Customer Alan Roberts’ Experience

Posted: August 3, 2017 I thought I would let you know how our Sanden Heat Pump HWS is going now that we have a full month of electricity use to look at. Our energy provider allows us to monitor various aspects of our energy use. We replaced our 250 litre electric storage HWS (4800 watt element) with the Sanden HWS on June 13, 2017. Our old electric storage HWS ran on night rate, but the Sanden is set to run as required, with no block out. We have a 1.5Kw PV array on the roof and we get 66.6 cents/KwH feed in tariff. The Sanden HWS generally runs for 3-4 hours each day from about 9am, and the run time depends on the hot water use for the day (eg showers, washing, etc). We live about 15km north of Bendigo in central Victoria. Our winter this year has been quite bitter with cold days and many frosts down to -40C, which is not ideal for a heat pump HWS system. Having said that we are really happy with the operation of the unit despite the conditions – it is incredibly quiet, extremely efficient, unobtrusive, and has made a huge difference to our energy use and costs. I have observed the freeze protection system working a couple of times, however it clearly works effectively when required. I can also see when it worked on our daily energy use web page. It will be interesting to see what happens as the weather warms up and the Sanden HWS operates even more efficiently. I’ve attached some screenshots of the energy use that is recorded by our energy provider. I am able to monitor our energy use on a daily, monthly, and yearly basis. At the moment I can’t monitor our solar output, however we should be able to do that soon when our energy provider updates their system, so the screenshots below don’t include our energy production by our PV array. The screenshots are: 1. Sanden July 2017 daily comparison – compares out total daily energy use for July 2017 to July 2016 on a daily basis. The daily difference is energy use is quite obvious. 2. Sanden July 2017 total energy use – shows our total energy use for the month of July 2017 and compares it to July 2016. The total used in July 2017 is 327.04Kw, and the total used in July 2016 was 758.94Kw. This is a saving of 431.9Kw of electricity on our energy use in July 2016. 3. Sanden June 14 energy comparison – this shows the immediate impact of the Sanden HWS that day after it was installed.