Energy savings, do you care?

On a sunny day (Tue, 4 Aug 2020 00:38:10 -0700 (PDT)) it happened Klaus Kragelund wrote in :

Anything IOT connected in the house is a hacking danger, so no way! As to email notifcation if pump fails, if its getting cold you will notice! Not that it will be getting cold soon, 32 C prediced this week here.

My lighting LED strips are connected to the computah and the computah is connected to the internet, the Russians, sorry the Chinese, ehh the aliens, what not now control everything. Unplug your fibre before its too late!

IOT connected definitely not, just a waste of money and another point of failure.

As for more efficient, possibly, but its a very small saving. The way these things are sold in the UK (via plumbers who buy them from distributors and sell on at higher price) it's often very hard to know if you are getting a good deal or ripped off. $4 a year just isn't worth the effort.

It's worth paying attention and making the effort for something big (I bought my boiled directly myself and got a plumber to install it.), but maybe not for a pump.

I was once involved in trying to persuade a supermarket chain to replace power supplies fitted to about 20k checkout tills. (I did the measuring), they would have saved about 3W per till = approx 50k per

MK

Why bother about pump efficiency in a _heating_ system ? The pump losses will eventually be converted to heat, which is the ultimate goal of the system.

The situation is different in a cooling system, in which you have to get rid of the original heat load but also the additional heat generated by the inefficiency of the pump.

Heating by electricity is a lot more expensive than heating with district heating or other forms of energy. Also, heating if the pump is placed in a basement for example may not be needed/desirable

Cheers

Klaus

Personally, I wouldn't bother for such a small long-term saving. Besides, there's no way of telling how long either pump will last and anything could happen during those 4 years.

When my nephew wanted to buy a new car a few years ago, he was considering going for a diesel version of the same basic model to save on fuel costs. He changed his mind after I calculated that it would take about 10 years to cover the 25% difference in initial cost. That was then. Now diesel prices are almost the same as that of petrol.

I think that there is still a very weak incentive to care, if the usual source of heat is cheaper than converting electricity directly to heat (e.g. in the losses of a motor). For example if the heat came from a heat pump that is COP times cheaper per unit of heat than resistive electric heating, or from a fuel burner that runs off some cheap fuel. But I agree with your general point that if any energy is saved in running the pump, an equal additional amount of energy will have to be produced from the usual heat source, diminishing any saving.

Yes. That would matter a lot more.

pending on the system.

you could buy a more expensive one that consumes 25W for

s of maybe 4 USD per year for a 50% duty ratio)

than 4 years?

wn, you can get a email notification, so you avoid a

Yeah, that needs to be ultra secure

If you have a floor heating system, you have a delay of about 8 hours in so me systems, so when you really notice you are getting cold, when you have f ixed the problem you will have a long lag before you have pleasant temperat ures again. It could also be that you are away on vacation, lets say in the winter time, so you could come back to a sub zero freezing house

That said, the pump should not fail anyhow, so it's kind of an academic dis cussion

connected

ot

Offline might be a trend in 10 years

epending on the system.

you could buy a more expensive one that consumes 25W for the same pump per formance? (that would correlate to a electricity savings of maybe 4 USD per year for a 50% duty ratio)

than 4 years?

own, you can get a email notification, so you avoid a cold house or other n uisance)

Communicating the savings to the customer could be a difficult task

That would make good sense to do, but again maybe a difficult sell to the c lient, payback of less than 4-5 years is preferable. You need to take Net P resent Value into account. If he invested 200k, could he have profit of 20% per year? Most companies used an interest of 10%, so your case would then be more like a payback of 7-8 years

If your furnace is on 50% of the time, the first order of business it to move to a better climate. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

It's not the furnace that is on, it's the pump. Most users just set the pump at speed 2 or 3, just to be sure they will never see a problem with sufficient heat transfer to the radiators

Cheers

Klaus

My pumps are controlled by the thermostat--one pump per zone. They don't run at all for five months of the year.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Even so the pump is only running when the CH thermostat tells it to and the boiler only fires when the return water becomes too cold. I don't think the energy saving here is sufficient to be worth considering.

You should run them for a few minutes a week in summer or they tend to seize up with rusting (at least they do in the UK). I made that mistake in summer the first year now I let it run briefly on a daily basis.

Yes, that is a typical US design. If you add up the power to those pumps you are probably way over 30W

In the EU, we use a central pump, and valves to turn regulate each zone. Typical power for the entire system is less than 30W

Cheers

Klaus

The newer designs regulate the boiler power, since the design you mention above is not as efficient and exerts more stress on the components

Never had an issue with that. Is it the pump or the armature that causes problems?

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

$4 is equivalent to zero. Doesn't matter.

What I want in appliances is reliability and simplicity. Energy use is secondary.

I have telemetry from our cabin, independent of the simple heating system, in case it gets freezing inside. If it does, I'll call someone to go there and fix it. They won't need a CS degree to do that.

Imagine the long-term maintenence nightmares of highly-automated web-connected appliances coded by the usual gang of idiots.

We are getting a new dishwasher this week, mostly because the existing one is flimsy and buggy and complex. The touch panel is a physical and logical nightmare. It's a high-end name brand that is now the same Chinese junk built in (and coded in) the same factory as a lot of other renamed junk.

Diesel is more than premium gas here.

Neither you nor P. need to worry about it much, but diesels are also much harder to start in cold weather.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

The pump itself. It is easily fixed by opening the end up and using a big screwdriver to overcome the the sticktion but it is easier not to allow it to happen in the first place. My CH pump is conveniently located in the loft along with the master phone socket (thanks BT).

The pump naturally tends to stop at the worst friction point and it doesn't take much to make it bind. A bit like unused car brakes.