Perfect indoor climate in all seasons
The installation we present to you is located in the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines in Dovadola, and involves a single-family building of about one hundred ad forty square meters of floor space, in which resides a family whose choice was intensely focused on energy efficiency. The growing energy cost has an increasingly significant impact on the family budget. This is why users are looking for solutions that make managing their home more efficient and less expensive. Users also require environments that make the building comfortable in all seasons, allowing them to enjoy every space in their home.
Before the work was done, the household was consuming over 105,000 kWh of gas and 970 kWh of electricity, resulting in annual fuel bills of over €9,000. Now, the house is energy efficient, with 6,157 kWh of solar electricity being generated, and only 1,182 kWh of gas being consumed. This has resulted in annual fuel bills of around €500, just 5.5% of what they were previously. What is more, over 2,500 kWh of electricity is being sold back to the grid each year, and the house now ranks at energy efficiency class A4, the best possible score, and an incredible nine classes above where it was.
The solutions adopted
The system consists of an Emmeti MIRAI SMI heat pump with Febos, a heat pump for DHW Emmeti Eco Hot Water, an Emmeti Clima Floor radiant system for winter and summer air conditioning with the integration of an Emmeti Dumy Floor dehumidifier, Emmeti Topway manifolds, a distribution system, Emmeti Gerpex, and finally a 4.5 kWp photovoltaic system.
Thanks to the Eco Hot Water boiler, the system can produce domestic hot water with an integrated heat pump powered by the photovoltaic system.
The photovoltaic system is still the most appreciated, virtuous, and advantageous. Solar energy is, in fact, the most renewable and clean energy source available: it is free, produces no CO2, and can be easily transported and used for a wide range of applications. In addition, the photovoltaic system, although involving a substantial initial investment, ensures significant savings in the long term.
In order to maximize the use of solar energy, Febos HP is a software with a related APP (available for Android and iOS devices) that enables you to control all environmental comfort parameters from a mobile phone, including room temperature. This heat is then stored and used to heat the rooms at night even if the heat pump is off.
Through an algorithm inside the heat pump, the system is able to harness this energy by turning it into heat that will be retained by the Emmeti Floor radiant system throughout the year. The system also controls the electrical load generated by the photovoltaic.
As seen in the graphic, the system accurately calculates the load produced by the photovoltaic system by first attempting to use the energy produced and then, if this is not sufficient, by using network withdrawal. This is made possible by the control precision of the heat pump inverter.
This makes it possible to increase the building's self-consumption from the typical 15-20% of electrical system use to over 90%, considerably lowering the cost of the family's energy bill.
With the help of this cutting-edge system, it is possible to keep an eye on one's own power usage and output, as well as the amount of energy that the heat pump uses to supply the building with energy (summer EER and winter COP).
The user can freely assess how to improve their use using these data, which are always available in the program and are readily accessible through straightforward graphs.
Underfloor heating system
The underfloor system is undoubtedly the best known and most in demand among radiant heating and cooling systems. The underfloor heating system (also called radiant because the heat is mainly radiated) works at low temperatures (25-30 °C on the surface, 35-40 °C on the water) thanks to its huge surface. These temperatures are ideal for heat pumps, particularly for our Mirai SMI, an inverter that can modulate the power produced by avoiding switching continuously with relatively reduced consumption.
All Emmeti products were used to distribute sanitary water; in particular, the PeX/Al/PeX multilayer pipe was developed to replace copper and steel with lower costs and maximum safety, as demonstrated by the various international certifications.
Thanks to these important innovations, customers can optimize costs without complex management systems, significantly lowering their energy bills in both the electrical and heating sectors.
Chiara Mattielli (owner and designer)
What prompted you, as a designer, to choose Emmeti systems?
First of all, the innovative management system of the radiant system, which allows the heat pump to work during the day, making the most of the photovoltaic system that I had planned for the building. Another point that guided my choice was the possibility of working with a single supplier for all the plumbing and heating systems.
As the designer and user of the building, what can you tell us after more than a year?
Thanks to the Febos HP system, I monitored all the consumption of my building and checked the efficiency of my heating system in real-time. During the winter period, which in our area runs from mid-October to mid-April, I could see that the average COP of my heat pump was over 4.6 and that my photovoltaic system actually provided most of the energy used by the machine. Furthermore, I must say that I am delighted with all the components' reliability, which has not given me any problems to date with proper maintenance.