So a quick poll. Our upstairs electric shower has died (it is one of two in the house). We need to refurbish the bathroom (it’s just failing on many points no vanity project eco-disaster here). We currently have a bath tub but very very rarely use it. However with the solar panels we do have plenty hot water. What would you do?
Comment welcomed.
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@ai6yr Although water is plentiful here (to date anyway) heating water is one of our biggest energy uses. To run a bath is still a bigger use of energy than running a shower.
@Janet_52square @ai6yr with the ASHP its the other way round here. As it might be if you heated the water with gas
@Janet_52square no double glazing? @ai6yr
@Janet_52square @ai6yr I grew up in a bedroom with single glazed metal windows on 2 walls and no cavity insulation back then. It was so cold 🥶
@Florapis @Janet_52square @ai6yr Snap apart from one very large window instead of two. It was a new build we moved into in the late 60s.
Even with gas central heating we would get thick layers of frost on the inside of the windows on "cold" winter nights. I remember being fascinated by the patterns the ice made.
At some point in the 70s my parents got the cavity insulated. Which made a big difference. Then they fitted DIY double glazing which helped as well.
@the_wub @Janet_52square @ai6yr I think the first house I lived in in Wales was worse, badly fitting sash windows. May as well have just left the windows open
@Janet_52square Ah interesting. We switched from gas to a heat pump water heater a few years ago, has been a huge energy savings (even with electric vs. gas). Natural gas prices have been going up significantly, and although electric prices too, we have solar panels on the roof which mitigate that significantly.
@ai6yr cold is our enemy. The water enters the house at 3-5C in winter to maybe 10C on a sunny day. So it’s a long way off hand-hot. Our house is made of solid whinstone walls so insulation to a standard where an air source heat pump is viable isn’t easy. My sister has one in a relatively new-build home and hers is brilliant. We have a wood pellet boiler which runs a water-based heating system and we use electricity boosted by our solar for the hot water. In an ideal world these systems would all work well together but the reality is that for most of the year our house is pretty cold. Our thermostat is set to 16C or about 60f and the wood pellets are getting more and more expensive, through Brexit and environmental pressures. They were an economical (waste wood product) and environmentally recommended (supposedly carbon neutral though I think that’s not true) option when we installed the boiler and we’re tied into a government scheme for 10 years from purchase, which will mean we could change it fairly soon but we rather resent chucking out a huge investment (and weight of metal) until we need to. So we are managing along until it breaks!
@Janet_52square I would ditch the bath, but I live in Southern California and saving water is something we do... baths use so much water compared to showers, so we never use ours.