I;m living in Ireland, fridge man by trade, have both A2A and A2W in the house, running on rads. Solar PV on e/w orientation. Been lurking here for a while, interesting to see the difference in acceptance of A2W between here and the UK, all new builds here have them since a good few years ago. I've worked on A2W and ground source for many years, stick mainly to AC now. 

@alincork, welcome to the forums. It’s great to have someone with your background join us, especially someone who’s worked on both air-to-water and ground source systems. 

Looking forward to your contributions.

Hi Guys

I'm new to the forum but have been using a lot of the content from the RHH over the past 12 months or so as a way to try and limit the mistakes in picking and installing a system. I wont go into all that on an intro page, but I could not believe the difficulty in trying to do things right, and even then the pitfalls which awaited me. I naïvely thought - get three quotes and go with the cheapest - wow, was I in for a shock 🤣 Probably got 7 or 8 quotes in the end and now know more about the process than most of the people who came to quote 😳 I still can't believe companies are so poor at what they are supposed to be professional at, and as soon as I started asking questions, and then questioning their replies, half of them went into scrip mode and answered questions I had not asked, and the other half were like rabbits in the headlights.

Anyway, this is what I went for in the end:

2000sqft 70s bungalow, just getting the underfloor and loft insulation sorted now that the system is pretty much in and up and running, although there are still a couple of small bits which need resolving from the install. I asked all companies to do the heat loss report based on my insulation being right as I was going to do it after the project, so wanted it included in the calculations which were incidentally - ranging from just over 8kw to just over 12kw! 🙄 

Heat loss used was Approx. 8.5kw and located in central Scotland not far from the coast. Using a Vaillant 10kw Aerotherm, with standard controls and a 250L slimline Vaillant cylinder. Got 19 radiators linked up to it, mostly new styles, but kept some older ones to reduce the costs, and got new underfloor pipework where required according to the installer.

At the same time I got a large solar system installed, its 34 x 475w Aiko Neostar 475w panels @ 16.1kw, a Sigenstore system with a 12kw inverter and gateway which also has DNO approval for the same, 27kwh of battery storage and a Sigen 7kw EV charger.

I've just started playing with tariffs and asked Googles AI for help on this also - which I'm not convinced is right, but the conversations did give me thinking material, so worth looking at, but I ended up not doing what it suggested anyway. I went for Octopus Agile for both import and export and have left the Sigen AI to manage the process. Again, I'm not sure if this is the right thing to do but you have to start somewhere, so until I have it running a while it will be hard to tell how good it is, and TBH, my initial thoughts were just go for an EV overnight tariff and rely on solar and the batteries during the day (octopus intelligent go is not supported by the Sigen 7kw EV charger BTW), so we will see?? Got my gas disconnected also 😉 

James