Off Grid House

System:

• Rehau PeX Underfloor pipe system in 10 loops – Exposed aggregate polished concrete floor.
• Hunter Herald 80B log burner providing in excess of 16kWh to the water jacket.
• NZ made Homewood Heritage ‘dry’ kitchen range.
• Superheat 180L Buffer tank & 300L hot water cylinder, buffer gravity fed from the Log Burner.
• Apricus 30 Tube Solar collector feeding the Hot Water cylinder directly.
• Controlled via 2x Buffer Tank Thermostats powering low energy pumps.
• Fed from a 60L Copper Header tank with a Copper over tank vent.
• 2x custom Spiroloc 2 Piece Flues – Height and Cowl matched.

Operation:

• Underfloor from a solid fuel source is not easy to live with as underfloor systems like a constant heat-source rather than a variable output source such as the Hunter. It means that the log burner needs to run pretty much all day.
• As the buffer tank heats up the pump feeding to the floor kicks in and heat is ‘dumped’ into the floor, as the buffer tank continues to heat past 60°C the pump feeding the cylinder also kicks in.
• Apricus Solar Collector provides 85% of all Domestic hot water requirements annually. Typical mid winter collection provides approx. 40°C+ this is topped up by the Heating system.
• Total electrical budget for the system is <90W with everything running. Considering this is all total electrical draw for all Heating, Domestic Hot Water and Cooking we are unlikely to drain the 32kWh PV Battery system.

Note:

• The system can never really overheat as we have put in place more thermal load than energy produced, in the event of an electrical failure every pipe above the fire is in Copper.