We seem to be on a bit of a roll with the ground source heat pump. Last week we finally sorted out the leak in the ground loops that had been plaguing us for the last 6 months. Today our application for the Renewable Heat Incentive got approved. We applied for it at the end of July and it looks as if our first payment will be at the end of October. The incentive is paid on a quarterly basis, so this means that the approval today means that our first payment is exactly 3 months from when we first applied.
The current tariff is 18.8p for every kWh generated. According to our EPC, it has been estimated that we will be generating 35,405kWh per year. A quick bit of mathematics will show that this generates a payment of around £1,660 per quarter. These payments are for 7 years and by the time we reach the end of this period, it should have re-couped the capital that we invested in the ground source heat pump.
We have installed our own electricity monitor (Owl Intuition) so we know exactly how much electricity that we are using. While we are going to have to wait to see how the heat pump, and the house, performs over the winter, current indications are that we are using between 150kWh per week in the summer to around 1,000kWh in the winter (this includes all of our heating, hot water, lighting and cooking). We will have to see how it all pans out…..