Apricus Electric boosting requirements in Winter? « Alternative Technology Assn Forums

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Apricus Electric boosting requirements in Winter?

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Started 8 years ago by bundy
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Michael Eagleton
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I would be interested to hear what the OP has found with their trials.

Our home recently finished construction and we have had a SHW system installed alongside a hydronic heating system. We live in Melbourne as opposed to Perth and the coldness of winter is already starting to set in some evenings/mornings (and its only the start of Autumn!) but I don't fancy boosting my system all the time if I don't need to. I was planning to do some trial and error myself until I came across this post, so there's a few things that I am interested in trying out now.

Posted Monday 31 Mar 2014 @ 3:20:08 am from IP #
bundy
Member

Hi,

Last winter I tried a couple of options. Firstly boosting for about 2 hours from about 3pm. Worked OK but if there was a heavy HW load we would start to notice it next morning. Ended up increasing to about 2.5 hours boost time to cover such events and be safe.

Mid Winter I changed my boost time setup slightly in setting booster earlier in the day. This isn't ideal in that we dont get full solar gain in the tank, but I do have Solar PV and found I was not using what I generated from PV at peak times, so was just sending back to the Grid getting 8cents per kWh then buying it back a few hours later at 26c per kWh. So for me in my case it made financial sense to use up my PV excess.

So for convenience I had booster set to come on each day. There were odd days we wouldn't have to boost as much but in reality I would say over winter we boosted 90% of the time for about 2.5 hours per day for a fmaily of 4. (With 2 young kids having a bath also)

Hope that helps

Posted Wednesday 2 Apr 2014 @ 2:04:04 am from IP #

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