A riverside house in Bray This beautiful - and enormous - 100 year old house on the banks of the Thames was the subject of a total restoration, limited only by the need to preserve its Listed status (which, amongst other things, meant that leaded single-glazing had to be retained). Though the Ground Floor and bathrooms all had newly-installed Under Floor Heating, the upper floors are heated by conventional radiators. The combination of those 3 elements - single glazing, Listed building and conventional radiators - meant that we couldn't guarantee that the Heat Pumps on their own would be able to maintain a decent internal temperature when the outside temperature dropped to significantly below ZeroC - we specified a gas boiler to assist the pumps on the coldest days as part of the installation.
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Riverside house: the Greentec System
2 x 40kW Heat Pumps are powered by open-loop boreholes - 2 x 8-metre deep holes, 5 metres apart, 2 metres from the riverbank. Water is pumped from the upstream hole at a rate of 5 litres per second; processing by the Heat Pumps drops its temperature from 8-9C down to the 4-5C that we put back into the downstream hole.
A Heat Recovery Ventilation system extracts air from the wet areas of the home (bathrooms and WCs) and (in winter) warms the incoming air piped to the living areas.
When the outside temperature rises, Comfort Cooling drops the incoming air being fed to the bedrooms to around a comfortable 19C - for the astonishing cost of something like 2p per hour!
Because we needed to extract more than 20,000 litres daily (even though we put back all that we take out), we had to obtain permission from the Environment Agency, which took more than a year; it included visiting every property within 100 metres of the home's boundaries. One bonus for the homeowners is that they are now proofed against hosepipe bans; they can use their borehole water to irrigate the garden, so they'll never have to watch their beautiful gardens wither and die.