Tepeo ZEB: The High-Density Ceramic Thermal Battery
The tepeo Zero Emission Boiler (ZEB) doesn't move ambient heat like a compressor-driven system. It stores it, mechanically, as raw heat in solid ceramic.
An ultra-insulated ceramic core inside the unit charges up to 750°C overnight, drawing cheap off-peak electricity from a smart tariff like Octopus Agile. That's the entire storage mechanism — no refrigerant, no compressor, no outdoor unit.
Through the day, internal air modulators blow air across the hot ceramic core and through a standard water heat exchanger, feeding the home's existing wet central heating circuit. Critically, that circuit can be legacy microbore or steel radiators, run at flow temperatures up to 80°C — the exact flow temperature a badly-matched heat pump would collapse under. No retrofitted pipework. No external unit at all.
The honest trade-off has to be stated plainly: ZEB runs at a strict 1:1 thermodynamic efficiency, a COP of 1.0. It is not moving heat, it is releasing stored heat, and it consumes materially more absolute kWh than a heat pump delivering the same warmth. What it buys instead is a complete bypass of the 4pm–7pm grid peak — every kWh it uses was bought overnight, at the cheapest, least carbon-intensive point in the day.
Luthmore: The Battery-Buffered LFP Combi Boiler
A standard electric combi boiler has a hard, well-known failure point: heating water instantly, on demand, for multiple simultaneous showers can demand a peak electrical draw of up to 24kW. Most UK domestic supplies were never sized for that.
Luthmore solves it by moving the demand problem in time, not in method. A Lithium Iron Phosphate (LFP) battery block, built directly into a standard wall-mounted combi boiler chassis, charges slowly and gently overnight at roughly 2kW — a load any domestic supply handles without strain. When hot water is actually called for, the unit discharges instantly from that internal battery, matching the high-flow demand of multiple showers without ever pulling anything close to 24kW from the grid.
The footprint case is just as important as the electrical one. Luthmore needs zero external space — no outdoor unit, no compressor, no fan box on an exterior wall. For urban flats where planning conditions or noise restrictions legally bar an external air-source unit outright, it's often the only electrification route that's actually permitted.
Far-Infrared Panels: Radiant Surface Heating and Spatial Zoning
Far-infrared panels don't heat air at all. Long-wave IR-C radiation passes through air largely unabsorbed and instead vibrates water molecules directly in whatever solid mass it hits — walls, furniture, and the people in the room.
That's a fundamentally different heat-loss profile to convective heating. A radiator heats air, and that warm air happily escapes through every draughty gap in an old building's fabric. A radiant panel heats the mass in the room directly, largely bypassing that air-leakage pathway.
The zoning case follows naturally: with 48V or 230V smart thermostats on each panel, a household heats only the rooms actually in use, room by room, rather than conditioning the whole building's air volume to one target temperature. That directly reduces the property's total effective heat load.
Two real constraints deserve equal billing with the benefits. Panels need a clear line-of-sight to room occupants to deliver radiant heat effectively — furniture and partition walls block it like anything else. And panels don't heat domestic hot water at all; every infrared installation needs a standalone DHW solution alongside it, typically an unvented cylinder or a separate heat pump water heater.
The Engineering Verification Matrix
Metric | Air-to-Water Heat Pump | Tepeo ZEB | Luthmore Combi | Far-Infrared Panels |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Average system COP | 3.0–4.0 | 1.0 | 1.0 | 1.0 |
Upfront installation friction | High — survey, heat loss calc, often new radiators | Low — direct swap onto existing wet circuit | Low — direct swap onto existing combi position | Low — panels mounted room by room |
External space footprint | Required — outdoor compressor unit | None | None | None |
Legacy radiator compatibility | Poor at legacy flow temps | Excellent — up to 80°C flow | Excellent — unchanged wet circuit | N/A — replaces radiators entirely |
Target smart tariff synergy | Moderate — continuous background draw | High — single overnight charge window | High — single overnight charge window | Moderate — zoned, on-demand draw |
Cross-Linking & Discovery
Match the technology to the property, not the other way round:
- Solid-wall period home, legacy high-flow-temperature radiators, no room to re-pipe: Tepeo ZEB.
- Urban flat, multiple bathrooms, no external wall access, tight electrical supply: Luthmore.
- Well-insulated building, rooms used at different times of day, want granular zoning: far-infrared panels, paired with a separate DHW solution.
- Enough outdoor space and flow-temperature headroom to hit a COP of 3.0–4.0: a standard air-to-water heat pump is still the more efficient choice — see our full breakdown of the underlying physics in The Thermodynamics of the Heat Pump.
Every one of these three alternatives shares one design principle with a standard heat pump: shift consumption into the cheapest electricity window available. See exactly how that works, half-hour by half-hour, in Octopus Agile Explained.
For the full engineering picture this platform's electrification strategy sits inside, return to the EV Blueprint Index.