This is our beautiful, new, super-smart hot water tank. It’s from an innovative British firm called Mixergy and it’s the last step in our renewables and energy efficiency journey. It does some clever stuff…
Unlike a regular cylinder (which heats the entire tank) this heats the water from the top, forming a layer of hot water that floats on top of the cold. You can therefore choose to heat as much water as you need rather than the whole tank every time. The water as the top can be 55C whilst at the bottom it’s 14C! That alone can save loads on heating costs.
You can set a schedule for heating or let their AI machine learning model see how you use hot water and it’ll then heat the water inline your actual usage. Again, very efficient.
The water can be heated using a mixture of your gas boiler, electricity or even a heat pump. Ours has a solar diverter that will take excess power from the solar panels and use that to heat the water.
If you are on an advanced variable tariff for your gas and electricity, you tell the tank which tariff you’re using, it’ll automatically download the prices (for the next day) and then use the cheapest time and mode (gas or electric) to heat your water. (As I said, super-smart!)
It’s managed with an app or web portal and, as a bit of a party piece, you can control it using your voice via Siri and Google Assistant.
We’d previously struggled with pressure for our hot water (as it was driven by tanks in the lift), this tank is unvented which means that mains pressure is used now so our showers are rather like being jet washed!… I might need to turn then down a bit. No tanks in the loft also means no chance of leaks or overflows, that we’d had before.
It’s very early days but we should be free from using gas to heat our water for a good chunk of the year.