The pushback comes from the fact that 95% of homes in UK is not well insulated. Despite nearly 6 decades of push for good loft insulation, some 20% is still under insulated. With windows and doors, although no govt led push towards better doors and windows, homeowners have generally bought in although a good many are still using first gen DG, many now not so efficient due to poor seals, hinge wear etc. Probably less that 10% of Victorian and Edwardian, which forms majority of UK housing stock have proper wall insulation. You can put in loft insulation and install DG but walls are difficult. The whole thing is compounded by the glacial nature of house building that can bring in modern highly insulated houses. Nobody like throwing away money, but being forced to throw it on unproven technology is another matter. People will willingly move over to newer technologies if it proves superior to an older one but at an affordable price.
@quasar9 - or when it’s cost effective to do so. Once we get to the point that ASHP breaks even against gas at COP 2 (electricity 1.8x gas per kWh), there will be no reason not to use them even in Victorian buildings (needing 15kW or less) since it will cost less to do so even running 70C target.
This is pretty much the scale of it, well put, and members here are way more able to see it than the average house owner that doesn't understand how insulation or heating works, the question is though who is responsible for heating homes efficiently/cost effectively? if you take government green targets out of the equation you are still left with the reality of energy costs rising, I think there are millions of people out there that don't really want to think about it and soon they will have to or face bills they just can't afford to pay.
I back in around 1978 fitted a Myson fan assisted radiator, I worked well, took up less room than a conventional radiator, it still pushed out heat even with furniture in front of it, and could be switched to fan only in the summer. Latter versions can be used to heat and cool, the iVector for example. However it also had its down sides as well, during the day one would not notice the noise, but dead of night when it kicked in, needed to turn up TV sound, it would not have mattered so much if a consent sound, but it only kicked in when the room cooled. The unit always allowed full flow of the heating water, it adjusted heat output by turning on fan, latter models have 5 speed fans which auto select speed, but my early model had a large manual rheostat which you could manually adjust speed with. Living room it worked well, but would not want one in the bedroom, and the way it was controlled does not lend its self to working with condensate gas boilers, at least not plumbed in parallel. This is the problem, build a new house and fit heat pumps, heat stores etc, that fine, but modify an existing home is a completely different kettle of fish. Water filled heat stores are heavy, so likely need to reinforce the floor, and they want the water as near to boiling point as possible so it can store as much heat as possible, but heat pumps don't like heating the water that hot, so likely it would need batteries to store energy which cost more. As to why you need to store not sure? The water storage works well, my brother-in-law had it, but to retro fit it is expensive, and the main idea is multi fuel heating, he had solar panels which when the electric not required for other things would heat the water with immersion heaters, he had a LPG gas boiler, and a wood burning fire with a back boiler, and a very well insulated new house, so a fire in the evening was enough to keep house warm all day. And when not at home, solar panels kept a back ground heat, and a pair of hot water tanks could reheat the house using phones to turn on the heating as he arrived back in the UK. Problem however is installation cost, we pay around £400 per year to heat the home with oil, moving to any other form of heating, will also cost, but if it can save £100 per year, then maybe worth it, but at 72 realistically it needs to pay back in no more than 25 years. So £2,500 is the maximum installation cost, not including interest on the money, as that will be offset by price increases, but with that budget, only way a heat pump would be considered is if the oil boiler fails, and at 60 amp incoming it would also mean some upgrade to the supply. As to the goody goody feeling for saving the planet, we all saw what happened when we moved to diesel cars, up's they got it wrong. Look at the cost and it gives one some idea as to resources it is using, however slave labour warps that a bit, but give it a few years, and some other idea will be raised to get us to spend our hard earned cash on, it does not really save the planet, only the worlds monitory system.
I wouldn't waste your money on a heat pump, costly to install and retro fitting will only be successful on a small number of properties. In order for a heat pump to be efficient and work correctly, the whole house has to be designed around the heat pump. So really that is new builds designed to be heated by a heat pump. I would agree with the poster who says air conditioning heat pumps are far superior and with our climate changing you get the advantage of air conditioning thrown into the bargain. I have my house fully air conditioned and I can tell you I couldn't be without it.
I have designed the house around it, and the cost is lower than anything comparable, whether that provides heat though is another matter, as with all these sort of things you only find out what works by building it. It should be fine, the heat source is a small part of heat these days, insulation is where the heavy lifting is done now.
Yes bigger savings to be had with other technologies and simple things like insulating your home properly, Heat pumps are not really designed for our houses or climate really. You have to keep the things running virtually all year round, then when you need the heat in a cold winter they seldom live up to expectations. You can save some money in energy savings on them but that is down to them not heating your home up too well. I used to work as a service engineer on them, it was rare anyone who had them actually had a good word for them, you get the odd ones where the house is suited to them but that is not common.
Actually that brings me to another point, you need to be very careful who actually installs it to the success rate of them. A lot of installers who are accredited don't actually know how to design them initially.
For sure, in fitting anything you want someone that has at least done it a few times and has seen the results, best way with these things is get to know someone who has already done it and learn from them.
It now looks both main political parties have woken up to the frightening cost of going green by setting targets rather than a superior technology take over in its own time. It also carries the public opinion (especially the silent majority). Hence the furious back pedalling by both sides under the slogan of “reducing the burden on working families” .
The wholesale process of switching away from gas in the UK is a massive catastrophe waiting to happen, I have said it before but the heat/energy source is the easy bit, the hard bit is making the house suitable which in most cases means starting from bare walls to do right, and the majority of people in the UK think that their heating should somehow be facilitated by the government, so you got millions of people thinking the government will somehow have to do something for them, and millions of people who simply can't afford to rip out their house to get it into the shape it needs to be just to keep them alive in winter at anything near what they are used to paying. Whenever I say these things someone immediately talks of green issues, I think that is clouding peoples minds to the real issue which is just having affordable heat in the near/medium future, I'm switching now because I'm building now, do I go with gas then strip out in a few years for an alternative? I don't think so.
We only have to worry about “making the house suitable” because the ludicrous price of electricity. R290 systems will deliver 65*C flow all day long if needed… the COP suffers obviously which is why the entire thing comes back to the price of electricity. Combination of ASHP (12kW) and solar PV (6kW) has reduced my own household carbon footprint by 90% (yes there’s embodied carbon and hence a pay back period, but the savings are so dramatic that it isn’t long compared to the expected operating life of the kit). The technology is good enough. Now.
It is, but for most people stripping out their house to then insulate, re board, plaster, decorate and so on is a cost they can't afford and a physical impossibility without moving out.
My point was that that is only required (in some homes) because of electricity costs. Generation cost is in the region of 5p from renewable sources essentially yet we’re paying nearly 30p currently because we’re all supporting the fossil fuel industry. A heating system that can halve running costs, make homes more comfortable and reduce carbon footprint by at least 2/3rds is surely a no brainer. The issue is the government’s continued failure to reduce electricity prices both in absolute terms and relative to gas and oil. If electricity were 10p per kW we wouldn’t have to care so much if the SCOP was 2 or 2.5 or 3 in a large proportion of our homes. A home needing 3x the average gas demand at 10p and SCOP 2.5 would cost about £100 pm to heat (DHW included) to give an example. Which means all that work is less critical and the systems could be installed with higher flow temps.
In some countries like USA and Canada , houses have a relatively short life and each rebuild brings it up to the current standards. However in UK, the average house is closer to 100year old and expected to last another 300 if the rate of house building continues at the current rate. Trying to bring insulation up to required standards is a major challenge. Further, we seem to have messed up even with current current standards as in the case of cladding scandal. Who wouldn’t like a massive drop in their energy bills plus having their homes cool in summer and warm in winter. But forcing the issues as in the case of ULEZ only alienates the public. The danger for UK is that stopping of all major infrastructure projects in the guise of going green will leave us behind rest of Europe especially Germany which is going back on its promises.
We are missing the 'elephant in the room' here. If electricity became affordable, down to a level that we could all afford to use it for heating, 2 issues arise. 1/ Where is the electricity coming from? 2/ How will it get to the consumer? Both of these issues require huge investments from organisations that places the need, and greed of the shareholders before the needs of the customer. Currently (no pun intended), electricity, and gas are rationed by price, why should the suppliers and distributors make work for themselves by selling more of the stuff when they can make obscene profits by selling the same amount, or less, for more. And then charge us all a daily rate of 60p for each fuel for doing nothing at all. Sounds like a good gravy train to me.
Why the government has not made an effort to decouple from gas prices is beyond me, we now have a situation where places like Shetland generate more electricity than they use and pay more than mainland, it's also bizarre from a green point of view, if electricity was not locked to fossil fuel prices the relative cost would accelerate a shift to renewables when everyone realised the true cost of fossil. But we are where we are and it doesn't look like that is going to happen anytime soon.
Their is not the political will to take on the energy companies. This may be due to the government not seeing it as important at the moment, or, more likely, some people who will remain anonymous, are making huge profits and are able to make substantial contributions to unidentified Political Parties who may, or may not be providing a fertile environment for this behaviour to flourish. Make up your own mind on this one.
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