Has anyone heard of Logicor Heating?
The infrared radiators are technology I have seen before, but the thing that caught my eye was the hot water boiler. They claim it is cheaper to run than gas? Even Heat pumps don’t always promise that
Hey Oscar!
I have had a rapid read of their collateral.
The water heating unit looks pretty tidy, but there are no details on how it is different from/better than a traditional electric on-demand heater.
It looks like it has only a modest flow rate (6L/minute) which means that it’s not quick - 30 minutes to fill a bath. It also doesn’t say anything about the temperature increase it provides at that flow rate.
I’m sceptical about this, if I’m honest, as it comes down to simple physics.
It takes 116Wh (0.116kWh) to increase 1 litre of water by 1 °C. Assuming a bath holds 200L and you need to raise the water from 20°C to 40°C then you need 4.65 kWh.
If the Logicor is 100% efficient and running at it’s nominal rating of 6kW then that’s 46minutes, or half that at the peak 12kW power.
My guess is that they have some fancy heat exchanger that is a bit more efficient, but I doubt it’s much above 90% and that efficiency drops off as the flow rate and power increase.
As for the IR panels, the interesting thing there is the claimed pulsed heating. Sadly there is no information on that at all. I have become a big fan of Far IT panels, but not sure if these are any better than any other. Perhaps we should get them to do a session for us…
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That would be interesting. Its the heating unit that is the main bit interesting me. perhaps with that flow rate it could run just a central heating system. It looks nice and slimline and would integrate easily. Just don’t see how they can run at near heat pump costs with just IR tech. unless it uses microwaves? 
There is nothing in their literature that suggests that the water heater uses IR.
Either way, it’s a simple matter of energy flow. A heat pump is the only way to seem to get more out than you put in and that’s because it ‘cheats’ and borrows the heat from outside. It would be difficult to come up with anything more efficient than that in terms of energy in for heat out.
Anything with direct heating can’t be as cost effective as a heat pump (as long as the outside temperature is above -5C); gas is currently attracti9ve because it has a low cost per kWh (though gas boilers are less efficient than electric I think), though IR takes a different approach, providing spot heating rather than volume heating.
As for microwaves - I know rather a lot about them having worked on high power (1MW) magnetrons back in the day. It is possible to get pretty good coupling efficiency with the right frequency of microwaves. The trouble is that magnetrons and other microwave generating devices aren’t terribly efficient at turning electricity in to RF.
Thermodynamics is never your friend:
- You can’t win
- You can’t draw
- You can’t quit the game
Ginsberg’s theorem - Wikipedia
on their page they state:
The CHS Infrared Boiler
and in terms of efficiency or price they are stating for a 80 Litre Bath:
Electric Immersion Heater 44 pence
Modern Gas Boiler 16 pence
Logicor’s ILHWS 9 pence
with an assumed unit rate of 14p/kWh.
Now if we assume the immersion heater has 100% efficiency, this would suggest that their heater is 44/9= 4.8: 480% efficient. Very hard to believe. As you say, thermodynamics.