BOILERS, PUMPS & VALVES


MICROWAVE BOILERS: HEATING WITH


ZERO-EMISSIONS


With gas boilers due to be banned in new homes from 2025, Heat Wayv has developed a microwave boiler which provides home heating solutions with similar installation


and running costs to existing gas boilers. Here, the company examines the cost implications of other technologies and explains how its new boiler works


T


o help cut CO2 emissions, gas boilers are due to be banned in new homes from 2025, with


heat pumps proposed as a low-carbon alternative. However, according to UK energy technology company Heat Wayv’s Home Heating Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) analysis, the installation and use of heat pumps would cause a 400% increase in home heating costs for the average consumer.


The promised reductions in annual fuel costs are overwhelmed by high acquisition and installation costs, with the total consumer expenditure set to be in excess of £45,000 over a ten-year period. The Home Heating TCO report examines annual


operating costs and amortised capital costs over 10- and 20- year periods, and includes costings based on standard electricity tariffs, off-peak tariffs and a blended tariff rate that reflects typical usage.


THE OPTIONS For comparison, the analysis also includes hydrogen boilers. Hydrogen boilers have been proposed as a direct replacement for gas boilers, but serious challenges in the national distribution of hydrogen and annual fuel costs of over £3,200 would make them both unavailable and unaffordable to most consumers. High hydrogen fuel costs mean that these would cost consumers £79,000 over a 20-year period. In addition, home heating using electrical panel


radiators also showed a three-times increase in cost compared to today’s gas boilers. While purchase and installations costs are relatively low for electrical panel heating, the high annual electrical bill, given that they tend to be used at peak periods, pushes the total cost up to up to £3,200 per year. A low cost alternative to gas is the microwave


boiler, which has an annualised cost of £1,883 over 10 years when used across both standard and off-peak rates, and reduces further to £1,645 over its full 20-year lifetime. When used exclusively on off-peak electricity tariffs, microwave boiler costs are lower than gas boilers, with annual costs over a 20-year period of £972.


14 ENERGY MANAGEMENT - Autumn 2021


MICROWAVE BOILERS


“The need to replace CO2 belching gas boilers is beyond question, but we need to find solutions that are affordable for average families,” explains Paul Atherton, CTO of Heat Wayv. “From the analysis, there are clearly very different levels of costs for the different proposed solutions, but these costs are often not understood and not being debated. Some are simply unaffordable, and we need to prioritise the solutions that will prove cost effective for British homes.” Heat Wayv has therefore developed a microwave


boiler, which provides home heating solutions with similar installation and running costs to existing gas boilers, (using twilight off-peak tariffs) but with zero carbon emissions. The company is currently in pre-production development for trial units in 2022 with full product manufacturing forecast for 2023. The replacement of UK gas boilers with microwave boilers would lead to a 14%* reduction in the UK’s greenhouse gas carbon emissions. “The microwave boiler completely removes the


burden on central government and tax-payers for massive additional budgets to transition the UK by 2035,” says Phil Stevens, CEO of Heat Wayv. “For local authorities and housing trusts, it also means they can transition the home heating of their housing stock from gas to zero-carbon with no impact on their scheduled maintenance budgets.” Microwave boilers would eliminate up to


54 million tons of CO2 emissions that are currently created annually by gas boilers in the UK,


representing 14%* of the total CO2 emissions in the UK and 29%* of the UK’s greenhouse gas


emissions that come from homes. Heat Wayv’s www.energymanagementmag.co.uk


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