Towards net zero

  By Pat Hackett. One of my goals is to make suggestions on how individuals can reduce energy consumption so that  collectively we need less power stations in the future to meet demand making the task of replacing them with renewables less of a challenge. Furthermore to do this without a loss in individual wellbeing. I recently set out to see if we could continue to reduce our energy consumption for home heating on the realisation that this is one of the most effective way individuals can reduce our impact on the climate without waiting for Energy companies or the government to take adequate action on climate change. Many of the low cost, high impact ways that could be replicated throughout the country are of course well known. However I also found ways involving zero cost! that had huge impact for those who have heat pumps installed. I could not find any previously written descriptions of these ways. The engineers who designed the hardware and software must clearly have full ...

We had achieved the best of many worlds:-Heating our home with a simple control system that required less consumption of energy and had no compromise  on comfort or wellbeing but rather an even improved level of both. After being very satisfied with the installation I set out to find further ways to reduce the radiator flow temperature as one important way to improve the overall efficiency of the heat pump, while still achieving the desired room temperature. I found that this could be achieved to a much better degree than I had thought using standard radiators and taking full advantage of a weather compensated system control. This resulted in having radiators working at low temperatures that were more comparable to that of underfloor heating with high efficiency, stable temperatures and even freeing up floor space in our living room! (Link to follow)  So overall we reduced our energy consumption because 2/3 to 3/4 of our heat is created by the system thus reducing our carbon f...