[Tech1] We claimed £70,000 in grants for heat pump, but it saved us NOTHING | Daily Mail Online

[Alan Taylor]

It seems to me that heat pumps must be digital.  Owners either describe them as being the best thing since sliced bread, or else they were an unmitigated disaster.  I can’t recall many reports where the owners are right in the middle between those two extremes.

I suspect that the explanation is more to do with inappropriate specifications, poor planning and unreasonable expectations. The concept is certainly good if the rest of the house ( insulation, radiators, pipe work and hot water system ) is suitable for working with a heat pump, but as it’s still relatively unfamiliar technology in the UK, I’m not convinced that most installations so far have been particularly well designed or implemented.

I’d like to think that as professionals become more familiar with them, “best practice“ will become the norm and customers will normally be happy rather than disappointed.  However that’s not much consolation for anybody who has already spent £10k plus on a flawed installation which doesn’t deliver the results they hoped for.

I would add that the places I know of with heat pumps only regard them as background heating, keeping the house at an even but slightly cool temperature.  The lounge would also use another form of heating if you’re sitting around. Round here they nearly always use a log burner.  People who have been accustomed to gas or oil central heating often set the timer so that heat is only produced when it’s needed.  Heat pumps won’t quickly warm up a house in the same way.

Running cost comparisons might sometimes be misleading because a heat pump installation is usually accompanied by significant upgrades to the insulation. The previous heating system would also be more economical once the insulation was upgraded to that standard. 

Much of the problem with heat pumps in the UK can be attributed to our houses being poorly insulated compared to houses in Northern Europe. My in-laws in Germany have an apartment in a city and also a converted mill in a very remote setting. The apartment was built in the 1950s, while the mill house was built in the early 1900s.  For the last thirty years or more, both of them have doors and windows which are significantly more thermally efficient than equivalents in the UK. The same is true for most buildings over there. At the mill, the walls are well insulated and the roof has an impressively thick layer of insulation. They don’t have heat pumps, the apartment is communally heated, while the mill uses wood burners which pipe hot water to radiators in other rooms. The mill might have been an excellent candidate for a water sourced heat pump, however the trees surrounding the mill provide them with unlimited quantities of free firewood. It only costs them a little fuel for the chainsaw and electricity for the log splitting machine. The electricity supply to the mill is often unreliable in cold weather, so their heating system using free logs and not needing electricity offers unique advantages when weather conditions are harsh.

Alan Taylor

 

> On 1 Nov 2021, at 11:47, Steve Edwards via Tech1 <tech1 at tech-ops.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> Keeping this brief: A couple of years ago a neighbour converted to an Air Source heat pump at great expense. 
> 
> The result is that the house doesn’t get anywhere near warm enough. They have to rely on other means of heating to make the house warm enough to live in - from what they told us I don’t think there has been any advantage or cost saving.  
> There was also a serious problem with the pump and the repairs took 6 months to fix - fortunately they hadn’t removed their old log burner!
> We were surprised by the length of time they had to wait (with a non-working pump) for the repairs to be carried out. 
> 
> I’m not reporting this as a for/against heat pumps - just passing this info on. 
> 
> Steve 
> 
>>> On 1 Nov 2021, at 11:08, Dave Plowman via Tech1 <tech1 at tech-ops.co.uk> wrote:
>>> 
>> 
>> It's quite difficult to find accurate figures about the costs to convert from ordinary CH to a heat pump. And accurate like for like running costs too. And it seems to be impractical to insulate existing properties well enough too.
>> 
>> On 31/10/2021 12:43, Bernard Newnham via Tech1 wrote:
>>> https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/bills/article-10147319/We-claimed-70-000-grants-heat-pump-saved-NOTHING.html 
>>> 
>>> 
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