[retrotecchie]

@meldrewreborn

There are 'salvage yards' that specialise in recovering the old bathroom stuff. One not to far from here has all manner of sinks, baths and 'porcelain horses' in all the old Armitage Shanks colours. Avocado and Pampas are still fashionable in some circles, Powder Blue or Pink not so much . Back in the day, I not only had a particularly offensive plastic bath in Avocado, but also drove an old A-reg Vauxhall Cavalier saloon in an almost identical shade of avocado green. In fact, I was putting a shower fixture over the bath one time and dropped the hammer, punching a neat hole through the bottom of the bath. The Isopon car body filler and an aerosol of Cavalier touch up paint kept the bath going for a good couple of years until the Housing Association renovated everyone's bathroom in our block!

[wizzo227]

Short answer: gas is cheaper this year.
One day, if you are having to pay so much tax that they can build enough necessary direct air capture machines to keep on using gas, it won't be. Imported and fossil-fueled electricity has the same climate change problems, not abated by the accountant certificated 100% claims being bandied about by some disreputable energy merchants.

Now to what you can do about it, this summer, and get hot water for free after sunny days. Step 0, get rooftop solar panels at home, and don't waste effort with the EoN offers, get as much solar as can possibly fit on sunny parts of your roof.

Once that is on order, and you know how many kW(peak) you can get, you can plan the best ways to heat water on sunny days. 10kW is sudden bursts so don't expect that existing electric heater to be supplied from solar. As a test, and since I was at home in the daytime, I got a 1.7kW kettle to boil for free and routinely used that as my first choice washing water (and kitchen washing up), in order to demo nil-CO2 hot water (with side effect of not costing money either). I even did free hot kettle-baths in summer, but several kettle boils takes too long to do that for four people.

There are smarter machines to store surplus solar power and end up with hot water than manually started kettles. One type, which runs an ordinary immersion heater in an ordinary hot water tank at sunny times, gets called a "solar diverter", so look those up. You will get solar generation above half of your kW(peak) for several hours on sunny days, and quarter of kW(peak) for more hours. You might consider swapping the immersion heater element for a smaller one better sized to your free local solar surplus, unless you have a really big roof and can get >6kW(peak) put up. In winter when you rarely get sun, gas combi boiler will still often be cheaper.

There is a new type of phase change material heat store which you should look up if you don't yet have a hot water tank. The 58C hot water type might suit.

[EmmaN_EONNext]

Appreciate this was posted a while ago but there's some great ideas here!

Hope some of the advice helped @JOHNIOW just let us know if you have any further questions 😊