't really be an issue, but you are correct about limits on positioning for outdoor units.
 
Yeah, in a domestic setting, so long as total area taken up is no more than 2.5sqm, then it falls under exempted development.
 
You just need to run power to the outdoor compressor. It feeds power to the indoor cassettes. The other thing you'll need is a condensate drain for each cassette - this can be a pumped unit if there isn't a nearby drain available which allows for indirect drainage but you'll hear that noise from time to time. Not sure how the pump is powered though (from where). The EV Puzzle link is a great one, another is the guy below:
youtu.be

Air-to-air vs. air-to-water heat pumps - why we chose A2A

If you're thinking of replacing your gas central heating with a heat pump system then you probably already know about air-to-water heat pumps but may not hav...
youtu.be youtu.be
Hot Water is the only issue but you can get a monobloc unit that vents directly outside - Daiken do a cylinder and A2W all in one or you can go separate but you need a compatible cylinder with a large transfer coil inside. It feeds directly to outside with two ducts (intake, exhaust) so no outside compressor unit.
So, you can either tee off the A2A system fot hot water (note it does one OR the other at a time) or split the two functions out. More maintenance but if you have problems, only 1 is affected. The big plus is A2A does great cooling in the summer too!
You should like an ideal candidate for A2A, you're thinking right. SEAI and Governments don't encourage A2A as they see us heading the US route and half the countries energy generation used for aircon during the summer......
 
AJAM said:
This guy in the UK, recently switched his heating over to an air to air system.
He has a few videos about it.
Long story short, he is very happy with it.
www.youtube.com

Toshiba Air to Air Heat pump (A2A) - Probably one of the best heating systems you can install

And it cools! These are air conditioning units but they heat brilliantly. Quiet, gentle, heating your home with incredible efficiency without radiators. No ...
www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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I did a retrofit of an air-to-water Viessmann in our house recently. To the point made in this video, the cost of the heatpump is only the beginning of the cost doing a project like this, maybe less than half the cost in my case. So if an air-to-air setup suits your house (a few large open plan areas) it’s well worth considering. The ability to cool the house might come in useful if we’re to have more hot days/nights too.
 
Currently looking at energy upgrades for my own house (standard 1970's 4 bed semi) and had a firm in doing an initial assessement via Airtricity as we didn't have a clue where to start. Advice they gave me was that there was absolutely no point in installing a heat pump until you have resolved any and all insulation issues in the house. In our case, that is likely to be the external wrap around as the ceiling/attic is fine as well as some other small things.
 
Zenith63 said:
I did a retrofit of an air-to-water Viessmann in our house recently. To the point made in this video, the cost of the heatpump is only the beginning of the cost doing a project like this, maybe less than half the cost in my case. So if an air-to-air setup suits your house (a few large open plan areas) it’s well worth considering. The ability to cool the house might come in useful if we’re to have more hot days/nights too.
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Zenith, I'm looking to do the same (retrofit of an air-to-water Heatpump). Can I ask how much it cost you? And who did you use to do the install?
I like the Viessmann but I don't see many people who install them.
 
AJAM said:
Zenith, I'm looking to do the same (retrofit of an air-to-water Heatpump). Can I ask how much it cost you? And who did you use to do the install?
I like the Viessmann but I don't see many people who install them.
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Precision Heating (precisionheating.ie) are the distributors for them in Ireland, they were very good any interactions I had with them and will have no problem recommending some installers in your area if you give a shout. One issue you might encounter is that a number of installers have stopped doing SEAI heatpump grant installs because of the complexity of the paper work and the SEAI auditors rejecting grants because the house does not meet the spec (radiators too small in certain rooms, that kind of thing), which create a serious headache with the homeowner who is expecting to get a large chunk of money back from SEAI but is unable to do so without spending more. I'm generally fairly skeptical when I hear stuff like this from tradespeople, there's often other factors at play (like not wanting to pay tax but being forced to if a grant is involved, disinterest in doing things properly, unfamiliarity with sitting down in front of a laptop and crunching the numbers on heat loss per room or whatever), however in the case of the heatpump grant it does sound like there may be a legitimate issue there.

FWIW my understanding is that Viessmann are at the top end of the heatpump market, you can definitely find cheaper, but they're supposed to be very reliable. I've only had mine a few months but so far so good and it seems to be very well built etc.
 
Zenith63 said:
I did a retrofit of an air-to-water Viessmann in our house recently. To the point made in this video, the cost of the heatpump is only the beginning of the cost doing a project like this, maybe less than half the cost in my case. So if an air-to-air setup suits your house (a few large open plan areas) it’s well worth considering. The ability to cool the house might come in useful if we’re to have more hot days/nights too.
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An air to water solution would mean having to install all the pipework and radiators from scratch so probably a lot of ripping up floors, maybe walls, not to mention system design as it would effectively be designing and installing an entirely new "wet" system. House could also do with more ventilation than it currently has in dry rooms & there's no mechanical ventilation in kitchen/bathroom where it should be. It seems like a good "fit".
Thanks for your video though - will definitely have a look at it later. Attic insulation is already done and made a huge difference despite not having a proper working fixed heating system. Also replaced a broken open gas fire running off an outside cylinder with a wood burning stove. The next steps are wall insulation and windows/doors.
 
Trying to research this too. Cant see anything yet which states clearly why air to air would be better or worse than air to water.

Air to air has benefit of use in summer- it's possible that public policy doesn't want summer energy demand when efficiency is priority.

Air to air apparently works well in our climate.

For my own situation, we have solar, so summer usage would be on days we have our own generation.
 
presidenttttt said:
Trying to research this too. Cant see anything yet which states clearly why air to air would be better or worse than air to water.

Air to air has benefit of use in summer- it's possible that public policy doesn't want summer energy demand when efficiency is priority.

Air to air apparently works well in our climate.

For my own situation, we have solar, so summer usage would be on days we have our own generation.
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I was thinking that. Have other stuff to do first, and the multi fuel stove actually compensates quite a lot because of the design of the interior. It's going to be a while before I can afford it as have some other works to do first
 
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