So youre happy with the ZEB? I have looked at the Tepeo from their release, they still feel my house is too big, too many rads. Looking at my gas consumption and monitoring when I run my heatpump would suggest theyre wrong but its almost impossible to reason this out with Tepeo so Im sticking with Gas + Heatpump at the minute.
It's early days yet with the ZEB, and I'm still learning how to use it to it's best abilities. I'm using it with a Drayton Wiser Hub, which controls the ZEB very effectively. The radiators selected, get hot very quickly and then the ZEB reduces its output accordingly depending on how many radiators are on and what temperatures they are set to.
My old Potterton gas boiler used to fire up and stay fired up until the Hub switched it off, regardless of the different number of radiators and their settings.
I've got some experimental routines set up in Alexa, which are varying the on and off times of individual radiators to get maximum efficiency and I'll report back on those.
There are a couple of things I personally would have done differently if I were designing it, the main one being it charges at 9kW, and 9kW only; which means I cannot top it up during the day from my battery, as the inverter only outputs 4.5kW. Fortunately, Tomato do the 13p/kWh between 09:30 and 11:30, so I can use some of the battery and some "semi" off peak. This has only been an issue during the couple of cold nights where the temperature went below zero and I had the heating on low through the night.
Which brings me on to the second issue. If you have the heating on through the night, whilst the ZEB is charging, it does not reach 100% capacity by 06:00 in the morning, which means you start the day with less than you expected and instead of range anxiety, you get heat anxiety, am I going to have enough to get through the day.
I'm working on an Alexa routin to just keep the bedrooms at night at a comfortable temperature with the radiators turnd off at regular intervals to allow the ZEB to charge up. Again, I'll report back when I have some data.
On the whole though, very pleased with the ZEB, it's a great improvement on my gas boiler. Also, Tepeo have a solar diverter in beta testing which is doing well apparently, and I've put my name down for one of those. Hopefully, they'll listen to a bit of feedback about charging from a battery as well.
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octopus.energy
