Hydrogen #HydrogenHome

Hydrogen Homes in Gateshead and this is 100% hydrogen boilers that are running. So these are zero emission boilers. We all know that we need to do something to help with climate change and protect the planet as much as we can. I’m here today, we can have a look round, I’ll show you, I’ve got few clips of the hydrogen burning, hobs in use, et cetera like that. If you do have any questions, please put them in the comments below and I’ll try my best to answer those questions. Also, if you would like to come and have a look around for yourself, I’ll also add a link in the description where you can just go and have a look. You can go see for yourself, any questions that you’ve got you can ask the people here as well. So, yeah. Good. Let’s go have a look.

When you arrive, you are greeted with a pair of semi-detached properties and they’ve both got boilers in, we’ve got a Baxi boiler. We’ve also got a Worcester Bosch boiler. So what we’ll do, first of all, we’re going to have a look at the hobs.

To what you’d expect, natural gas. Obviously you don’t get the blue colour and you get little bits of sort of like orange and red coming through. This can now on individual flames. So we’ll allow that a bit of time to warm up. You can sort of start to see the orange coming on those flames already. Another pop, not such a bad pop. The burner is different to a natural gas burner in the oven, but it’s not a huge change and because it’s behind a draught excluding cover, you can’t really see it. So, I don’t think people are really going to notice much difference between natural gas and a hydrogen one.

So that was the hobs. And as you could see, there’s like an orange flame on the hobs. This is totally new to me. I think it’s exciting times. There’s a lot of talk about air source heat pumps are going to be the answer to the climate crisis. In my opinion, it’s going to be a balance we’re going to have. I think air source is going to be big, but I think we need something else as well. And this hydrogen looks like this could be a solution. Please put a comment below. Let me know what you think. When you start the hob up, you get like a pop on it. And what they say is, if it were a bright day, you wouldn’t be able to see the flame. But when we were looking at it clearly, you can see it’s quite orange. So you can sort of see it.

There’s also lights on them. So a little bit like electric, when you got the ceramic type tops, you know the glass tops, you have a light on there so that you know they are still hot. They’ve got that on these hobs as well and on the cooker. Put a comment below. Bearing in mind, these are 100% hydrogen. What’s happening at the moment up here, they are putting a blend of hydrogen in, they’ve already started doing that. So in part of the network up here, they have put a 5% blend in, and that’s going to go up to a 20% blend. And what they are saying is your normal appliances that you’ve got now, they expect that they will work on a 20% blend and then going forward from that to have 100% in the future, obviously it’s going to be 30 years down the line or so, then you’d have to change the appliances.

But what will happen there is, as you are changing appliances, them appliances will already be hydrogen ready, hopefully. So when people are saying about, ‘oh customers are not going to pay for this extra’, well, hopefully it’ll be just staged in. So it shouldn’t have as much of an impact. So anyway, let’s go and have a look at the fire. Look at the… There’s a couple of types of gas fire, but we’ll have a look at one of the gas fires as well. Again, this is 100% hydrogen gas fire, zero emissions.

This one here is the balanced flue glass fronted. So it’s actually, it’s the highest efficiency one, about 80% efficient, which is very impressive. Get two click clicks. Now it’ll start to sequence. You can hear a fan for purging. There’s the pilot light lighting. Now it’s a smaller pop because bear in mind, that’s a pilot light, whereas on your cooker, you’re lighting straight on the main burner so that’s the difference in the pop. Once it’s recognised on the thermocouple, it should allow the main burner to light, which will go straight across. Yeah, yeah. That’s true. Yeah. It’s there for focal point.

So as you can see, they’ve also got solution for gas fires as well. Not that, well, I don’t instal gas fires anymore. I don’t really work on them that much, but at least there is a solution. And just to bear in mind that all this stuff is prototypes at the moment. Let’s go and have a look at the boilers.