thanks - will watch that later. There was some disingenuous chap on twitter making hay yesterday with "so you think you cannot have an airsource heat pump - but do you own one of these" and pictured a fridge. Which is an airtight, heavily insulated small box.
The extreme difficulty of insulation for many homes means the cost of re-plumbing the house to meet the needs of a pump the size of a campervan is conveniently ignored. Does it address that particular elephant?
his basic proposition is that whilst insulation is good it costs a lot and it is usually easier and cheaper to fit a bigger heat pump which is large enough to heat your leaky home
I feel like I'm asking for spoilers, but does it consider the energy cost (ignoring carbon) of powering the larger pump, versus a smaller-sized gas boiler? I think we'll probably end up with adapted combi boilers powered by pure or h2 blended with nat gas for anything pre 1930s...
50C is enough. You will not shower or wash your hands with 50C. The video notes that there are no known cases of legionella attracted in a domestic setting (heatpump or boiler).
but does it consider the energy cost (ignoring carbon) of powering the larger pump, versus a smaller-sized gas boiler?
That is a comparison you cannot make. Your house will loose X amount of energy that you need to feed in overtime. The required input is the same for a boiler or heatpump. You only need to have a heatpump that is capable of delivering the required level of input.
The relevant sums are:
[required input / efficiency] * price/kW
whereby gas is cheaper than electricity (unless you have PV), but a boiler has abou 90% efficience and a heatpump has 350-500% efficiency.
On balance, heatpump will be a bit cheaper to run, leaving aside that the monoblock ones need zero maintenance.
There is an easy solution to the Legionella risk. You just add a small immersion heater that boosts the hot water in the tank to 70C once a week. The efficiency impact is negligible overall.
Can you get a gas fired heat pump? That would make it cheaper.
Assuming this is a genuine question, no you can't, and no it wouldn't (necessarily). The efficiency of a condensing gas boiler gets to about 90% if used optimally. But that is efficiency in producing heat that is retained in the home (i.e. 90% of the energy goes to heating water and 10% is lost in warm exhaust gases).
If you were to power a heat pump with gas, you would essentially be using gas to run a motor that runs the heat pump. The efficiency of burning gas to produce kinetic energy (i.e. turn the heat pump over) is going to be way lower than the 90% efficiency of a gas boiler.
Don't some heat pump HWSs have an element to boost once a week and kill off any nasties?
They're getting very popular here in upsidedownland. With most of the population living in temperate and sub tropical areas it's extremely efficient.
I'm moving house soon and the new place will have heat pump ducted central heating that turns into air conditioning in the summer. With solar panels and insulation it's going to be very cost effective.
The solution to legionella is not to have water sitting in the system. Anyone sensible in a hard water area will run every tap and shower once every couple of weeks anyway so I don’t worry about legionella.
He did it in an old house - the main jobs were to super insulate the loft, replace all the windows, replace all of the radiators (as they need to be usable at lower temps). It works fine. We have some solar also but the heat pump is quiet and on a place no one can see it (other than our grumpy khunt of a neighbour)
I spoke to a clever engineer once. He had some bespoke system where he had a massive block of concrete that he heated and then had a fan blowing the warm air it radiated around his house. What is that?
Masonry heater. Effectively a giant storage heater, traditionally heated by burning wood, but I suppose any heat source will do. Quite common in Germany.
what is the performance of heat pumps actually like irl?
do they keep your house as toasty warm as gas?
I would be willing to look at this and would consider making the investment on the basis of greater sustainability, but the level of drop off in performance I’m willing to tolerate is basically zero.
We are situated in a super hard water area and we definitely do NOT run all the taps and showers once a week. There is one shower in the house that AFAIK we haven’t run since moving in two months ago.
what is the performance of heat pumps actually like irl?
do they keep your house as toasty warm as gas?
See my earlier post. As long as you put the energy into your house to make it toasty warm, there is no difference. It is just the manner in which this energy (heat) is generated.
And yes, they can keep up in winter. We had -10 here in Krautland and no biggie. Leccy use skyrocketed during those days, but that is balanced out over the year. The 350-500% efficiency rates that are quoted are over an entire season (today I am generating 6000w heat with 600w leccy).
In the Nordics, heat pumps are the rule rather than the exception. Seeing heat pumps at literally every home in DK and S convinced me that it should not be a problem further south.
A lot of commentary I've seen is that they work great if properly fitted by someone who understands how to adapt the install for the specific.
But (standard for the UK) half the people out there fitting them are absolute cowboys interested in doing it as quickly and cheaply as possible, so unless you know your stuff well enough to force them to do it properly it's a total lottery.
Laz run that shower occasionally as otherwise you may find it scales up and you have to replace bits of it regularly. After I left home had constant problems with my shower only running cold, etc. until we discovered the problem and my mum would run it for a short while one a week or so while I wasn't there. I now go round my house ever week or two and run the taps and showers that aren't used regularly.
I'm only aware of legionella in water systems because there's a section about it in every H&S assessment for a block of flats.
what is the performance of heat pumps actually like irl?
do they keep your house as toasty warm as gas?
Yes, they do.
You need to throw out some cherished ideals born of decades of gas boiler ownership. Like you should have the HW and CH on all the time, not on a timer. In fact, they do therefore keep your house toasty warm all the time.
The fact that the water is heated to a lower temperature is not a problem at all, as no one really uses water at 70C anyway. It will scald you.
The legionella thing is a non-issue, either because it never was an issue in domestic systems, or because you run a legionella cycle once a week.
You do need a house that is insulated half well, but that's something that every house should be anyway these days.
My heat pump experience so far is limited to heating a pool but it's certainly much more cost effective than an old oil boiler but yes you need to run it more because it's only putting out water that's a couple of degrees warmer than the water coming in at any time.
What gloria says is also true with underfloor heating. It can't respond as quickly as old school radiators so you basically need to keep it running and keep constant warmth circulating rather than thinking you can just pop it on when it colds. Saying that though it's still more efficient because once you get the underfloor up to temperature it pumps heat out for a long time and then only need occasional topping up to keep it warm.
OMG. The Guardian is reporting, today, that Therese Coffey, who, laughably, is the environment secretary, has just said "There are some places where it’s just not going to work to have a heat pump at all."
She should tell the Swedes, as they have obviously been heating their houses wrongly for 30 years.
everyone in new york has air conditioning. daft to be worried about heat pumps compared to the environmental impact of that.
whole building systems in buildings where every flat is legally separately owned, and the garden is owned entirely by the ground floor flat? good luck with that.
district systems? lol
there are many homes in the uk where heat pumps are practical, viable, and relatively cheap. focus on getting them installed there and we get a lot of benefits without having to come up with mental, ruinously expensive plans to fit them in homes where they're obviously not the best solution.
Just need to adjust the planning system so that you are allowed to stick a heat pump on the outside wall of your third floor flat along with also getting it to recognise that some changes to listed buildings are needed for them to still provide viable accommodation but won't fundamentally change the historic nature of the building.
As far as I can tell nobody is being forced to get a heat pump? It will be a natural process at the next boiler replacement.
In the Victorian building you can fill the cavities with beads, install EWI, insulate the roof next time it needs re-done and install an MVHR system by running the ducting between the joists. A good chance in somewhere like London you would hardly need to heat it at all and the MVHR would deal with damp issues. None of this is great if you have to do it this year, but all achievable as part of a plan of works.
The fact is people want to blow £125 on F&B paint instead of do anything meaningful to reduce the energy consumption for their bills. The answer is to do proper EPC checks, come up with the most realistic but tough assessment of the level it can get up to, and ban selling it until they are done. Instead you have the situation now where you sometimes get a worse rating for making efficiency improvements. Or just provide you only get the primary residence exemption if they get done.
In any event, the first step can be making sure every new home requires as little energy as possible to heat it. Instead building regs standards are still shoddy, and architects are allowed to do what they like instead of designing for solar gain.
And the elephant in the room of conservation areas and listed buildings where you will currently largely be banned from making any meaningful improvements. Yes the windows with droopy old glass are lovely but there's no real reason why they can't be replaced with double glazing in a similar frame without any real detrimental effect to the building itself.
My neighbour is trying to work out how to insulate a listed farmhouse and the answer is to allow him to make it slightly bigger by allowing him to add the insulation to the exterior so that the original timbers remain visible inside and to add a new higher roof to it which sits on top of the original roof structure and is packed with insulation. I was allowed to do that converting a barn but suspect the conservation office would object to a similar proposal for an existing house.
the level of drop off in performance I’m willing to tolerate is basically zero.
This. And my neighbour spent tens of thousands installing this in his (similar) barn conversion, with the result that his bills went up versus an oil system and he often doesn't have hot enough water to have a shower. I'll pass until the technology is better.
My heat pump can heat 90 cubic metres of water to bath temperature in a matter of days so pretty sure it would be more than capable of providing a few hundred litres for a shower without too much trouble.
I agree with the proposition bananaman, but cost is a significant factor. We got EWI put on our house. It cost north of £30k. We are never going to recover that, but we had the money to do it. Many won't have that type of cash available.
The point is definitely coming where people will start to pay more for more efficient properties. I'm partly putting solar panels in to reduce my own bills but also doing it because I think that when I come to sell in five to ten years buyers will expect a country house with a reasonable amount of land to have some degree of power self-sufficiency.
Just need to adjust the planning system so that you are allowed to stick a heat pump on the outside wall of your third floor flat
And get your landlord to agree to let you do that. And have the space for the tank, somewhere close to the wall. Sure, no foreseeable problems there.
We already have the smallest homes in Europe. People rightly do not want to to give over that space (inside and out) to heating their homes.
Just insulate the shyt out of everything and that’ll make a huge difference right off the bat. The most efficient energy is energy you don’t need to use.
The change to the planing system would oblige your landlord to agree so that's not a major problem. Also doesn't seem to be a problem in other parts of the world where each flat sticks its own A/C unit on the outside of the building.
New developments tend to have CHP these days so we're generally only talking about attaching a few to the outside of converted houses.
For a property lawyer, you’ve given this very little thought, Sails.
Who decides where the leaseholder is allowed to put it (remember: this isn’t in the leaseholder’s demise)? Who decides where and how it is attached and where the conduits are punched through? Who is responsible if the structure isn’t strong enough for one heat pump? What if it’s strong enough for the first couple but no more? How does the freeholder recover any additional costs of maintaining the structure with a huge additional load?
And yes Jelly, same. Also external insulation is ruinously expensive, looks dreadful in and of itself, and really ruins the uniformity of terraces.
I absolutely hate the idea of having heating on all the time. And I hate over insulated houses. I like my house cold at night, nice and airy during the day, occasionally heated for 2-3 hours if I feel like sitting still and am cold and am not in bed. It is an obliging ramshackle Victorian house which does exactly what I want, for now.
So if I had a heat pump instead of my gas boiler, which I do want to replace with something more eco-friendly, can I do this? I suppose I set all my thermostats low? Am I talking hours / days to get a bit of heat into the system?
The planners would normally decide a lot of that already and you can simply provide it goes through the same hole as the existing boiler flue. Most brick walls of a house will support a small heat pump so very unlikely you'll need structural works and the only additional cost of maintenance is that it's a bit trickier to do the pointing behind a heat pump than without it. For a lot of London the ground floor flat will put the pump in the front or rear garden so it's just the upper flat installing theirs and in this day and age can probably stick on the ground floor's rear or side return extension flat roof. Also when upstairs ultimately decides to extend in to the loft they can create a spot for it.
Are you feeling alright, old bean? Have you been on the sauce?
Why would the planning authorities (which are stretched so thin they can’t decide householder applications in less than 6 months in many places) be in any position to decide where to put the heat pumps? Going to send them round to compulsorily purchase bits of the freehold?
If you have two flats on the same level, there’s likely to be a fight about who gets to put theirs in the more convenient place and who has to suck up the cost of putting theirs elsewhere. Also, not everywhere is London you know. There are plenty of purpose built blocks of flats with, say, a dozen flats in, which don’t have a central system but are bigger than just a townhouse conversion.
I think you’re imagining that all flats are spacious townhouse conversions with a nice garden flat and one above. That’s just not the case.
Appreciate the answer - thanks summersails. Then I will probably continue current plan of segue from gas boiler + radiators to solar + radiators to heat pump + radiators once there's less fuss from installers about insulation. Or unless new tech emerges
This is a well insulated house in fact - good thick walls but no cavity, and doesn't meet tick-box criteria.
How is it "tick box" when your wall is a thermal bridge? It's basically a giant radiator to the outside, only mitigated by any solar energy being stored into it. The "fuss" is v. basic levels of insulation required to qualify for the grant.
Solar is not going to provide anywhere near the energy you need to heat an uninsulated house so you will be paying a fooking fortune for electric radiators. Logically you either go long on gas and get a new boiler before any ban, or switch now.
No Anony just provide for legislation that gives flat owners the right to put a heat pump on the wall subject to certain caveats. The additional fees might help to properly resource planning departments. The whole system needs reform to bring in more permitted development for energy improvement measures.
If you've got two flats on the same level they install them where the flue for the current gas boiler is. For a fairly recently built purpose built development you won't need much of a heat pump because of the insulation so you're not putting huge lumps of plant on the walls. You're talking about something that's 1m by 1.5m so should pretty much go on the outside in a similar position to the existing gas boiler mounted internally. Yes it's preferable to have them mounted on a south facing wall but that won't be possible for a great many houses as well.
There are huge number of flats in converted old houses which are the main problem when it comes to energy use and emissions but most of them are fine for sticking a few heat pumps on the external walls.
Not really, bananaman. I've done the sums. I know the house and its quirks. I know the cost of heating. I know how much heat I use.
I'm not asking for any grant to fund my energy use, and I'm a very low user of energy / heating in any form.
I want the solar anyway - I'm very well situated for it. It would take me decades to recoup the expense of insulating and pump at my energy usage. Move to solar and cutting off gas more effective for me. If my circumstances change, I can make changes.
Weve got a biggish period place amd Im already appear to be on the downslope of an fairly mediocre career so any spare money (not much at the moment) will go into a pension that wont be enough to retire on until my 70s. I can live with that as we love the house and have a nice enough life. But there is literally no way ill be able to afford to insulate it and heat pump etc. I just hope there is a straightforward exemption for listed property. Or it only kicks in on moving. We wont be moving.
Im gradually moving to wood burning stoves. More affordable and in keeping with the stylenand function of the house. If it worked in the 18th and 19th century it will be fine in the warmed up 21 st century. Also we have a large tree that will need to come down in a decade or two and I will use that until I win the lottery or die.
tbf I might get some solar at some point if the price carries on coming down.
It's not about climate, heff. It's about the quality of the (uninsulatable) housing stock.
Scandis all have heat pumps. But they also all live in heavily insulated boxes. External wall insulation isn't possible. Internal requires ridic amounts of space loss and dehumidifiers for the newly created cavity.
External is definitely possible in timber framed places although you'll lose some of the external features and it would be a ball ache. There are now also thin internal insulation materials that mean you only lose an inch or so of the room and I'm sure those will keep advancing.
Changing to log burners is a terrible idea as they'll be banned before long. I was sitting at traffic lights the other day looking at a big fireplace and log burner showroom and hoping that the owner is close to retirement age as he won't have a business in ten years.
I'm also amazed that no government has had a pop at swimming pool heating yet as it's an easy headline grabbing policy that doesn't affect many people so it sounds good even if it doesn't achieve much. I suspect the only thing stopping it is the cost for local councils of upgrading their pools.
it's good to insulate, and easy to insulate the roof/loft and upgrade your windows. Everyone should be doing that. External and internal insulation retrofit is more difficult and may be impractical. That doesn't stop a heat pump being a good solution, you just need a more powerful one.
I did. I need to insulate or size the pump larger and have it on constantly and have radiators resized.
Appreciate this is the telegraph, but when the MD of a heat pump manufacturer says this - then the anecdata of a kindly man (who has insulated his home a lot) telling me they work without insulating, I am sceptical.
Heat pumps will not work for Britain’s Victorian houses, one of the largest makers of the devices has warned.
Vonjy Rajakoba, managing director of Bosch UK, told The Telegraph that heat pumps did not make sense for older homes that lack extensive insulation or were not detached.
Mr Rajakoba said: “At low temperature you need well insulated homes, you also need space for heat pumps for the external unit and also the tank, so you need to have the sort of home which is adequate around the heat pumps.
“We think that in the UK, with the fleet of Victorian houses or period houses and so on, hydrogen, or in the interim hydrogen-ready boilers, are the solution.”
The simple fact is homeowners get fat subsidies off the taxpayer in the form of the primary residence exemption, and richer households benefit from the regressiveness of council tax. Like vehicles, the rule should be buy what you like, but cough up for the externalities you free ride on. Someone thinking I can keep my £20k in my pocket and pollute/leave the country at the mercy of Putin et al need to get in the sea. At this point in time, if you are buying an old cold flat/house with no thought of what's coming it's no different to these people buying houses on the Norfolk coast for "a song" and then crying because we aren't going to pay £1bn for sea defences to protect their property.
Like anything else, what's needed is an honest govt that say "this is a bit shit any way we go", but doing the best they can to reflect the externalities in either taxes or subsidies for the bad/good.
Also as I've said before, maybe there are "hard cases" where it's too difficult too difficult to do, but apparently we need 4m new houses, all of which could be "insulated boxes", and I reckon if he accepted a £10k "loss"/payment for the externalities he freerides on, even Jelly's box could be gas free (he could even get his cleaner to labour for the installer for her 50p an hour to save costs).
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Assume you’ve replaced your boiler and also ripped out your wood burning stove, Heffalump?
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we don't have a wood burning stove but we do still have a gas boiler
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thanks - will watch that later. There was some disingenuous chap on twitter making hay yesterday with "so you think you cannot have an airsource heat pump - but do you own one of these" and pictured a fridge. Which is an airtight, heavily insulated small box.
The extreme difficulty of insulation for many homes means the cost of re-plumbing the house to meet the needs of a pump the size of a campervan is conveniently ignored. Does it address that particular elephant?
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yes
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his basic proposition is that whilst insulation is good it costs a lot and it is usually easier and cheaper to fit a bigger heat pump which is large enough to heat your leaky home
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I feel like I'm asking for spoilers, but does it consider the energy cost (ignoring carbon) of powering the larger pump, versus a smaller-sized gas boiler? I think we'll probably end up with adapted combi boilers powered by pure or h2 blended with nat gas for anything pre 1930s...
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That is a really good video. Thank you for sharing.
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Spoilers:
- no, you don’t need to insulate your home first (although it helps)
- you may need to buy a bigger pump, though. Not that expensive.
- Ground source heat pumps are not practical.
- lots of maths and science in the video
- hot water seems like more of a challenge. Only heats to ~50C
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Do you think anyone else is really going to sit through the full hour of that nonsense?
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Those to weak to cope with legionnaires were a carbon drag anyway tbf.
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50C is enough. You will not shower or wash your hands with 50C. The video notes that there are no known cases of legionella attracted in a domestic setting (heatpump or boiler).
That is a comparison you cannot make. Your house will loose X amount of energy that you need to feed in overtime. The required input is the same for a boiler or heatpump. You only need to have a heatpump that is capable of delivering the required level of input.
The relevant sums are:
[required input / efficiency] * price/kW
whereby gas is cheaper than electricity (unless you have PV), but a boiler has abou 90% efficience and a heatpump has 350-500% efficiency.
On balance, heatpump will be a bit cheaper to run, leaving aside that the monoblock ones need zero maintenance.
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There is an easy solution to the Legionella risk. You just add a small immersion heater that boosts the hot water in the tank to 70C once a week. The efficiency impact is negligible overall.
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Can you get a gas fired heat pump? That would make it cheaper.
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Does it matter?
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Assuming this is a genuine question, no you can't, and no it wouldn't (necessarily). The efficiency of a condensing gas boiler gets to about 90% if used optimally. But that is efficiency in producing heat that is retained in the home (i.e. 90% of the energy goes to heating water and 10% is lost in warm exhaust gases).
If you were to power a heat pump with gas, you would essentially be using gas to run a motor that runs the heat pump. The efficiency of burning gas to produce kinetic energy (i.e. turn the heat pump over) is going to be way lower than the 90% efficiency of a gas boiler.
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Does he get COVID in the middle?
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What a total fcvking waste of a life. Oh but he’d installed a heat pump.
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Bring back smoking
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How about instead
We reduce carbon by putting everyone who is advocating for a lifetime of shyt showers to the sword?
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Don't some heat pump HWSs have an element to boost once a week and kill off any nasties?
They're getting very popular here in upsidedownland. With most of the population living in temperate and sub tropical areas it's extremely efficient.
I'm moving house soon and the new place will have heat pump ducted central heating that turns into air conditioning in the summer. With solar panels and insulation it's going to be very cost effective.
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Do the Scottish govt provide a mega heat pump subsidy Rham?
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Can anyone live in upside down land?
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The solution to legionella is not to have water sitting in the system. Anyone sensible in a hard water area will run every tap and shower once every couple of weeks anyway so I don’t worry about legionella.
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He did it in an old house - the main jobs were to super insulate the loft, replace all the windows, replace all of the radiators (as they need to be usable at lower temps). It works fine. We have some solar also but the heat pump is quiet and on a place no one can see it (other than our grumpy khunt of a neighbour)
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I spoke to a clever engineer once. He had some bespoke system where he had a massive block of concrete that he heated and then had a fan blowing the warm air it radiated around his house. What is that?
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Masonry heater. Effectively a giant storage heater, traditionally heated by burning wood, but I suppose any heat source will do. Quite common in Germany.
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what is the performance of heat pumps actually like irl?
do they keep your house as toasty warm as gas?
I would be willing to look at this and would consider making the investment on the basis of greater sustainability, but the level of drop off in performance I’m willing to tolerate is basically zero.
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We are situated in a super hard water area and we definitely do NOT run all the taps and showers once a week. There is one shower in the house that AFAIK we haven’t run since moving in two months ago.
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never heard of legionella as a concern in domestic water systems
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me neither - perhaps it’s a myth circulating only in the watersports community?
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See my earlier post. As long as you put the energy into your house to make it toasty warm, there is no difference. It is just the manner in which this energy (heat) is generated.
And yes, they can keep up in winter. We had -10 here in Krautland and no biggie. Leccy use skyrocketed during those days, but that is balanced out over the year. The 350-500% efficiency rates that are quoted are over an entire season (today I am generating 6000w heat with 600w leccy).
In the Nordics, heat pumps are the rule rather than the exception. Seeing heat pumps at literally every home in DK and S convinced me that it should not be a problem further south.
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A lot of commentary I've seen is that they work great if properly fitted by someone who understands how to adapt the install for the specific.
But (standard for the UK) half the people out there fitting them are absolute cowboys interested in doing it as quickly and cheaply as possible, so unless you know your stuff well enough to force them to do it properly it's a total lottery.
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Laz run that shower occasionally as otherwise you may find it scales up and you have to replace bits of it regularly. After I left home had constant problems with my shower only running cold, etc. until we discovered the problem and my mum would run it for a short while one a week or so while I wasn't there. I now go round my house ever week or two and run the taps and showers that aren't used regularly.
I'm only aware of legionella in water systems because there's a section about it in every H&S assessment for a block of flats.
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Yes, they do.
You need to throw out some cherished ideals born of decades of gas boiler ownership. Like you should have the HW and CH on all the time, not on a timer. In fact, they do therefore keep your house toasty warm all the time.
The fact that the water is heated to a lower temperature is not a problem at all, as no one really uses water at 70C anyway. It will scald you.
The legionella thing is a non-issue, either because it never was an issue in domestic systems, or because you run a legionella cycle once a week.
You do need a house that is insulated half well, but that's something that every house should be anyway these days.
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Watch this guy:
Heat Pump Retrofit In a Victorian House. Is It Even Possible? - YouTube
Also this for heat pump relatively dogmatic advocate v old school builder (not plumber):
Skill Builder V Heat Geek | Heat Pump Argument - YouTube
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My heat pump experience so far is limited to heating a pool but it's certainly much more cost effective than an old oil boiler but yes you need to run it more because it's only putting out water that's a couple of degrees warmer than the water coming in at any time.
What gloria says is also true with underfloor heating. It can't respond as quickly as old school radiators so you basically need to keep it running and keep constant warmth circulating rather than thinking you can just pop it on when it colds. Saying that though it's still more efficient because once you get the underfloor up to temperature it pumps heat out for a long time and then only need occasional topping up to keep it warm.
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OMG. The Guardian is reporting, today, that Therese Coffey, who, laughably, is the environment secretary, has just said "There are some places where it’s just not going to work to have a heat pump at all."
She should tell the Swedes, as they have obviously been heating their houses wrongly for 30 years.
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is she wrong? how is someone in the 3rd floor flat of a converted victorian terrace realistically going to have a heat pump?
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well, in New York, for example, they are rolling out a massive programme of window based heat pumps for apartments
or you can have whole building systems, or district systems
it can be done
it's just this country isn't doing it
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everyone in new york has air conditioning. daft to be worried about heat pumps compared to the environmental impact of that.
whole building systems in buildings where every flat is legally separately owned, and the garden is owned entirely by the ground floor flat? good luck with that.
district systems? lol
there are many homes in the uk where heat pumps are practical, viable, and relatively cheap. focus on getting them installed there and we get a lot of benefits without having to come up with mental, ruinously expensive plans to fit them in homes where they're obviously not the best solution.
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thanks for your strong though fact free assertions
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Just need to adjust the planning system so that you are allowed to stick a heat pump on the outside wall of your third floor flat along with also getting it to recognise that some changes to listed buildings are needed for them to still provide viable accommodation but won't fundamentally change the historic nature of the building.
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I get very depressed at how we have basically wasted the last 15 crucial years
heat pumps are established, simple technology which could and should have been mandatory for years
instead we have a govt wibbling about hydrogen and other bollocks
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no worries, i've got the balls to stand behind my wild claim of "heat pumps are good but impractical in some UK properties for a variety of reasons"
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I assume at some point the main constraint will be the grid rather than practicalities and cost of installation.
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As far as I can tell nobody is being forced to get a heat pump? It will be a natural process at the next boiler replacement.
In the Victorian building you can fill the cavities with beads, install EWI, insulate the roof next time it needs re-done and install an MVHR system by running the ducting between the joists. A good chance in somewhere like London you would hardly need to heat it at all and the MVHR would deal with damp issues. None of this is great if you have to do it this year, but all achievable as part of a plan of works.
The fact is people want to blow £125 on F&B paint instead of do anything meaningful to reduce the energy consumption for their bills. The answer is to do proper EPC checks, come up with the most realistic but tough assessment of the level it can get up to, and ban selling it until they are done. Instead you have the situation now where you sometimes get a worse rating for making efficiency improvements. Or just provide you only get the primary residence exemption if they get done.
In any event, the first step can be making sure every new home requires as little energy as possible to heat it. Instead building regs standards are still shoddy, and architects are allowed to do what they like instead of designing for solar gain.
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I agree with all of that bananaman
it's massively depressing
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And the elephant in the room of conservation areas and listed buildings where you will currently largely be banned from making any meaningful improvements. Yes the windows with droopy old glass are lovely but there's no real reason why they can't be replaced with double glazing in a similar frame without any real detrimental effect to the building itself.
My neighbour is trying to work out how to insulate a listed farmhouse and the answer is to allow him to make it slightly bigger by allowing him to add the insulation to the exterior so that the original timbers remain visible inside and to add a new higher roof to it which sits on top of the original roof structure and is packed with insulation. I was allowed to do that converting a barn but suspect the conservation office would object to a similar proposal for an existing house.
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I also agree with you on that SS
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This. And my neighbour spent tens of thousands installing this in his (similar) barn conversion, with the result that his bills went up versus an oil system and he often doesn't have hot enough water to have a shower. I'll pass until the technology is better.
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'The answer is to do proper EPC checks'
You do know what you get for an EPC inspection...?
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Can we assume that Heff, as an 'early adopter' of dodgy and unproven technology, drives an EV?
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My heat pump can heat 90 cubic metres of water to bath temperature in a matter of days so pretty sure it would be more than capable of providing a few hundred litres for a shower without too much trouble.
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the technology is fine. It is used throughout Scandinavia and Germany and other places, where the temperature is much colder than here
if your mate can't heat water properly there is a problem, but the problem ain't that heat pumps don't work
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I agree with the proposition bananaman, but cost is a significant factor. We got EWI put on our house. It cost north of £30k. We are never going to recover that, but we had the money to do it. Many won't have that type of cash available.
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The point is definitely coming where people will start to pay more for more efficient properties. I'm partly putting solar panels in to reduce my own bills but also doing it because I think that when I come to sell in five to ten years buyers will expect a country house with a reasonable amount of land to have some degree of power self-sufficiency.
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Just need to adjust the planning system so that you are allowed to stick a heat pump on the outside wall of your third floor flat
And get your landlord to agree to let you do that. And have the space for the tank, somewhere close to the wall. Sure, no foreseeable problems there.
We already have the smallest homes in Europe. People rightly do not want to to give over that space (inside and out) to heating their homes.
Just insulate the shyt out of everything and that’ll make a huge difference right off the bat. The most efficient energy is energy you don’t need to use.
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The change to the planing system would oblige your landlord to agree so that's not a major problem. Also doesn't seem to be a problem in other parts of the world where each flat sticks its own A/C unit on the outside of the building.
New developments tend to have CHP these days so we're generally only talking about attaching a few to the outside of converted houses.
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Interesting to see I can fill the cavity of my Victorian house with beads. Or magic beans, given there's no actual cavity.
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For a property lawyer, you’ve given this very little thought, Sails.
Who decides where the leaseholder is allowed to put it (remember: this isn’t in the leaseholder’s demise)? Who decides where and how it is attached and where the conduits are punched through? Who is responsible if the structure isn’t strong enough for one heat pump? What if it’s strong enough for the first couple but no more? How does the freeholder recover any additional costs of maintaining the structure with a huge additional load?
And yes Jelly, same. Also external insulation is ruinously expensive, looks dreadful in and of itself, and really ruins the uniformity of terraces.
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I absolutely hate the idea of having heating on all the time. And I hate over insulated houses. I like my house cold at night, nice and airy during the day, occasionally heated for 2-3 hours if I feel like sitting still and am cold and am not in bed. It is an obliging ramshackle Victorian house which does exactly what I want, for now.
So if I had a heat pump instead of my gas boiler, which I do want to replace with something more eco-friendly, can I do this? I suppose I set all my thermostats low? Am I talking hours / days to get a bit of heat into the system?
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The planners would normally decide a lot of that already and you can simply provide it goes through the same hole as the existing boiler flue. Most brick walls of a house will support a small heat pump so very unlikely you'll need structural works and the only additional cost of maintenance is that it's a bit trickier to do the pointing behind a heat pump than without it. For a lot of London the ground floor flat will put the pump in the front or rear garden so it's just the upper flat installing theirs and in this day and age can probably stick on the ground floor's rear or side return extension flat roof. Also when upstairs ultimately decides to extend in to the loft they can create a spot for it.
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Tilnet depends if you have radiators connected to a heat pump or decide to go full underfloor.
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Are you feeling alright, old bean? Have you been on the sauce?
Why would the planning authorities (which are stretched so thin they can’t decide householder applications in less than 6 months in many places) be in any position to decide where to put the heat pumps? Going to send them round to compulsorily purchase bits of the freehold?
If you have two flats on the same level, there’s likely to be a fight about who gets to put theirs in the more convenient place and who has to suck up the cost of putting theirs elsewhere. Also, not everywhere is London you know. There are plenty of purpose built blocks of flats with, say, a dozen flats in, which don’t have a central system but are bigger than just a townhouse conversion.
I think you’re imagining that all flats are spacious townhouse conversions with a nice garden flat and one above. That’s just not the case.
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Appreciate the answer - thanks summersails. Then I will probably continue current plan of segue from gas boiler + radiators to solar + radiators to heat pump + radiators once there's less fuss from installers about insulation. Or unless new tech emerges
This is a well insulated house in fact - good thick walls but no cavity, and doesn't meet tick-box criteria.
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How is it "tick box" when your wall is a thermal bridge? It's basically a giant radiator to the outside, only mitigated by any solar energy being stored into it. The "fuss" is v. basic levels of insulation required to qualify for the grant.
Solar is not going to provide anywhere near the energy you need to heat an uninsulated house so you will be paying a fooking fortune for electric radiators. Logically you either go long on gas and get a new boiler before any ban, or switch now.
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No Anony just provide for legislation that gives flat owners the right to put a heat pump on the wall subject to certain caveats. The additional fees might help to properly resource planning departments. The whole system needs reform to bring in more permitted development for energy improvement measures.
If you've got two flats on the same level they install them where the flue for the current gas boiler is. For a fairly recently built purpose built development you won't need much of a heat pump because of the insulation so you're not putting huge lumps of plant on the walls. You're talking about something that's 1m by 1.5m so should pretty much go on the outside in a similar position to the existing gas boiler mounted internally. Yes it's preferable to have them mounted on a south facing wall but that won't be possible for a great many houses as well.
There are huge number of flats in converted old houses which are the main problem when it comes to energy use and emissions but most of them are fine for sticking a few heat pumps on the external walls.
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Not really, bananaman. I've done the sums. I know the house and its quirks. I know the cost of heating. I know how much heat I use.
I'm not asking for any grant to fund my energy use, and I'm a very low user of energy / heating in any form.
I want the solar anyway - I'm very well situated for it. It would take me decades to recoup the expense of insulating and pump at my energy usage. Move to solar and cutting off gas more effective for me. If my circumstances change, I can make changes.
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Weve got a biggish period place amd Im already appear to be on the downslope of an fairly mediocre career so any spare money (not much at the moment) will go into a pension that wont be enough to retire on until my 70s. I can live with that as we love the house and have a nice enough life. But there is literally no way ill be able to afford to insulate it and heat pump etc. I just hope there is a straightforward exemption for listed property. Or it only kicks in on moving. We wont be moving.
Im gradually moving to wood burning stoves. More affordable and in keeping with the stylenand function of the house. If it worked in the 18th and 19th century it will be fine in the warmed up 21 st century. Also we have a large tree that will need to come down in a decade or two and I will use that until I win the lottery or die.
tbf I might get some solar at some point if the price carries on coming down.
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We’ve got air con with heat function in about half the house, which is a sort of heat pump. It works fine and we use the gas fired CH a lot less.
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nice little article from our Scottish colleagues: https://brodies.com/insights/living/planning-for-net-zero-will-heat-pumps-work-in-scotlands-climate/
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It's not about climate, heff. It's about the quality of the (uninsulatable) housing stock.
Scandis all have heat pumps. But they also all live in heavily insulated boxes. External wall insulation isn't possible. Internal requires ridic amounts of space loss and dehumidifiers for the newly created cavity.
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have you actually watched the video I posted at the beginning?
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External is definitely possible in timber framed places although you'll lose some of the external features and it would be a ball ache. There are now also thin internal insulation materials that mean you only lose an inch or so of the room and I'm sure those will keep advancing.
Changing to log burners is a terrible idea as they'll be banned before long. I was sitting at traffic lights the other day looking at a big fireplace and log burner showroom and hoping that the owner is close to retirement age as he won't have a business in ten years.
I'm also amazed that no government has had a pop at swimming pool heating yet as it's an easy headline grabbing policy that doesn't affect many people so it sounds good even if it doesn't achieve much. I suspect the only thing stopping it is the cost for local councils of upgrading their pools.
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it's good to insulate, and easy to insulate the roof/loft and upgrade your windows. Everyone should be doing that. External and internal insulation retrofit is more difficult and may be impractical. That doesn't stop a heat pump being a good solution, you just need a more powerful one.
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I did. I need to insulate or size the pump larger and have it on constantly and have radiators resized.
Appreciate this is the telegraph, but when the MD of a heat pump manufacturer says this - then the anecdata of a kindly man (who has insulated his home a lot) telling me they work without insulating, I am sceptical.
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The man from Bosch definitely doesn't have his own agenda...
https://www.worcester-bosch.co.uk/hydrogen
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They sell heat pumps too.
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they are trying to get the UK to fund their hydrogen research
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The simple fact is homeowners get fat subsidies off the taxpayer in the form of the primary residence exemption, and richer households benefit from the regressiveness of council tax. Like vehicles, the rule should be buy what you like, but cough up for the externalities you free ride on. Someone thinking I can keep my £20k in my pocket and pollute/leave the country at the mercy of Putin et al need to get in the sea. At this point in time, if you are buying an old cold flat/house with no thought of what's coming it's no different to these people buying houses on the Norfolk coast for "a song" and then crying because we aren't going to pay £1bn for sea defences to protect their property.
Like anything else, what's needed is an honest govt that say "this is a bit shit any way we go", but doing the best they can to reflect the externalities in either taxes or subsidies for the bad/good.
Also as I've said before, maybe there are "hard cases" where it's too difficult too difficult to do, but apparently we need 4m new houses, all of which could be "insulated boxes", and I reckon if he accepted a £10k "loss"/payment for the externalities he freerides on, even Jelly's box could be gas free (he could even get his cleaner to labour for the installer for her 50p an hour to save costs).
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Is WBosch producing H2?
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