With the recent heatwave, along with a lot of people I’ve been looking at various options for cooling. Heatpump will be installed in about 2 months time, and it’s connected to UFH, so I know I’ll be able to use that to mitigate somewhat downstairs temperature if I’m careful in respect of dew points.
what I was reading about was the use a ducted fancoil(s) in our loft space so that there is only a couple of grills in the various bedroom ceilings, and the heat pump providing cooling that way?
has anyone done anything similar? I did see that vaillant offer such products (arovair I think), but only seem to provide links on international websites not uk?
What about the cheapest high capacity aircon unit on the upstairs landing, along with a duct from the far corner of each bedroom with a inline fan to take the air to above the aircon unit?
Efficiency and the best possible comfort is hard to justify for 3 weeks use a year, but such a basic system would give a lot of cooling and lower the indoor dew point. The cooled UFH will radically reduce the heatgain of downstairs rooms.
We have a Vaillant GSHP, which I have enquired to see what it would take to run cool into UFH. I would then want to add cieling ducts to bedrooms as we don’t have any outside wall options for installations.
This is certainly an issue I have been considering. I never felt an ASHP was going to be suitable for me for cooling as I have just radiators and even without originally knowing about the dew point issue I could not see it working.
I am currently leaning towards having a separate multi-split AC system for cooling. However an option that might work for you is an Air-to-Air HP rather than the more common air-to-water HP. Then you can use (air) ducting in the ceilings with ceiling vents.
An apparently unique product you might also want to look at is the following Samsung unit.
Their TDM Plus combines an air-to-water for heating and an air-to-air for cooling in the same outdoor unit.
I currently cool via the floor (UFH) we are have pipes 100mm down in concrete and less than ideal 300mm centres. We are NE Scotland so actually outside temperature is nowhere near what you get down south. But we get loads of solar gain so floor cooling does an excellent job of keeping things comfortable. Biggest advantage is overheat recovery time, and comfort rather than ultimate air temp. I am about to add a fan coil to MVHR. Not really for cooling as they are pants for that but more summer dew point control. Will flow with 14 Deg water and that should knock some water out the air that wouldn’t be done otherwise, hopefully giving a better margin to dew point while cooling.
The following seems to be an average price for the external unit.
For the benefit of everyone, one might feel it should be possible to take the heat extracted via the cooling (air) half to boost heat via the heating (water) half - after all an ordinary ASHP works by taking heat from air and transferring it via water to warm the house. However clearly you would not have room heating and room cooling going at the same time.
What is perhaps less obvious and I believe this unit does not do but should is to take the heat extracted via the cooling half to boost the heat supplied to a hot water tank. You would after all want hot water even on a hot day. Samsung if you are reading this please advise on why this is not done as it would logically boost efficiency.