Really good video. It's nice to see someone big enough to re-evaluate a point of view and admit any original shortcomings. That speaks volumes about this guy's character.
@@GosforthHandyman where's your channel been hiding! As a heating engineer just up the road from you at Morpeth, I can say first hand the people that jumped the gun are bitterly disappointed with their new heat pumps. Paying more now already than previously with a combi to heat/provide hot water in their home water....
In the land of -40C winters, the year after a new build with a high-efficiency gas furnace added a heat-pump for cooling, and used the heat pump until the real depths of winter, December through February when it seems to live at below -25 consistently, the heat pump kept pace, and the gas kicked in. They’re thrilled with the heat pump install.
@@GosforthHandyman To be fair, they did build to higher-than-average insulation values and air-tightness, to the point of installing a heat recovery ventilator to control humidity. Also, our energy costs here are a little different… So running a heat pump full gallop at (a converted) 14p a kw/hr when traditionally the gas prices spike is quite attractive. But indeed, the system as sized definitely require the gas backup when the real deep freeze kicked in. I’ll have to puzzle some more on conversions, to get from gigajoules to kwh for gas prices.
Thanks for the follow up video and for correcting points that you got wrong. We’ve had our heat pump since January 2022 and whilst it does make a noise when running, its not particularly noticeable, and a boiler makes a noise when running so we don’t feel thats an appreciable difference. As part of our installation plenty of radiators were replaced but none of the pipework needed to be upgraded, its all 15mm standard throughout. We have two pumps in a push/pull configuration and that gets the water round just fine. In our case we have no gas in our village and had oil heating but the tank failed and the latest regulations meant that a new tank would have to be in the middle of the garden - 1.5m from any building/shed, 0.75m from hedges and boundaries. So we elected for an air source heat pump and received the previous RHI grant which was much more generous. After the grant the cost of replacement is about the same as a new oil tank, give or take. A SCOP/COP of 3.5 is quite typical and in our case running costs are about the same. One more thing to correct though, there is no “wrong orientation” of your roof for solar. They are just less efficient if not South facing. I was told 5-10% less efficient. Our roof is North/South aligned so we have panels on the front (East facing) and back (West facing). On a sunny day our 14kW batteries are full by mid morning!
Thank you for posting. I live in western Washington state and have close to an identical outlook on the things you mentioned. I’m 70 and have a full background in construction from the military and my parents too. I also had a career in medicine and have university science degrees. I am able in general building, plumbing, electrical, drywall, and fine woodworking and finishing. The one thing I can’t change is the fluctuation in material supplies and costs. Even my reading of history doesn’t add much to today’s economic outlook and social climate. My parents went through the Great Depression and Spanish Flu but our worldwide pandemic was different. People are different now. There were 2.5 billion humans when I was born. Now there are 8 billion. You have a good head on your shoulders. I think you will get through the present alright. It’s compromise where you have to, don’t overthink everything, just the critical things, and do what I did, keep the family first. The best to you and yours. Curt
I looked into this after we'd had solar installed, and came to a similar conclusion - COP3 is great efficiency but electricity can be approx 3x the price of gas per kWh, so you end up around the same on heating prices. Solar (+battery) on the other hand is brilliant, and I'd recommend it if you have the cash for the initial outlay. It's free energy from the sun - awesome! Ours will pay for itself in around 5-10 years and hopefully last longer than that.
We're having an octopus ASHP install done at the end of January. A few things to note: 1. Our house is a 1800sqft semi built in 2011 2. We have no gas, so have relied on an electric boiler (the cost is unfathomable. £5 an hour, and then some) 3. The install from octopus is an 8kw Daikin EDLA08E2V3 air to water 4. I've paid a £500 deposit (refundable) 5. Government grant has since increased to £7500 6. Total cost for install (as they throw another £250 into it for you now as well) is £3350 That cost is £11600 for the heat pump, minus the £7500 BUS Grant, minus the £500 deposit, minus the additional £250 Now, if that isn't a bargain, I simply don't know what is. Expected energy usage all year for the heating and hot water is 3335kwh, or £1006 based on a 0.30p/kwh electricity cost. However, we also recently had a 4kwh solar array and battery installed. We also bought an EV and can charge the battery at 7.5p/kwh and run any other electric items overnight at that cost, so the heat pump will draw from the batteries. I intend to expand the battery storage to cover our entire daily usage, so assuming that all goes to plan, we can have the heating and water bill at around £251.62 for the year. But let's assume we only do 50% of the heat pump usage via battery, it'll be around £700ish per year. We also plan to expand the solar panels by another 10, so we'll have an 8kwh array. The excess will pump back into Octopus at 15p/kwh which over summer should bump our credit to the point that we're (hopefully) close to zero outgoings on energy bills. I'll report back in January 2025 to let you know how it goes 😂 I don't care about pay back time as I simply want the worry of outgoing bills to essentially disappear.
Thoroughly enjoy the rant and information :-) I am considerably older than you so my thoughts will be "Old fashioned" but I have just had a new gas boiler fitted, I must say it is a nice bit of kit, like yours it just sits there and isn't running 100% all the time. I thought there was something wrong with it but apparently it is a modulating boiler and just keeps itself ticking over. It is not a combi boiler, just a regular boiler, being old fashioned I like my hot water cylinder and an airing cupboard. As for electric cars, not for me, I will stick to a good old petrol engine vehicle until they drag me down the road kicking and screaming. I did have a diesel and loved it, but then they painted diesel drivers black and up went the road tax, so I went for petrol when it died. Like you I don't believe a word anyone says, there are too many people who are trying to line their own pockets, they have no interest in us as people or the planet or anything else apart from themselves, whatever they sell you will be wrong in twenty years time. That's my rant over, I could go on but I won't 😂😂🤣🤣Keep up the good work Andy, I am soon going to order a new kitchen from DIY kitchens, I was quite impressed with yours and your thoughts on them. The price is good too. Take care. Oh and don't get me started on the bloody council tax!
Great video, and all credit to you coming out correcting errors. We bought our 1963 bungalow in mid Wales 6 years ago, and the first thing I had done was to have Solar put on the roof 3kw, planned with the idea of expanding it to 10kw, and it does not feed into the grid. Our then 2 fossil fuel cars both old Vauxhall Vectra's one converted to LPG, both failed one after the other within 8 months. The misses car went first, I had already explored the idea of EV's and we bought one, a 2011 Nissan Leaf for £6'500. I did the same after my Vauxhall packed up 7 months later. 2015 Nissan Leaf for £9'750. We were saving each year £1'200 in running costs compared to the Vauxhall, not including savings in servicing etc. That gave us a plan to payback in 5 years. We both paid them back this year, mine was settled just a week ago. We now have in our pockets £1'200 a year each extra to spend. So 3 years ago our old Grant Combe Oil burner sprung a leak in the water jacket, I managed to repair for that winter, but we needed a replacement. After much research we decided to go for a LG 9kw Therma V monobloc ASHP, we decided on mono-block, because that meant it was a self contain machine in the garden nothing else was in the house, we kept the same pipe work which was mixed in diameter through out the home, and kept the same rads. Our budget, and plans for the house would not allow these changes until we do our extension further down the road. To install our ASHP we paid an MCS approved local engineer of which there was only 2, which cost us £7'650 installed. We got the Government Grant of £7k before it was lowered to £5k. It took a day and half to complete. I removed the old Oil burner, and got £160 in selling the newly replaced parts to sell on, and scrap value. The oil tank had £300 of fuel left in it, which we sold to locals and friends. The Oil Tank was given away in return for a bottle of wine. The ASHP works just as good as the oil burner and heats our poorly insulated home most all the time. The ASHP is noisy but that because of the way we had in mounted, that will improve. When in Dec last we hit -8c it did struggle, which was to be expected, so we had installed Infrared panels as a back up plan. I installed them myself, we could uses these when the sun shone in winter months. Our Solar system has grown by another 1kw to 4kw and we have added 31.5kWh of battery storage to the system. We can also use one of our Nissan Leafs as a fall back as we can use the energy stored in the car to run the heating system via a generator connect through a device called a Setec 6kw Mobile Power station. This allows to not only use as a generator, but also should the other car run out of juice we can charge it by the roadside. We can also take it camping and run things like bed warmers, lighting, and electric cooking equipment. The drive behind our reason for change was because of the climate! We have no kids to spend money on, because of health issues. We understand the science and accept that not everyone will want to join the movement. Sadly I don't think there will be enough people to make a difference, but that is no reason not to try. The oil companies simply have to much power over our lives. To end on I would add, (having just watch the end of your video), you can buy into a Solar Farm like Ripple Energy. Its a cooperative of people who have got together to buy into owning their own Wind Turbine, or as in our case a Solar farm. It is in fact cheaper to go down this route at 65% cheaper than having Solar put on your roof. We in vested £3k or a 3kw solar array which will accumulate over the summer months onto our account with Octopus, (what a compnay this is, amazing) and it will be used over the start of the winter months next year. The Solar farm based in Cornwall is an extention of an existing Solar Farm from what I can see on Google Maps and is likely to last 40 years. It is transfereable in a will, which at the age of 63 will happen for me to go to one of my Nieces!! This is how I see the climate debade is solved together with more effiencent machines! Combined with in stream water turbines like Obital Marine who make these machines in Scotland, tidal is avaibable 24/7 12 months of the year, and will stick around until the moon pops off. I will share this video to my friends!!
I’m a heating engineer. I know dozens of other heating engineers. Now baring in mind that we would get the materials at trade and the installation labour cost would be zero. Have a guess how many of us have fitted heat pumps in our own properties. The answer is zero, not one. That tells you all you need to know about being an early adopter of heat pumps. My advice for anyone considering spending 14k on a heat pump is stick in a decent A rated gas boiler with a weather comp or opentherm and then take the thousands you’ve saved and spend it on a nice holiday to the Caribbean instead. It’s honestly much more rewarding than chasing some eco waffle dream whilst China and India build more coal fired power stations.
It's genuinely getting to the stage where it may be cheaper have a few months off in warmer climes than paying for our energy prices over winter. The irony. 😂
@@GosforthHandyman lol. Funny you should say that. My mate has a customer with an ASHP. Admittedly they do have a big five bed detached house, but in December then went to Tenerife for a week as it was cheaper than heating their house as the ASHP was costing £49 a day to run. They currently have a special arrangement with their energy supplier to cap their price at £9k a year!!! When installs on these go wrong they go spectacularly wrong. They are being forced on to an industry and therefore the public that in the majority of cases simply isn’t ready. Your point about service engineers is also very valid. I know of one customer who reckons that every call out was costing nearly 2k. That heat pump is gone now.
We're still very early in the adoption curve. I install heat pumps, granted for the more premium customer and I've noticed that the deciding factor is that they want to reduce CO2 and think it's magic to heat your home with cold outside air. As long as we can run at cost parity then theyre happy. I do understand that it will make almost no difference to the global CO2 output if every home on the UK was to convert to electric heating but it's not very productive advising everyone to stick with gas and go on holiday. I do agree with weather comp and opentherm for sure. I know plenty of heating engineers with heat pumps, they are the tip of the spear though. I'm still on a gas boiler but it still has a few years left until I will swap to an ASHP. If the systems are designed correctly by competent installers all the scare stories will fade away. My systems are running at SCOP of almost 4 on average and I know guys that don't settle for anything under 4.5. Lastly, you'll only pay that 14k once. A lot of that price is to make your system compatible which we need to do as part of Part L anyway, designing radiators to 55⁰C for any heat source. In 20 years it'll be a day's work to swap out the external unit assuming it's been designed correctly.
Always love your stuff Andy and this video was superb. Honesty and humility goes such a long way. I’ve followed the ASHP debate through RogerB and the HeatGeek and it’s this open discussion that helps people make an informed decision based upon their own ethics and situation. As the Essential Craftsman would say “Keep up the good work”
Well done on owning up! I live in the country and noise was a big consideration for a heat pump - I’ve walked around the neighbourhood and heard the whirring buzzing noises made by some (cheap) units. I spent an extra €3k on a unit expressly because it just makes a noise like the wind in the trees, no buzz or whirring… Even the circulating pump was chosen and set up to minimise the noise. Result - it’s much much quieter inside and out than the oil system it replaced.
@@GosforthHandyman on ours i can select silent mode from the app or set timers for when you want it to be quieter but even when it's going full pelt it's not loud.....I don't have many neighbours and the horses have not complained yet 😂
Sorry, Andy, I think you been suckered in and while it may be OK for those with money who can afford the high initial cost. For most it is just pie in the sky. I didn’t hear any real technical arguments in support of ASHP and no mention of the regular servicing and associated cost. Until they invent an absolute silent fan every unit in a local area will combine, the more densely populated the louder the noise. Try and find someone in your area with an ASHP and go listen at night. Was your gas price inclusive of the Energy Price Guarantee? If not, my cost per KwH is 60% higher than yours and of course we have the standing charge on top. These topics need face to face debate to get anywhere near a compromise solution and we already know that we don’t get told the truth. If only we lived in an ideal world but we don’t and we never will. Great Chanel by the way. I really enjoyed following your renovation. Regards, Paul Sorry Andy 😷
@@paulowen9628 The technology works, and has roughly halved my costs compared to oil, but there are other reasons than simple finance to cut oil and gas usage. I want my children to have a future, and it’s not enough to wait for governments to act - they won’t. I also don’t want to send my money to places like Russia, Saudi Arabia and Qatar to buy oil when they clearly don’t share our values and way of life.
@@paulowen9628 the arguments about heat pumps being cheaper than gas are a bit disingenuous in many cases and there are a lot of factors at play, but they *can* be cheaper than gas. That doesn't mean they will *all* be cheaper though, by any means, and as Andy rightly says, it's often better to spend money on insulation work now and then worry about changing the heating source later. The equation changes with LPG and oil rather than mains gas, of course. That being said, there are annual maintenance costs for boilers too, and parts are often more expensive than parts for heat pumps, as the heat pumps are inherently simpler machines with few moving parts. No matter what heat source you have, annual servicing is a good idea, so although the absolute cost for that service may differ, it's not going to be wildly different.
Well done Andy. I have looked at all of your videos on this house renovation. Your thought processes are similar to mine I find. You made the right decision to go for a gas boiler at the time (I made the same decision for the same reasons). Whilst it is nice to be an early adopter of new green technologies, you need to ensure that you are doing the right thing for you and your family. It's easy to get taken up with a sexy high tech solution because it is exciting. The costs should rule it out - for the moment at least but I'm sure that most of us will have heat pumps in the future. For me, the technology and critically, the support infrastructure is just not there yet as you have already shown. Geeky people like us may be able to cope with the demands of such tech, but not so the average householder: if they can't even manage with the TRVs on their current systems, then they will be right over their head with a heat pump combined with batteries and PV panels combined. Keep up the good work.
Firstly can i recommend the Heat Geek channel to everyone, those guys' are highly knowledgeable on heat pumps, I work in architecture so i know abit about this subject. You have done a lot of the prep work already by insulating your house as you've progressed so it would help any future conversion. I am also having an octopus energy assessment done on my 80s bungalow so i am interested to see the results . Also like you've suggested ive turned my combi flow temp to rad circuit and also hot water temp down to 45 degrees, which works well for baths/showers but we do find it abit too cold for home heating. I suspect we will have to add more radiators which is annoying but needs must.
Much of their advice seems to be based on theoretical maximums. Real-world averages never reach near the COP values they suggest and likely never will with a wet heating system. Air handlers are much more efficient!
@@GosforthHandyman Heat Geek is very good, worth watching the Skill builder discussion videos they did. Quick search should find them, think it was one reaction one and then one to one with Rodger, entertaining as well
Our 4 bed detached house is only 20 years old yet was built with no cavity wall insulation and a polycarbonate roof in the conservatory which is part of the kitchen. We had the roof replaced with a fully insulated solid roof and the cavities have been filled with the spray ball glued insulation. Our gas consumption has reduced by a third over the year and the kitchen and conservatory are useable all year round. Very pleased!!
The extension on our house is about the same age. It does have some insulation in the walls - I saw it when I had the windows upgraded recently. but it's just 25mm of celotex or equivalent and in some places it's on the inner leaf of the wall and in some places it's on the outer leaf. Seriously considering the sticky ball stuff to improve performance. We have got rendered walls which keeps the water out (cement render on that part since it's block wall, lime on the old cob/stone part) so should be OK, but need to find some sort of reliable, trustworthy firm to assess.
@@GosforthHandyman I wouldn't bother with air source. A fire that heats the water and radiators is probably the best way or a 2 way system if you want to keep your boiler and have air source
I agree. On new builds that are designed for heat-pumps from the outset, it does make sense, but for a very large percentage of UK homes, it's not cost effective, and in reality impossible. Yes, they are more efficient at turning heat in to heat out (very efficient infact), but they run on ELECTRIC, which is way, way more expensive than gas. Heat pumps only have an average return flow temp of about 45deg, so most UK homes would need larger radiators and possibly pipework too, so there's the additional cost/disruption of that. Heat pumps only really work if your house is insulated to a certain level too (ie, up to the eyeballs!), and finally, you WILL need a 300-400l hot water tank which a very large number of UK houses built in the last 30 years don't have room for, and if you can find room, it's all the additional pipe-work required to plumb it in. Personally, an A+ rated gas/LPG/Hydrogen combi boiler makes a lot more sense, and is a LOT cheaper for the consumer. The governemt will never, ever, not-in-a-million-years reach 600,000 heat pump installs a year. Nowhere near.
Do you really need a tank thou? Maybe if you have a bath, but for small homes with a shower that already have an electric shower, why not just use the air source for heat only and then get insta electric hot-water for the kitchen sink and the bathroom tap. I have gas boiler on its way out atm, but i only use gas from nov to end of feb, i am looking into and air source pump atm, mainly as it would save me the gas standing charge, as most ears the gas company's reject my summer usage as the meeter reading is less than 10 units, as my house is insulated. But if i did it, i dont think i would want a tank, A because i just dont need one and the house is to small and B it also takes the cost out of tank out.
Renovating our house we had pay 125%, then 150% council tax because it was treated as a second home. It was inhabitable with no furniture, but as you say that counts for nothing anymore. I was paying two lots of council tax, with a premium on one of them.
Good decision about the heat pump. I just installed one after a long think. I am happy with it. It's definitely not noisy as we don't hear it at all. the water is really hot and give the same result as the combo-boiler. The house heating is a bit different. It definitely maintains the house at the temperature of choice but the radiator are most of the time mild. All in All I don't regret
I looked into this seriously myself a year or so ago. Combi boiler is hands down the best for me. Copper pipes are 12mm (so would need to replace all the pipework) but more importantly, the pre (first world) war house I have has solid walls. So it is impossible to fully insullate. We've done our best (new roof, insulated) but the walls are what sucks the heat out now and you need the burst heat from a combi to heat the home in winter.
I've never heard of a combi boiler being described as "burst heat". You mean a gas boiler will give you a higher initial, quicker rise in central heating temperature?
@@colin4685 compared to a heat pump. Yes. Heat pumps work great for fully insulated homes... My home only half insulated due to solid walls so will be so useless
@boli2746 yes I know how they work. I'm a heating engineer. It's the lower water temperature flow rate and larger size of heat emitters that allow ashp to transfer its heat. Have you had a professional heat loss calculation done on your home?
Andy you need to do your apology I got it wrong again...re council tax you CAN get a 50per cent discount for a 12 month period of time if the house is classed as uninhabitable..so removal of the bathroom facilities and or the kitchen facilities makes it inhabitable
There are a lot of negative considerations that you have skirted over here Andy ...if a house requires bigger radiators and bigger pipework say 22 or 28 mm then that pipework is going to be very difficult to hide so you have fugly piping on show.. additional or bigger radiators mean that in many houses furniture placement becomes more difficult and radiators end up behind furniture the capability to site a monstrous heat pump is also not viable for lots of people and as you have mentioned..the noise that they emit will certainly cause some neighbour disputes. They are definitely a marmite subject at the moment .
Urban Plumber is another good channel for heat pump info, including retrofits. He is a Heat Geek qualified plumber (wish there were more), but he is also very unbiased: Deals only with facts and real-world experience, and is still also a very active gas engineer. I like the idea of a heat pump as we have electric only and cannot have gas or oil for various logistical reasons. I don't see it as a 'cheaper' way of heating my house as it is often (incorrectly) portrayed because of course we cannot have gas anyway, but we use perhaps 15000-16000 kWh per year to heat our 4 bed end terrace which is part 200 year old cob/stone and part 20 year old slightly shoddy extension, plus hot water cooking etc. That's not cheap on electric only, but it's no more than an average house of our size uses, but the temperature in our house in winter was never all that good - we aren't the types to have it set to 25C+ or whatever, but 19-20 is comfortable for us and that was a struggle to achieve. We have a 6kW flow boiler running 5 UFH heating zones, each of which has it's own time and temp programmable stat with app control (Heatmiser, an easy upgrade from old temp only dial stats), and we are on an economy 7 tariff so during the 7 hours of cheap rate we can bung the temperature up which helps during the day. However, we have other problems to solve first before I can even contemplate a heat pump. We have just upgraded a load of 20 year old aluminium framed double glazing which was awful: On cold mornings the frames were maybe 3-4C on the inside and the whole glass and frame would be soaked in condensation. We've had modern uPVC installed (alu clad timber was just too expensive for us), albeit the way it's made is with the traditional cutlines of 18th/19th century timber windows and a grain pattern so it looks like painted wood, surprisingly convincingly. It's even been approved on listed building in some areas. This alone has made a big difference to the comfort of the house. Next, the crappy old single glazed back door which you can see daylight round the frame of. New, custom made oak door (it's in the old bit of the house so it's a weird size, and a stable door because the wife insisted) and a threshold which the current door lacks are going in soon. After that, the front door needs doing (more draughts) and four old handmade wooden windows need refurbishing with new glass and whatnot. Then, we ned to put insulated plasterboard into the new extension on the ceiling (don't ask - the original builders and architect were true morons so we have no access to the roof void, save for downlighter holes, to improve the inadequate insulation). I might also look into improving wall insulation in the extension since it only has 25mm celotex and in some places it's on the inner leaf of the wall and some places the outer, so I can't see it being as effective as it should be. In the meantime, being a software developer I am writing some apps to automatically scrape my energy usage from Octopus, plus air temps etc to do something similar to your graphs, Andy, and after all that work is done (probably 2 more years as it costs a bleedin' fortune!) then I might be in a position where once funds allow, a heat pump *might* make sense. A nice win of, say, 50k on the lottery would probably let me sort all that out in one go and re-render the old part of the house in new lime (and re-do some lime plaster inside) - best buy a ticket!! Even after all that lot, we might not have enough room for the cylinder as our existing, much smaller one, is in the loft and a lot of installers won't put stuff in lofts for whatever reason. And I'm not sure we have a logical place to put the outdoor unit either as they're not exactly tiny. But we'll see how the tech develops and maybe we'll be able to do something. Failing that, a heat battery would be my other avenue for on-demand hot water and they are pretty neat and can take advantage of cheap rate power and would provide more than our 144l tank does, but they are about £3k plus fitting so not cheap either, and often weight ~200kg so siting them is tricky too.
Urban Plumber never seems to give the full picture on the economics though. I love his channel and his work but he's not willing to lay out all the figures like we've just seen in this video. Really annoying...
Slightly off topic, but my sister has a wood/coal burning stove in her 200 year old stone cottage. And when Storm Arwen blew through the North East a couple of Winters back, it kept her alive. She was without electricity for a week at the end of November; she lives out Consett way, so you being familiar with the NE will know it’s bloody freezing then. I hope the Govt doesn’t ban them.
I got my house 15 years ago a new build with Air source heatpump heating fitted, can't fault it at all, never broken down and always produces enough heat through the radiators and enough hot water for a family of 4 for showers etc. I guess an older property with not as good insulation may have issues, the noise yeah you can hear it and I can hear my neighbours but certainly not at all bothersome.
👍👍👍You should be on the telly, seriously. Such a refreshing video to watch, with no bull in it. Just someone telling it as it is, and he aint daft, he knows things
Hey Mr. Handyman big respect for re-evaluating your position. You still say air source heat pumps have a noise issue. My lived experience is that our valiant 11kw heat pump is loads quieter than the vallient combi boiler it replaced. Even in hot water boost boost mode you have to get within 3 meters of it before you hear it. The Combi boiler we could hear from the bedroom. When it modulates down normal heating mode you have to walk right up to it before you hear anything. We live in quiet countryside. And no, it doesn't run all the time, only when the leky is cheap.
Getting an air to air Mitsubishi hyperheat heat pump installed soon in northeast USA. We have solar panels and central air and the AC crapped out last summer, so we needed to replace those anyways. Needing to replace the AC anyways made the decision to go heat pump much easier.
Glad you updated. Whilst the cost element was a very understandable reason to go for the more traditional route, I was very surprised at the time on your comments on heat pumps. Good job!
Well done Andy on the renovation so far, we did ours 18 months ago ( hands off, contractors) and it changes it to really become your own. Very humble of you to admit when you think you’ve got it wrong or re-evaluate based on new info. The only thing we didn’t change in the renov was the heating, just swapped 2 big rads for tiny ones when removing a wall. 🤦♂️ Bang goes the boiler. Decided to get an ASHP to compliment the solar and battery we already have. It’s working a treat. We did decide to get all new rad as the old ones were past it / pathetic anyway. Savings sound about right if you can get a high SCOP I just need to improve ours by doing some top up insulation in the loft now that all the disturbing is done. And I may use your vids as reference and inspiration to do under my ground floor from underneath. 👍🏻 I’m not extremely well off. Young family, and given we’ll be here a long time I want to keep the bills costs as controlled as I can. We managed all this through Energy Saving Trust and Home Energy Scotland loans, following getting an EV loan and EWI installed. Thankfully the savings each month about cover the costs of the loan payments. Oh and a small factor of savings for you to consider £100 /year saving on gas standing charge.
Another great video, Mr Mac. There are so many variables in the equation, it's difficult to be sure exactly which way to jump sometimes. Gas and electricity prices will fluctuate, of course. While the price of electricity in the UK is inflated by charge components like environmental and social scheme support (about 13% of the cost of each unit), in time I feel that pressures to use less fossil fuel and the increased proportion of renewable electricity generation will mean the relative unit price of gas and electricity will start to change and even reverse, so gas will be expensive relative to electricity. Back in 2019 my wife and I invested in a garden office for my wife's business. It is heated (and cooled!) by a mini-spilt air-to-air heat pump and works really well. We live in the west of the Central Belt in Scotland so our weather is broadly comparable to yours. The heat pump works very well and I would say that the CoP has never dropped below 2.8 even on the coldest nights (about -8 degC this winter). Overall, the seasonal coefficient of performance is around 4 and we're very pleased with it. Our house is a 3-bed semi, built 1994 and is reasonably well insulated. We are slowly doing the house up just now and one item near the top of the list is replacing the 29 year-old gas boiler (not even a combi, let alone a condensing boiler!). Initially we planned to just have the boiler and all the radiators replaced. After doing my RUclips research and coupled with our experience of the mini-split in the garden office, we changed our minds to use another ASHP for the house. However, having experienced the (admittedly quite short) hot spell last Summer, we've changed our minds again and are installing two A2A heat pumps for the house so we can have cooling as well as heating. Having looked at the prolonged hot spell in the south of England last year, we feel that it's likely that, as time passes, these hot spells are going to be longer and hotter and work their way north! We're lifting our suspended timber floors to insulate below and increasing our loft insulation too. The A2A installation means that we can remove our radiators completely as we've opted to use wall-mounted indoor units. Generally speaking, A2A is less expensive that an equivalent A2W system BUT it is very unlikely that any A2A system will attract any government subsidy, so these two sort-of cancel each other out. We're looking at perhaps using a device like the Valliant aroTherm (storage tank with an A2A HP mounted on top) to cater for domestic hot water. I was interested in your comments about the suitability of the electricity networks to accommodate the potential loads presented by transferring our domestic heating and transport energy demand onto these networks. As a retired DNO engineer, I'm always shaking my head at the claims that the 'grid' will be more than capable of dealing with these loads, as if the 'grid' was some homogenous machine, which it most certainly is not. The low voltage networks, in particular, will struggle with supporting these new loads as uptake increases. DNOs already require to know if a customer is planning to connect either a heat pump or and EV, so the danger of being told 'no' already exists. Finally - if I may - your payback calculations don't take into account the 'cost' of money over the years, given that £1 next year won't buy the same as £1 buys this year. Even a modest rate of inflation can have a major impact over 45 years! At the end of the day, people invest in their homes because they want to and not necessarily with an eye on their investment paying back. I sometimes think the pay back criterion is somewhat over-emphasised. Anything could happen over the coming years as the pressure to reduce carbon emissions increases, which could render pay back calculations redundant. Thanks again.
Great to see an re-evaluated opinion. Almost all the criticisms of ASHP that fly around are based on a weak understanding that ASHPs need a different and house specific system design, plus an over optimistic use of the reference "COP" value that tells you how efficient the unit will be (which is driven slightly by the mandated "MCS" design process). The larger radiators are actually because the flow temperatures for water with an ASHP can and should be much lower. This is because the system is MORE, not LESS efficient. It is however a very different style of system. Other things that system designers get wrong is misdesigning for water heating and ending up needing an additional immersion coils (which one way you can lose the efficiency). The modern ones run at around 50dB (and are definitely no louder than the sound of the gas boiler). The other area that really needs to be considered with ASHPs is that because they use electricity, they can benefit from solar, batteries and agile tariffs. You are totally right that the heat pump is an expensive retrofit and its hard to find the installers right now (more important is to find the system designer). We're about 100K short of installers.
We also just finished a renovation and, although we didn’t replace the perfectly working gas boiler, something we should have done was installing underfloor heating all round That would have made switching to a heat pump more viable if ever needed in the future
Great to look at the implications. One friend has installed for environmental reasons, another to get rid of gas standing charges. Both recent so no figures yet though happywith performance.
On the noise point. A vaillant is very quite you will not hear it any further than 1 to 2m away. Also yhey do not run at 100% 24 7. Well sized unit will run at 50% 24 7 for average temps. Which is even quiter. So peak noise is not high and also only at the very cold moments. In my eperience. Choose carefully and dont add fear to your neighbours.
I’m surprised you have dismissed the solar panel option, unless you have a massive shading problem, an east / west install can work very well and produce some serious savings. The rates for exported solar power are going up (12 to 15p / KWh now) and anything you use directly saves a lot more. Although you do have to use an MCS certified company, its pretty easy to reduce the installation costs by doing all the prep work for them. If you are thinking of a more “electric” future (heat pumps and EVs) then generating your own power makes sense (just install “bird blocker” to stop the pigeons!)
I've just commented the same. I had a small system installed in March this year (2023) and it effectively took us off grid for the whole summer and we only began importing to charge the batteries in mid October and we exported enough to build significant credit for the winter. We do have shading issues during the winter on one side of the house, sadly, the sunny side. But, we still generate something (particularly on days with light cloud) and having 10kWh of batteries mean that we rarely use full price grid electricity. I fill the batteries on our cheaper rate, not as good as an EV rate but not bad - currently 16.11p per kW. A saving of about 10p per kW every day! If I had an EV and was on Octopus Go I could run my home on electricity priced at about 9.5p per kW!
I'm in Texas,. USA and heat pumps are common for AC, but iffy for really cold winters which we occasionally have. In 2022 we had a long cold spell and pipes froze when electricity failed. My gas central heat was fine when we had electricity and the house stayed warm enough during the periods without it. Apartment complexes were hard hit and with a lot of frozen pipes. Also heat pumps don/t seem to last as long as gas hvac units and use more electricity in extreme cold. I've lived in my present home since '79. and put in two hvac systems., always the most efficient I could afford. The Air Conditioning part of the HVAC systems here are eleectric.
I would say put spend £2-3k on insulation and you will find it easier to recoup your money, make your home nicer and as a bonus when you get a heat pump later it will still be saving you money. Good thing about insulation its will keep working for 50 years.
A neighbour of mine had a 3-bed semi stone barn conversion done about 15 years ago ... she uses solar to supplement hot water. Insulation levels are mad (10" of Kingspan insulation on all external walls internally) and wide boar underfloor heating throughout with ASHP. In 15 years she has got through THREE heatpumps at enormous cost, the current one is about 18 months old. Despite getting a fixed deal before the electricity price hikes she is still paying over £300 a month in winter for electricity for a maintained temp of 18C. She has to use a wood burner every day in winter and even though she lives alone needs to use an immersion heater to top up hot water in winter. When the engineers installed the last pump they reckonned in cold weather a COP of 2 is a about average. She also needs to run the system before cold weather is due because it takes ages to raise the temperature of the underfloor heating slabs and they need to be kept at a steady temp 24/7 to even achieve 18C. Maybe there are problems with her installation but she has used specialist installers to try to improve things. Plus her barn conversion was specifically designed and overspecced for an ASHP system. Doesn't exactly fill me with confidence. 18 months ago we had a new combi oil outdoor boiler installed (no mains gas) and replaced all the radiators and replaced open fire in lounge with an AGA m/f burner. Similar house (but not so good insulation - now being rectified) but we maintain 20.5C year round with unlimited water for about £700 pa and electricity for everything else is about £80 a month (half of which is standing charge). We also get a couple of loads of wood. I appreciate your video and talking about heat pumps but I am still not convinced. Plus like you our roof ridge is NS aligned so no good for supplementing electricity with solar.
We ripped out our central heating system last year and replaced it with air con (air to air heat pump) and its cost us about £60/month to run through the coldest months. Almost instant heat, cooling in the summer, havent looked back. Much cheamer than a new central heating system too.
Really good video and well done, on your work so far on your home. When heat pumps costs come down I think they would be a worth while investment assuming you have copper pipes of the correct size already in the house... unlike mine which is riddle with plastic pipe and according to heat geek I would need to basically upgrade all the pipes in the house to a larger size or change them to copper, which ripping the house to bits is not an option.
That was a great insight to making people aware of the amount of energy they use! As an electrical engineer I believe and totally agree with your analysis at this time! Well worth renovated property! Keep up with the videos, you have done a great job 👏 👍.
That 90 second rant at Government regulation and MsM was perfect. You would never believe that the video would then end with "I'm definitely getting a heat pump ' though. Keep up the good work. Learned a fair bit from this channel 👍
I have a geothermal heat pump installed (Water Furnace 5). Only sound coming from it is the movement of air, and this is when standing right next to it.
Who needs heating anyway with the warm fuzzy feeling from the views of the Ouse Burn in the spring sunshine ! Thanks for the update, I share your views on much of this, (being a grumpy old cynic) I'm yet to be convinced on electric cars although I agree they are probably the answer in the long term but there's still far too much selective nonsense talked about pollution - we all know how wonderful battery metals are for the environment for example, and I've been telling people for years that much of the particulate pollution is down to tyres & brakes ! This is why it's great to have channels like yours, as you talk more common sense and frankly do more meaningful research than most of the mainstream media output, so thanks again ! I'm gonna stop there before I get into the cost of living crisis and house prices !
One thing to add, if you want to do one thing for the environment, don't be afraid to plant trees and do plant native ones, we have a very similar sized plot to you and we planted around 150 native tress when we moved in, most of these are maintained as a natural hedgerow around the garden and is coppiced so as to provide us with all our firewood. you can't do this the same with things like Laurel and they don't support our native wildlife as well. The only way anyone can approach carbon neutrality is to plant more than they use, but you don't need acreage to make a difference ! Looking forward to seeing how your garden develops !
10/10 vid and info so well presented! As usual, your mileage may vary. Funny how the brochure and sales pitch is usually overly optimistic. I got sold a new gas forced air furnace claiming my 15yr old unit was less than 75% efficient so a 94% efficient unit would pay back in X yrs. Turns out the new furnace was much more noisy due to small fan running too fast, but gas consumption didn't change despite a slightly warmer winter and our programmed thermostat settings remained exactly the same. The rub for me is discarding perfectly operable and reliable equipment 10 yrs ahead of designed life expectancy. That is a bigger waste of energy than a few whiffs of NG.
eating your own humble pie in a very constructive way is very good Andy. I know from your videos that your floors and ceilings are well insulated but I cannot remember if you insulated your walls. 1920’s house sounds like it might be solid brick construction. Does your house cool down quickly overnight? I keep our house at about 18ºC, but when I setting the schedule for turning off at 6PM by the time the heating started again at 6AM the internal temperature had dropped by between 3º to 4º and it would take the boiler 90mins to 2hours to heat the house up to target temperature again. I now keep the target temperature at 18ºC 24 hours a day and depending on the weather it comes on between every 90 mins to 2hours for about 15 mins a time. some days I make a loss over scheduling it but on the whole I am using less gas. I know I need to insulate the solid brick walls in our 1904 built house but doing that isn’t a priority at the minute for me. But I knowI would save a lot more money. I’m still out on the whole Air Source Heat Pump thing but thank you for your well thought through analysis.
In my apartment block we're told not to turn them off ever. They 4 hours to heat radiators on a cold day, if I set my water temp it's always 5 degrees lower. Ireland here but the electricity bill is st very expensive
If you get proper OEM service ( where they open it up and clean the heat exchanger) and it’s set up with low flow temp correctly, you should get 15 yrs or more. New WBosch combos come with 10ths warranty
I'm in Canberra Australia. It regularly gets to -5C in winter. We use reverse heat pumps for our heating cooling and they work well and are cheap to run. But when it came to hot water we chose to go with an immersion heater during our reno's a few years ago because the cost of heat pump water heaters was absurd. When it's 5 times the cost of a standard old immersion heater, it just doesn't make economic sense. We put on a large solar power system and a timer on our hot water circuit so that it only heats the water through the day. Our total energy costs for the year for a 160m^2 house are around AUD$1000. That is super cheap to me. Before the renos, in the middle of winter our energy cost for 2 months was $1650 for gas heating and electricity supply. There are better ways to achieve efficiency than just choosing the most expensive option for every appliance you can find. Using solar to offset our electricity has definitely paid for itself in the 4 years we have had it.
Good evening Andy. That was so interesting. A few years ago I had spray loft insulation and I now run a plug in hybrid car charged overnight at 7.5 pence per kw hour. I love it BUT in the winter the range reduces by over 50%. Like you, I am confident that technology and infrastructure will grow to accommodate future growth. As always, it’s great to hear from you and look forwards to future videos. All the best to you and your family. Ray 🌞
MCS guidance states 45 litres per person so Octopus will probably quote a 200ish cylinder. You can request a 250litre or more tank if you are worried about running out. As long as you have the physical space, there is basically no cost difference between the different size tanks.
We have a Diakin ASHP and it is very quiet when running. Also it is a nine year old unit too so not the latest. I have previously had an oil fired boiler and it was noisier externally when running.
Definitely consider an air to air system rather than air to water Much easier to install, faster response times, and you get air con in the summer Not to mention none of the issues with hydronic heating like sludge, water leaks, big radiators in the way etc..
You are correct you won't be stuck with lukewarm water the 3kw immersion heater will heat your hot water the same 3kw immersion that is used to heat your hot water the whole time. For the sake of legionella hot water should be stored above 55degrees your heat pump won't do this if you want to keep your scop high this needs to be taken in to consideration. So far this year I have removed 4 ASHP and replaced with combi boilers because of running costs and inability to get them repaired or serviced correctly they are good in principle but have a bit more of a way to go
Respect owning up. And very thorough video. Calculations should take into consideration that electricity will become cheaper and gas will increase in price. So you should add those into your projections.
Well done on diving deeper and rethinking. It's certainly a fluid situation, but it is almost a no-brainer now for anyone fitting new central heating to be "heat pump ready", oversizing the radiators to work at a lower temperature. We just did that on a house. Your situation with such minimal help is awful. Here in Ireland, where we also have a lot of old and cold housing stock, anyone (not just people on benefits) can get 80% of the cost of cavity wall or loft insulation - and even a grant for "the wrap" external wall insulation for hard-to-fix older homes - plus grants for solar panels, and a car charger, and the grant for installing a heat pump is more. There are of course shortages in all the skilled trades, including the registered retrofitters, but it's moving, and the trainee numbers are rising well. The UK government seems to have an ideological block against offering much at all: given the housing stock that needs all the kind of work you've done and more, that's going to make reducing residential CO2 emissions hard, and they are a significant chunk of the total emissions.
Nice to see you reasses your earlier assumptions. But I'm a bit confused, if the payback is likely to be 45 years+ and you'd need a cylinder (with limited hot water supply), why would you even think about getting one in a few years?
The problem of course is the variables which totally skew things. You’ve shown your gas prices as 10.6p - had you been on Octopus tracker the max it went was 6.2 and is currently 3.95 . Had you used those figures, you’d not be tho king a pump was a good deal! Obviously if you pair with solar and battery storage, it skews it even more. I’ve not really got anywhere I could place one, so it’s a gas boiler all the way for me - even though I have 16 panels that can make 6.7kwh and a 9.5kw battery.
Great video.👍 I do remember raising an eyebrow when you went with the cheap gas install. However your right, the spending has to end somewhere. My family and I are just about to complete our 2000 Sqft new build and we went with an Hitachi ASHP as there is no mains gas where we built. Get the council energy assessor to Energy assess the whole house as air tightness and insulation values are key to the correct sizing of the ASHP to meet your family needs. Your right, the lower designed flow temperatures may require an odd larger radiator to properly heat that particular space but the energy assessor work that out for you. We are also fitting a house battery as soon as funds allow. U.K electricity and gas prices are bad now however when the government price cap lifts and next winter arrives I fear prices could rise ten fold. Order your solar set up now lad!
I'm about to replace my oil boiler with ASHP. Why? The lack of routine maintenance, the engineer has gone to breakdown maintenance only, highly agravating 2 breakdowns in 2 months, no service but 2 call outs and days of no heating! When I used to go to work, central heating came on timetable. Now I've retired, my routine is no longer predictable. My radiators are set at 1 or 2 at the moment so there is scope to have a lower flow temperature. I am having a double fan ASHP which is theoretically a replacement for my boiler and can have similar flow temperatures. I live alone so can shower, wash clothes etc as hot water is available. My hot water tank is adequate for 2 showers together. I have had solar panels and a battery installed so hope to take the cost edge of some of my electricity costs. Major peeve is the electric company hasn't increased the payment it makes when I sell mine to them, but have to buy back at the inflated rate! Ie they are profiting from all those micro generators. Grrr
We live in Somerset and recently had a quote for air-sourced heat pump install for just over £10k and with a grant of £5k plus a possibility of selling on our oil boiler and remaining oil, we would be looking at less than £5k, so for us it's a viable alternative. Add on a 4.5kwh solar install coming in around £11.5k I think we could be looking at a quicker pay back. As you say it's very much an evolving technology and with improvements on battery tech etc, another few years on will see a more possibilities of energy-independence for more people, even in our climate 😀.
RE cold weather operation mathius wandle has a good video on the subject on the significant effect of humidity, which is most significant at just above ) 0 deg C. So unfortunately for UK homes air source pumps MAY be less efficient in our mild damp environment compared to colder environments.
Thank you for being self-critical and honest and all the information. We'll have the very similar problem here in Europe - no difference to what you told. I thin e-cars won't solve anything. As far as I know they only really come out on top if you drive them (the car) to it life end. Batterie changes not included. Cars must be reduced, public transport up. Small electric transporter and new ideas will help too. Electricity/energy storage in big terms is key I think. We need to look wide! Like the sand heat storage some blokes Finnland made.
Sorry if I missed it but with the heat pump would you also cap off your gas if you’re using an electric hob etc. So your standing charge may be around 30p so another £100 per year saved. I know it doesn’t make a massive difference but worth considering.
Yeah thanks ,I found your vid very informative,, actually I believe heat pumps can be installed alot more cheaply then your figure.. I too (down the road ) am thinking of getting a heat pump but as an option keeping the gas boiler...The down side of doing that is the standing charge on gas ,,,that is the biggest con going!!!!!
If you are buying a ASHP monoblock system, you do not need to be F gas registered as the ASHP comes pregassed and the only connections you need to make are for the flow and return for the central heating and hot water cylinder, plus electrics. Check out the LG THERMA V R32 Monobloc S
I think prices are dropping for heat pumps, and there is some promising technology driving COP upwards (variable compressors, and more efficient compressor design) but yes I agree with your thesis. Heat pumps only really make sense if you combine them with solar PV, batteries and a sensible (Octopus style) tariff arrangement. And much easier to retrofit a heat pump than to retrofit insulation. So your priorities were definitely correct!
Cheers! If we could work out a way of doing solar that would be a game changer, but roof pointing the wrong way. Perhaps studio room roof... but that would take it over the permitted development height limit. 🙄👍
EDF here in France currently charge me 0.206 cents/kwh - that equates to around 0.177p/kwh. (depending on the current exchange rate). That's under half the price you quote - and presumably EDF in the UK is also charging double what they do in France. Rum old world, eh!
What an interesting post, we are set to move to a bungalow and we are of a certain age. I’ve investigated ASHP to death and will arrange to get a quote to replace the gas boiler etc. The bungalow has cavity wall insulation and a few solar panels. When you add all that into the mix it could be worth while. Don’t think at my age I will get a ROI, for me it’s about comfort and keeping costs low. I think in the U.K. we are turning a corner and costs will continue to lower. When you look at the take up of solar panels a lot don’t exist anymore which may have resulted in the change of government policy, don’t know. But all new technology comes with a guarantee risk and following some of the sparks channels fixing issue isn’t cheap. Great post.
Electric infrastructure. Yes you are correct. I'm having a solar / battery system & car charger (no EV yet) installed on my 1986 built house & it turned out that we had a looped mains electrical supply with our neighbour. The shared incoming cable size (into ours & looped to our neighbour) was not large enough to handle the extra load of the 7kW car charger (32 amps) on top of the existing usage for both houses. The solution was to disconnect the looped cable between the two houses & run in a new cable from the street into my neighbours house which involved digging up the street & parts of the front garden. To be fair the guys that did the work, with the engineers from National Grid, were quick. 3 days start to finish & the power was only off for less than 15 mins on the last day. They replaced / repaired our neighbours block paved drive, tarmac pathway & even re-seeded the grass on the pathway out the front of the houses. Both outside meter cupboards were also upgraded with new manual isolators &100amp fuses (from 60amp). All free of charge thank god. The National Grid engineer I spoke to admitted that if 10 more people in our cul-de-sac wanted to install car chargers or heat pumps then not only would they have to un-loop & upgrade all their house supplies they would have to install a new larger mains cable right down the middle of the street & upgrade or replace the local electrical substation as well. That's just one small example of the amount of work that that will be required to upgrade the outdated domestic electrical systems that serves probably 90% of UK houses. As for heat pumps, they have a place, especially in well insulated new build homes. Indeed I've heard that at least one main stream house builder is now installing heat pumps with underfloor heating for ground & rads for 1st floor as standard on all their new 2/3 & 4 bed houses. However, retrofitting them into older houses is expensive & invasive - much like central heating was when added to old 1930's houses back in the 1960's. I still have a gas boiler (only 5 years old) & plan to divert some of my solar energy to heat the hot water in the summer. However, longer term I will probably go for a multi Air to Air (not air to water) Heat Pump system installed for house heating with a separate or integrated Heat Pump hot water cylinder located in our loft or garage. Not only are A2A Heat pump system cheaper buy & install than A2W, they can also provide cooling in summer somthing A2W systems cannot do without expensive changes. For more info on an Air to Air Heat Pump example installation have a look at www.youtube.com/@TimAndKatsGreenWalk who have documented the reason why they chose a A2A over A2W system & their forthcoming Solar / battery installation - part way through. They also have an EV. Right or wrong, your videos are always a good watch Andy. Keep them coming.
@@GosforthHandyman yikes! I be pulling more than 3 to 4 that overnight at some times. Between the hot water, storage battery, car if it’s on charge. Spose not many folks are doing the same as me in my street. I think my neighbours must think I’m mad.
Very interesting review of the issue of home heating. I am facing an end of life combi this year and with a large rear garden considered a ground source pump as an alternative. The costs to upgrade my internal heating pipes and the disruption involved plus the groundworks really did not add up in my case. We have a new build along the road with an air pump and you hear it when walking by so that put me off.
If you have a new build with modern insulation and underfloor heating then a heat pump is a great solution. I pad around our house in shorts and a T-shirt 365 days a year. The noise is no problem in my view but a cover for your pump can reduce the perception of noise significantly. It also doesn't run all the time even during weeks of minus temperatures. In the summer, I often chat with our neighbours directly in front of ours to benefit from the cool breeze. We are a terrace of three houses with a pump in front of each house and I have never perceived the noise as a nuisance. The 'common sense' of heat pumps is different though. Getting used to a low-temperature system with a long time lag is not so easy. How you feel it works and how it really works are two very different things.
I agree with a reply from Australia below. I live in Arizona and use a heat pump for cooling and heating using forced air not radiators. The heat pump does not handle the hot water. Most people, me included, use an immersion heater (electric or gas) that is in the garage. Modern immersion heaters are well insulated and mine costs very little over the year. Of course being in the garage means the Summer ambient temp can get to 95F inside, so any heat loss from the water heater will be minimal. I live alone in a 1540 square foot house and pay approximately $100 per month for electricity. I don't have gas and use the electricity for all my power needs. I reckon that the heat pump uses about 1/3 of my power per year so I am very happy with system.
Are solar water heaters big over there? I’ve seen loads in places like Turkey where they get painful sun, even seen quite a lot on roofs in Ireland (probably EU rebates on em).
There is a lot of replacement ongoing in the power industry this has & will be ongoing as infrastructure needs replacing (most was designed to last 30 years, however because most was over engineered have lasted around 50 years) new installs are up sized to cover the increase in use !
Heat pumps and installations are very expensive compared to a combi boiler install but you can help reduce the costs further. Octopus have an electric tariff called cosy which offers lower rates through the day to help heat pump owners. Home battery storage can be charged over night on cheap tariffs to power your home until the next overnight charge. Granted even a modest battery solution isn’t going to power your heat pump all day but it can be all worked out so you can make the most of it. Those thinking about powering a heat pump with solar. During the coldest months I barely produce enough to power the house….and this is on sunny days let alone cloudy days.
You really need to be think again about solar panels, as these would make a significant difference to your heat pump calculations. Like yours, our roof pitch faced the wrong way, so I built a 'solar pergola' in our back garden facing south. Consists of 12 panels, giving a peak of 3.6kW and as added bonus some nice shade in the hot summer months to enjoy a cold beer. Oh and I now drive one of those pesky Tesla's, love it!
Just check for the mcs installers in my area we have none .. the nearest is 10 miles away in Bradford or 12 miles away the other end of Huddersfield... We have two Solar installers ..
As others have said insulation is a must and the best ROI. I went from 13,000 kWh gas in 2010 in a yr 2000 house with regular boiler down to 8,000kWh in 2022 with successive insulation improvements mainly in the loft. Summer of 2022 went with an ATAG combi and already down to 5,800 kWh for that year and predicting 2023 5,170kWh. An air source for me would be approaching sweating the small stuff as its easily undone by electric unit and standing charges compared to gas. That might change but i doubt it like diesel was once cheaper than petrol but it aint now.
Really good video. It's nice to see someone big enough to re-evaluate a point of view and admit any original shortcomings. That speaks volumes about this guy's character.
Cheers!
@@GosforthHandyman where's your channel been hiding! As a heating engineer just up the road from you at Morpeth, I can say first hand the people that jumped the gun are bitterly disappointed with their new heat pumps. Paying more now already than previously with a combi to heat/provide hot water in their home water....
Have to agree this is how you get credibility
On my sixth winter with an air to water heat pump and love it . 5 bedroom house we didn’t change pipe work or radiators .
The best part of the video was the very polite rant about the government and mainstream media. Nicely done.
In the land of -40C winters, the year after a new build with a high-efficiency gas furnace added a heat-pump for cooling, and used the heat pump until the real depths of winter, December through February when it seems to live at below -25 consistently, the heat pump kept pace, and the gas kicked in. They’re thrilled with the heat pump install.
Wow - that's impressive! 👍
@@GosforthHandyman To be fair, they did build to higher-than-average insulation values and air-tightness, to the point of installing a heat recovery ventilator to control humidity. Also, our energy costs here are a little different… So running a heat pump full gallop at (a converted) 14p a kw/hr when traditionally the gas prices spike is quite attractive. But indeed, the system as sized definitely require the gas backup when the real deep freeze kicked in.
I’ll have to puzzle some more on conversions, to get from gigajoules to kwh for gas prices.
Thanks for the follow up video and for correcting points that you got wrong. We’ve had our heat pump since January 2022 and whilst it does make a noise when running, its not particularly noticeable, and a boiler makes a noise when running so we don’t feel thats an appreciable difference. As part of our installation plenty of radiators were replaced but none of the pipework needed to be upgraded, its all 15mm standard throughout. We have two pumps in a push/pull configuration and that gets the water round just fine.
In our case we have no gas in our village and had oil heating but the tank failed and the latest regulations meant that a new tank would have to be in the middle of the garden - 1.5m from any building/shed, 0.75m from hedges and boundaries. So we elected for an air source heat pump and received the previous RHI grant which was much more generous. After the grant the cost of replacement is about the same as a new oil tank, give or take.
A SCOP/COP of 3.5 is quite typical and in our case running costs are about the same.
One more thing to correct though, there is no “wrong orientation” of your roof for solar. They are just less efficient if not South facing. I was told 5-10% less efficient. Our roof is North/South aligned so we have panels on the front (East facing) and back (West facing). On a sunny day our 14kW batteries are full by mid morning!
Thank you for posting. I live in western Washington state and have close to an identical outlook on the things you mentioned. I’m 70 and have a full background in construction from the military and my parents too. I also had a career in medicine and have university science degrees. I am able in general building, plumbing, electrical, drywall, and fine woodworking and finishing. The one thing I can’t change is the fluctuation in material supplies and costs. Even my reading of history doesn’t add much to today’s economic outlook and social climate. My parents went through the Great Depression and Spanish Flu but our worldwide pandemic was different. People are different now. There were 2.5 billion humans when I was born. Now there are 8 billion. You have a good head on your shoulders. I think you will get through the present alright. It’s compromise where you have to, don’t overthink everything, just the critical things, and do what I did, keep the family first. The best to you and yours. Curt
I looked into this after we'd had solar installed, and came to a similar conclusion - COP3 is great efficiency but electricity can be approx 3x the price of gas per kWh, so you end up around the same on heating prices.
Solar (+battery) on the other hand is brilliant, and I'd recommend it if you have the cash for the initial outlay. It's free energy from the sun - awesome! Ours will pay for itself in around 5-10 years and hopefully last longer than that.
We're having an octopus ASHP install done at the end of January. A few things to note:
1. Our house is a 1800sqft semi built in 2011
2. We have no gas, so have relied on an electric boiler (the cost is unfathomable. £5 an hour, and then some)
3. The install from octopus is an 8kw Daikin EDLA08E2V3 air to water
4. I've paid a £500 deposit (refundable)
5. Government grant has since increased to £7500
6. Total cost for install (as they throw another £250 into it for you now as well) is £3350
That cost is £11600 for the heat pump, minus the £7500 BUS Grant, minus the £500 deposit, minus the additional £250
Now, if that isn't a bargain, I simply don't know what is.
Expected energy usage all year for the heating and hot water is 3335kwh, or £1006 based on a 0.30p/kwh electricity cost. However, we also recently had a 4kwh solar array and battery installed. We also bought an EV and can charge the battery at 7.5p/kwh and run any other electric items overnight at that cost, so the heat pump will draw from the batteries. I intend to expand the battery storage to cover our entire daily usage, so assuming that all goes to plan, we can have the heating and water bill at around £251.62 for the year. But let's assume we only do 50% of the heat pump usage via battery, it'll be around £700ish per year.
We also plan to expand the solar panels by another 10, so we'll have an 8kwh array. The excess will pump back into Octopus at 15p/kwh which over summer should bump our credit to the point that we're (hopefully) close to zero outgoings on energy bills.
I'll report back in January 2025 to let you know how it goes 😂 I don't care about pay back time as I simply want the worry of outgoing bills to essentially disappear.
Great to hear you changed your views on heat pumps! It's so important to challenge your views, especially the way the MSM works these days.
Really interesting video. As an electrician it was great to see someone understand the local DNO issues we are faced with. Good stuff.
Thoroughly enjoy the rant and information :-) I am considerably older than you so my thoughts will be "Old fashioned" but I have just had a new gas boiler fitted, I must say it is a nice bit of kit, like yours it just sits there and isn't running 100% all the time. I thought there was something wrong with it but apparently it is a modulating boiler and just keeps itself ticking over. It is not a combi boiler, just a regular boiler, being old fashioned I like my hot water cylinder and an airing cupboard.
As for electric cars, not for me, I will stick to a good old petrol engine vehicle until they drag me down the road kicking and screaming. I did have a diesel and loved it, but then they painted diesel drivers black and up went the road tax, so I went for petrol when it died.
Like you I don't believe a word anyone says, there are too many people who are trying to line their own pockets, they have no interest in us as people or the planet or anything else apart from themselves, whatever they sell you will be wrong in twenty years time. That's my rant over, I could go on but I won't 😂😂🤣🤣Keep up the good work Andy, I am soon going to order a new kitchen from DIY kitchens, I was quite impressed with yours and your thoughts on them. The price is good too. Take care.
Oh and don't get me started on the bloody council tax!
Great video, and all credit to you coming out correcting errors. We bought our 1963 bungalow in mid Wales 6 years ago, and the first thing I had done was to have Solar put on the roof 3kw, planned with the idea of expanding it to 10kw, and it does not feed into the grid. Our then 2 fossil fuel cars both old Vauxhall Vectra's one converted to LPG, both failed one after the other within 8 months. The misses car went first, I had already explored the idea of EV's and we bought one, a 2011 Nissan Leaf for £6'500. I did the same after my Vauxhall packed up 7 months later. 2015 Nissan Leaf for £9'750. We were saving each year £1'200 in running costs compared to the Vauxhall, not including savings in servicing etc. That gave us a plan to payback in 5 years. We both paid them back this year, mine was settled just a week ago. We now have in our pockets £1'200 a year each extra to spend.
So 3 years ago our old Grant Combe Oil burner sprung a leak in the water jacket, I managed to repair for that winter, but we needed a replacement. After much research we decided to go for a LG 9kw Therma V monobloc ASHP, we decided on mono-block, because that meant it was a self contain machine in the garden nothing else was in the house, we kept the same pipe work which was mixed in diameter through out the home, and kept the same rads. Our budget, and plans for the house would not allow these changes until we do our extension further down the road. To install our ASHP we paid an MCS approved local engineer of which there was only 2, which cost us £7'650 installed. We got the Government Grant of £7k before it was lowered to £5k. It took a day and half to complete. I removed the old Oil burner, and got £160 in selling the newly replaced parts to sell on, and scrap value. The oil tank had £300 of fuel left in it, which we sold to locals and friends. The Oil Tank was given away in return for a bottle of wine. The ASHP works just as good as the oil burner and heats our poorly insulated home most all the time. The ASHP is noisy but that because of the way we had in mounted, that will improve. When in Dec last we hit -8c it did struggle, which was to be expected, so we had installed Infrared panels as a back up plan. I installed them myself, we could uses these when the sun shone in winter months.
Our Solar system has grown by another 1kw to 4kw and we have added 31.5kWh of battery storage to the system. We can also use one of our Nissan Leafs as a fall back as we can use the energy stored in the car to run the heating system via a generator connect through a device called a Setec 6kw Mobile Power station. This allows to not only use as a generator, but also should the other car run out of juice we can charge it by the roadside. We can also take it camping and run things like bed warmers, lighting, and electric cooking equipment.
The drive behind our reason for change was because of the climate! We have no kids to spend money on, because of health issues. We understand the science and accept that not everyone will want to join the movement. Sadly I don't think there will be enough people to make a difference, but that is no reason not to try. The oil companies simply have to much power over our lives.
To end on I would add, (having just watch the end of your video), you can buy into a Solar Farm like Ripple Energy. Its a cooperative of people who have got together to buy into owning their own Wind Turbine, or as in our case a Solar farm. It is in fact cheaper to go down this route at 65% cheaper than having Solar put on your roof. We in vested £3k or a 3kw solar array which will accumulate over the summer months onto our account with Octopus, (what a compnay this is, amazing) and it will be used over the start of the winter months next year. The Solar farm based in Cornwall is an extention of an existing Solar Farm from what I can see on Google Maps and is likely to last 40 years. It is transfereable in a will, which at the age of 63 will happen for me to go to one of my Nieces!! This is how I see the climate debade is solved together with more effiencent machines! Combined with in stream water turbines like Obital Marine who make these machines in Scotland, tidal is avaibable 24/7 12 months of the year, and will stick around until the moon pops off.
I will share this video to my friends!!
I’m a heating engineer. I know dozens of other heating engineers. Now baring in mind that we would get the materials at trade and the installation labour cost would be zero. Have a guess how many of us have fitted heat pumps in our own properties. The answer is zero, not one. That tells you all you need to know about being an early adopter of heat pumps.
My advice for anyone considering spending 14k on a heat pump is stick in a decent A rated gas boiler with a weather comp or opentherm and then take the thousands you’ve saved and spend it on a nice holiday to the Caribbean instead. It’s honestly much more rewarding than chasing some eco waffle dream whilst China and India build more coal fired power stations.
Great advice, I fully agree. Just got a new Vaillant, weather comp controlled by sensocomfort and esbe electronic mixing valve
It's genuinely getting to the stage where it may be cheaper have a few months off in warmer climes than paying for our energy prices over winter. The irony. 😂
@@GosforthHandyman lol. Funny you should say that. My mate has a customer with an ASHP. Admittedly they do have a big five bed detached house, but in December then went to Tenerife for a week as it was cheaper than heating their house as the ASHP was costing £49 a day to run. They currently have a special arrangement with their energy supplier to cap their price at £9k a year!!! When installs on these go wrong they go spectacularly wrong. They are being forced on to an industry and therefore the public that in the majority of cases simply isn’t ready.
Your point about service engineers is also very valid. I know of one customer who reckons that every call out was costing nearly 2k. That heat pump is gone now.
We're still very early in the adoption curve. I install heat pumps, granted for the more premium customer and I've noticed that the deciding factor is that they want to reduce CO2 and think it's magic to heat your home with cold outside air. As long as we can run at cost parity then theyre happy.
I do understand that it will make almost no difference to the global CO2 output if every home on the UK was to convert to electric heating but it's not very productive advising everyone to stick with gas and go on holiday. I do agree with weather comp and opentherm for sure.
I know plenty of heating engineers with heat pumps, they are the tip of the spear though. I'm still on a gas boiler but it still has a few years left until I will swap to an ASHP. If the systems are designed correctly by competent installers all the scare stories will fade away. My systems are running at SCOP of almost 4 on average and I know guys that don't settle for anything under 4.5.
Lastly, you'll only pay that 14k once. A lot of that price is to make your system compatible which we need to do as part of Part L anyway, designing radiators to 55⁰C for any heat source. In 20 years it'll be a day's work to swap out the external unit assuming it's been designed correctly.
@@jacbisgood2221
China are building TWO coal-fired power stations EVERY WEEK.
Always love your stuff Andy and this video was superb. Honesty and humility goes such a long way. I’ve followed the ASHP debate through RogerB and the HeatGeek and it’s this open discussion that helps people make an informed decision based upon their own ethics and situation. As the Essential Craftsman would say “Keep up the good work”
Well done on owning up! I live in the country and noise was a big consideration for a heat pump - I’ve walked around the neighbourhood and heard the whirring buzzing noises made by some (cheap) units. I spent an extra €3k on a unit expressly because it just makes a noise like the wind in the trees, no buzz or whirring… Even the circulating pump was chosen and set up to minimise the noise. Result - it’s much much quieter inside and out than the oil system it replaced.
Yup, the tech will advance to make them all much quieter. Even the design of the fan blades can make a huge difference.
@@GosforthHandyman on ours i can select silent mode from the app or set timers for when you want it to be quieter but even when it's going full pelt it's not loud.....I don't have many neighbours and the horses have not complained yet 😂
Sorry, Andy, I think you been suckered in and while it may be OK for those with money who can afford the high initial cost. For most it is just pie in the sky.
I didn’t hear any real technical arguments in support of ASHP and no mention of the regular servicing and associated cost. Until they invent an absolute silent fan every unit in a local area will combine, the more densely populated the louder the noise. Try and find someone in your area with an ASHP and go listen at night.
Was your gas price inclusive of the Energy Price Guarantee? If not, my cost per KwH is 60% higher than yours and of course we have the standing charge on top.
These topics need face to face debate to get anywhere near a compromise solution and we already know that we don’t get told the truth.
If only we lived in an ideal world but we don’t and we never will.
Great Chanel by the way. I really enjoyed following your renovation.
Regards, Paul
Sorry Andy 😷
@@paulowen9628 The technology works, and has roughly halved my costs compared to oil, but there are other reasons than simple finance to cut oil and gas usage. I want my children to have a future, and it’s not enough to wait for governments to act - they won’t. I also don’t want to send my money to places like Russia, Saudi Arabia and Qatar to buy oil when they clearly don’t share our values and way of life.
@@paulowen9628 the arguments about heat pumps being cheaper than gas are a bit disingenuous in many cases and there are a lot of factors at play, but they *can* be cheaper than gas. That doesn't mean they will *all* be cheaper though, by any means, and as Andy rightly says, it's often better to spend money on insulation work now and then worry about changing the heating source later. The equation changes with LPG and oil rather than mains gas, of course. That being said, there are annual maintenance costs for boilers too, and parts are often more expensive than parts for heat pumps, as the heat pumps are inherently simpler machines with few moving parts. No matter what heat source you have, annual servicing is a good idea, so although the absolute cost for that service may differ, it's not going to be wildly different.
Well done Andy. I have looked at all of your videos on this house renovation. Your thought processes are similar to mine I find. You made the right decision to go for a gas boiler at the time (I made the same decision for the same reasons). Whilst it is nice to be an early adopter of new green technologies, you need to ensure that you are doing the right thing for you and your family. It's easy to get taken up with a sexy high tech solution because it is exciting. The costs should rule it out - for the moment at least but I'm sure that most of us will have heat pumps in the future. For me, the technology and critically, the support infrastructure is just not there yet as you have already shown. Geeky people like us may be able to cope with the demands of such tech, but not so the average householder: if they can't even manage with the TRVs on their current systems, then they will be right over their head with a heat pump combined with batteries and PV panels combined. Keep up the good work.
Firstly can i recommend the Heat Geek channel to everyone, those guys' are highly knowledgeable on heat pumps, I work in architecture so i know abit about this subject. You have done a lot of the prep work already by insulating your house as you've progressed so it would help any future conversion. I am also having an octopus energy assessment done on my 80s bungalow so i am interested to see the results . Also like you've suggested ive turned my combi flow temp to rad circuit and also hot water temp down to 45 degrees, which works well for baths/showers but we do find it abit too cold for home heating. I suspect we will have to add more radiators which is annoying but needs must.
Much of their advice seems to be based on theoretical maximums. Real-world averages never reach near the COP values they suggest and likely never will with a wet heating system. Air handlers are much more efficient!
@@sdgelectronics ok but what about an air to air source pump ?
Will check out Heat Geek! Do they fit heat pumps?
@@GosforthHandyman yes they do i particularly recommend the 2 parter they did with skill builder ruclips.net/video/fFpxiprcRfY/видео.html
@@GosforthHandyman Heat Geek is very good, worth watching the Skill builder discussion videos they did. Quick search should find them, think it was one reaction one and then one to one with Rodger, entertaining as well
Our 4 bed detached house is only 20 years old yet was built with no cavity wall insulation and a polycarbonate roof in the conservatory which is part of the kitchen. We had the roof replaced with a fully insulated solid roof and the cavities have been filled with the spray ball glued insulation. Our gas consumption has reduced by a third over the year and the kitchen and conservatory are useable all year round. Very pleased!!
Fantastic! We have family who just went for a warm conservatory roof - huge difference!
The extension on our house is about the same age. It does have some insulation in the walls - I saw it when I had the windows upgraded recently. but it's just 25mm of celotex or equivalent and in some places it's on the inner leaf of the wall and in some places it's on the outer leaf. Seriously considering the sticky ball stuff to improve performance. We have got rendered walls which keeps the water out (cement render on that part since it's block wall, lime on the old cob/stone part) so should be OK, but need to find some sort of reliable, trustworthy firm to assess.
@@GosforthHandyman I wouldn't bother with air source. A fire that heats the water and radiators is probably the best way or a 2 way system if you want to keep your boiler and have air source
@@GosforthHandyman we have it we don't get hot water
I agree. On new builds that are designed for heat-pumps from the outset, it does make sense, but for a very large percentage of UK homes, it's not cost effective, and in reality impossible. Yes, they are more efficient at turning heat in to heat out (very efficient infact), but they run on ELECTRIC, which is way, way more expensive than gas. Heat pumps only have an average return flow temp of about 45deg, so most UK homes would need larger radiators and possibly pipework too, so there's the additional cost/disruption of that. Heat pumps only really work if your house is insulated to a certain level too (ie, up to the eyeballs!), and finally, you WILL need a 300-400l hot water tank which a very large number of UK houses built in the last 30 years don't have room for, and if you can find room, it's all the additional pipe-work required to plumb it in. Personally, an A+ rated gas/LPG/Hydrogen combi boiler makes a lot more sense, and is a LOT cheaper for the consumer. The governemt will never, ever, not-in-a-million-years reach 600,000 heat pump installs a year. Nowhere near.
Do you really need a tank thou?
Maybe if you have a bath, but for small homes with a shower that already have an electric shower, why not just use the air source for heat only and then get insta electric hot-water for the kitchen sink and the bathroom tap. I have gas boiler on its way out atm, but i only use gas from nov to end of feb, i am looking into and air source pump atm, mainly as it would save me the gas standing charge, as most ears the gas company's reject my summer usage as the meeter reading is less than 10 units, as my house is insulated. But if i did it, i dont think i would want a tank, A because i just dont need one and the house is to small and B it also takes the cost out of tank out.
Great video Andy as always. Everyone should factor the cost of insulation when choosing Heat Pump as it's quite a major spent on top of HP install.
lnternal walls not cavity,,,just had ours all sucked out
Ground source and underfloor radiant heating. This should be the rules for all new build.
Renovating our house we had pay 125%, then 150% council tax because it was treated as a second home. It was inhabitable with no furniture, but as you say that counts for nothing anymore. I was paying two lots of council tax, with a premium on one of them.
Yup, absolutely shocking. Then land fill taxes on all the waste from the renovation. No wonder UK properties are falling apart! 🙄
Good decision about the heat pump. I just installed one after a long think. I am happy with it. It's definitely not noisy as we don't hear it at all. the water is really hot and give the same result as the combo-boiler. The house heating is a bit different. It definitely maintains the house at the temperature of choice but the radiator are most of the time mild. All in All I don't regret
I looked into this seriously myself a year or so ago.
Combi boiler is hands down the best for me. Copper pipes are 12mm (so would need to replace all the pipework) but more importantly, the pre (first world) war house I have has solid walls. So it is impossible to fully insullate.
We've done our best (new roof, insulated) but the walls are what sucks the heat out now and you need the burst heat from a combi to heat the home in winter.
I've never heard of a combi boiler being described as "burst heat". You mean a gas boiler will give you a higher initial, quicker rise in central heating temperature?
@@colin4685 compared to a heat pump. Yes. Heat pumps work great for fully insulated homes... My home only half insulated due to solid walls so will be so useless
@boli2746 yes I know how they work. I'm a heating engineer.
It's the lower water temperature flow rate and larger size of heat emitters that allow ashp to transfer its heat.
Have you had a professional heat loss calculation done on your home?
Andy you need to do your apology I got it wrong again...re council tax you CAN get a 50per cent discount for a 12 month period of time if the house is classed as uninhabitable..so removal of the bathroom facilities and or the kitchen facilities makes it inhabitable
There are a lot of negative considerations that you have skirted over here Andy ...if a house requires bigger radiators and bigger pipework say 22 or 28 mm then that pipework is going to be very difficult to hide so you have fugly piping on show.. additional or bigger radiators mean that in many houses furniture placement becomes more difficult and radiators end up behind furniture the capability to site a monstrous heat pump is also not viable for lots of people and as you have mentioned..the noise that they emit will certainly cause some neighbour disputes. They are definitely a marmite subject at the moment .
Urban Plumber is another good channel for heat pump info, including retrofits. He is a Heat Geek qualified plumber (wish there were more), but he is also very unbiased: Deals only with facts and real-world experience, and is still also a very active gas engineer. I like the idea of a heat pump as we have electric only and cannot have gas or oil for various logistical reasons. I don't see it as a 'cheaper' way of heating my house as it is often (incorrectly) portrayed because of course we cannot have gas anyway, but we use perhaps 15000-16000 kWh per year to heat our 4 bed end terrace which is part 200 year old cob/stone and part 20 year old slightly shoddy extension, plus hot water cooking etc. That's not cheap on electric only, but it's no more than an average house of our size uses, but the temperature in our house in winter was never all that good - we aren't the types to have it set to 25C+ or whatever, but 19-20 is comfortable for us and that was a struggle to achieve.
We have a 6kW flow boiler running 5 UFH heating zones, each of which has it's own time and temp programmable stat with app control (Heatmiser, an easy upgrade from old temp only dial stats), and we are on an economy 7 tariff so during the 7 hours of cheap rate we can bung the temperature up which helps during the day. However, we have other problems to solve first before I can even contemplate a heat pump. We have just upgraded a load of 20 year old aluminium framed double glazing which was awful: On cold mornings the frames were maybe 3-4C on the inside and the whole glass and frame would be soaked in condensation. We've had modern uPVC installed (alu clad timber was just too expensive for us), albeit the way it's made is with the traditional cutlines of 18th/19th century timber windows and a grain pattern so it looks like painted wood, surprisingly convincingly. It's even been approved on listed building in some areas. This alone has made a big difference to the comfort of the house. Next, the crappy old single glazed back door which you can see daylight round the frame of. New, custom made oak door (it's in the old bit of the house so it's a weird size, and a stable door because the wife insisted) and a threshold which the current door lacks are going in soon. After that, the front door needs doing (more draughts) and four old handmade wooden windows need refurbishing with new glass and whatnot. Then, we ned to put insulated plasterboard into the new extension on the ceiling (don't ask - the original builders and architect were true morons so we have no access to the roof void, save for downlighter holes, to improve the inadequate insulation). I might also look into improving wall insulation in the extension since it only has 25mm celotex and in some places it's on the inner leaf of the wall and some places the outer, so I can't see it being as effective as it should be. In the meantime, being a software developer I am writing some apps to automatically scrape my energy usage from Octopus, plus air temps etc to do something similar to your graphs, Andy, and after all that work is done (probably 2 more years as it costs a bleedin' fortune!) then I might be in a position where once funds allow, a heat pump *might* make sense. A nice win of, say, 50k on the lottery would probably let me sort all that out in one go and re-render the old part of the house in new lime (and re-do some lime plaster inside) - best buy a ticket!!
Even after all that lot, we might not have enough room for the cylinder as our existing, much smaller one, is in the loft and a lot of installers won't put stuff in lofts for whatever reason. And I'm not sure we have a logical place to put the outdoor unit either as they're not exactly tiny. But we'll see how the tech develops and maybe we'll be able to do something. Failing that, a heat battery would be my other avenue for on-demand hot water and they are pretty neat and can take advantage of cheap rate power and would provide more than our 144l tank does, but they are about £3k plus fitting so not cheap either, and often weight ~200kg so siting them is tricky too.
Urban Plumber never seems to give the full picture on the economics though. I love his channel and his work but he's not willing to lay out all the figures like we've just seen in this video. Really annoying...
Slightly off topic, but my sister has a wood/coal burning stove in her 200 year old stone cottage. And when Storm Arwen blew through the North East a couple of Winters back, it kept her alive. She was without electricity for a week at the end of November; she lives out Consett way, so you being familiar with the NE will know it’s bloody freezing then. I hope the Govt doesn’t ban them.
I got my house 15 years ago a new build with Air source heatpump heating fitted, can't fault it at all, never broken down and always produces enough heat through the radiators and enough hot water for a family of 4 for showers etc. I guess an older property with not as good insulation may have issues, the noise yeah you can hear it and I can hear my neighbours but certainly not at all bothersome.
👍👍👍You should be on the telly, seriously. Such a refreshing video to watch, with no bull in it. Just someone telling it as it is, and he aint daft, he knows things
Hey Mr. Handyman big respect for re-evaluating your position. You still say air source heat pumps have a noise issue. My lived experience is that our valiant 11kw heat pump is loads quieter than the vallient combi boiler it replaced. Even in hot water boost boost mode you have to get within 3 meters of it before you hear it. The Combi boiler we could hear from the bedroom. When it modulates down normal heating mode you have to walk right up to it before you hear anything. We live in quiet countryside. And no, it doesn't run all the time, only when the leky is cheap.
Getting an air to air Mitsubishi hyperheat heat pump installed soon in northeast USA. We have solar panels and central air and the AC crapped out last summer, so we needed to replace those anyways. Needing to replace the AC anyways made the decision to go heat pump much easier.
Insulation has been the key to your decreased usage Andy !
Cheers - defo Lynda!
Good on you for reassessing. I’ve got a heat pump and couldn’t be happier with it.
Glad you updated.
Whilst the cost element was a very understandable reason to go for the more traditional route, I was very surprised at the time on your comments on heat pumps.
Good job!
Well done Andy on the renovation so far, we did ours 18 months ago ( hands off, contractors) and it changes it to really become your own. Very humble of you to admit when you think you’ve got it wrong or re-evaluate based on new info.
The only thing we didn’t change in the renov was the heating, just swapped 2 big rads for tiny ones when removing a wall. 🤦♂️
Bang goes the boiler.
Decided to get an ASHP to compliment the solar and battery we already have. It’s working a treat. We did decide to get all new rad as the old ones were past it / pathetic anyway. Savings sound about right if you can get a high SCOP
I just need to improve ours by doing some top up insulation in the loft now that all the disturbing is done.
And I may use your vids as reference and inspiration to do under my ground floor from underneath. 👍🏻
I’m not extremely well off. Young family, and given we’ll be here a long time I want to keep the bills costs as controlled as I can. We managed all this through Energy Saving Trust and Home Energy Scotland loans, following getting an EV loan and EWI installed. Thankfully the savings each month about cover the costs of the loan payments.
Oh and a small factor of savings for you to consider £100 /year saving on gas standing charge.
You are absolutely right about the insulation!
Defo! Makes a huge difference.
Another great video, Mr Mac. There are so many variables in the equation, it's difficult to be sure exactly which way to jump sometimes. Gas and electricity prices will fluctuate, of course. While the price of electricity in the UK is inflated by charge components like environmental and social scheme support (about 13% of the cost of each unit), in time I feel that pressures to use less fossil fuel and the increased proportion of renewable electricity generation will mean the relative unit price of gas and electricity will start to change and even reverse, so gas will be expensive relative to electricity.
Back in 2019 my wife and I invested in a garden office for my wife's business. It is heated (and cooled!) by a mini-spilt air-to-air heat pump and works really well. We live in the west of the Central Belt in Scotland so our weather is broadly comparable to yours. The heat pump works very well and I would say that the CoP has never dropped below 2.8 even on the coldest nights (about -8 degC this winter). Overall, the seasonal coefficient of performance is around 4 and we're very pleased with it.
Our house is a 3-bed semi, built 1994 and is reasonably well insulated. We are slowly doing the house up just now and one item near the top of the list is replacing the 29 year-old gas boiler (not even a combi, let alone a condensing boiler!). Initially we planned to just have the boiler and all the radiators replaced. After doing my RUclips research and coupled with our experience of the mini-split in the garden office, we changed our minds to use another ASHP for the house. However, having experienced the (admittedly quite short) hot spell last Summer, we've changed our minds again and are installing two A2A heat pumps for the house so we can have cooling as well as heating. Having looked at the prolonged hot spell in the south of England last year, we feel that it's likely that, as time passes, these hot spells are going to be longer and hotter and work their way north! We're lifting our suspended timber floors to insulate below and increasing our loft insulation too.
The A2A installation means that we can remove our radiators completely as we've opted to use wall-mounted indoor units. Generally speaking, A2A is less expensive that an equivalent A2W system BUT it is very unlikely that any A2A system will attract any government subsidy, so these two sort-of cancel each other out. We're looking at perhaps using a device like the Valliant aroTherm (storage tank with an A2A HP mounted on top) to cater for domestic hot water.
I was interested in your comments about the suitability of the electricity networks to accommodate the potential loads presented by transferring our domestic heating and transport energy demand onto these networks. As a retired DNO engineer, I'm always shaking my head at the claims that the 'grid' will be more than capable of dealing with these loads, as if the 'grid' was some homogenous machine, which it most certainly is not. The low voltage networks, in particular, will struggle with supporting these new loads as uptake increases. DNOs already require to know if a customer is planning to connect either a heat pump or and EV, so the danger of being told 'no' already exists.
Finally - if I may - your payback calculations don't take into account the 'cost' of money over the years, given that £1 next year won't buy the same as £1 buys this year. Even a modest rate of inflation can have a major impact over 45 years! At the end of the day, people invest in their homes because they want to and not necessarily with an eye on their investment paying back. I sometimes think the pay back criterion is somewhat over-emphasised. Anything could happen over the coming years as the pressure to reduce carbon emissions increases, which could render pay back calculations redundant. Thanks again.
Yup - very valid point on inflation! But yes, until electricity supply issues are sorted (and that will take years) gas won't be going anywhere.
Great to see an re-evaluated opinion. Almost all the criticisms of ASHP that fly around are based on a weak understanding that ASHPs need a different and house specific system design, plus an over optimistic use of the reference "COP" value that tells you how efficient the unit will be (which is driven slightly by the mandated "MCS" design process). The larger radiators are actually because the flow temperatures for water with an ASHP can and should be much lower. This is because the system is MORE, not LESS efficient. It is however a very different style of system. Other things that system designers get wrong is misdesigning for water heating and ending up needing an additional immersion coils (which one way you can lose the efficiency). The modern ones run at around 50dB (and are definitely no louder than the sound of the gas boiler).
The other area that really needs to be considered with ASHPs is that because they use electricity, they can benefit from solar, batteries and agile tariffs.
You are totally right that the heat pump is an expensive retrofit and its hard to find the installers right now (more important is to find the system designer). We're about 100K short of installers.
We also just finished a renovation and, although we didn’t replace the perfectly working gas boiler, something we should have done was installing underfloor heating all round
That would have made switching to a heat pump more viable if ever needed in the future
Great to look at the implications. One friend has installed for environmental reasons, another to get rid of gas standing charges. Both recent so no figures yet though happywith performance.
Keep and use the condensing gas boiler for the on demand water only ?
Defo an option!
On the noise point. A vaillant is very quite you will not hear it any further than 1 to 2m away. Also yhey do not run at 100% 24 7. Well sized unit will run at 50% 24 7 for average temps. Which is even quiter. So peak noise is not high and also only at the very cold moments. In my eperience. Choose carefully and dont add fear to your neighbours.
I’m surprised you have dismissed the solar panel option, unless you have a massive shading problem, an east / west install can work very well and produce some serious savings. The rates for exported solar power are going up (12 to 15p / KWh now) and anything you use directly saves a lot more. Although you do have to use an MCS certified company, its pretty easy to reduce the installation costs by doing all the prep work for them. If you are thinking of a more “electric” future (heat pumps and EVs) then generating your own power makes sense (just install “bird blocker” to stop the pigeons!)
I've just commented the same. I had a small system installed in March this year (2023) and it effectively took us off grid for the whole summer and we only began importing to charge the batteries in mid October and we exported enough to build significant credit for the winter.
We do have shading issues during the winter on one side of the house, sadly, the sunny side. But, we still generate something (particularly on days with light cloud) and having 10kWh of batteries mean that we rarely use full price grid electricity.
I fill the batteries on our cheaper rate, not as good as an EV rate but not bad - currently 16.11p per kW. A saving of about 10p per kW every day! If I had an EV and was on Octopus Go I could run my home on electricity priced at about 9.5p per kW!
I'm in Texas,. USA and heat pumps are common for AC, but iffy for really cold winters which we occasionally have. In 2022 we had a long cold spell and pipes froze when electricity failed. My gas central heat was fine when we had electricity and the house stayed warm enough during the periods without it.
Apartment complexes were hard hit and with a lot of frozen pipes. Also heat pumps don/t seem to last as long as gas hvac units and use more electricity in extreme cold. I've lived in my present home since '79. and put in two hvac systems., always the most efficient I could afford. The Air Conditioning part of the HVAC systems here are eleectric.
I would say put spend £2-3k on insulation and you will find it easier to recoup your money, make your home nicer and as a bonus when you get a heat pump later it will still be saving you money. Good thing about insulation its will keep working for 50 years.
Defo - insulation lasts!
A neighbour of mine had a 3-bed semi stone barn conversion done about 15 years ago ... she uses solar to supplement hot water. Insulation levels are mad (10" of Kingspan insulation on all external walls internally) and wide boar underfloor heating throughout with ASHP.
In 15 years she has got through THREE heatpumps at enormous cost, the current one is about 18 months old.
Despite getting a fixed deal before the electricity price hikes she is still paying over £300 a month in winter for electricity for a maintained temp of 18C. She has to use a wood burner every day in winter and even though she lives alone needs to use an immersion heater to top up hot water in winter.
When the engineers installed the last pump they reckonned in cold weather a COP of 2 is a about average.
She also needs to run the system before cold weather is due because it takes ages to raise the temperature of the underfloor heating slabs and they need to be kept at a steady temp 24/7 to even achieve 18C.
Maybe there are problems with her installation but she has used specialist installers to try to improve things. Plus her barn conversion was specifically designed and overspecced for an ASHP system.
Doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.
18 months ago we had a new combi oil outdoor boiler installed (no mains gas) and replaced all the radiators and replaced open fire in lounge with an AGA m/f burner. Similar house (but not so good insulation - now being rectified) but we maintain 20.5C year round with unlimited water for about £700 pa and electricity for everything else is about £80 a month (half of which is standing charge). We also get a couple of loads of wood.
I appreciate your video and talking about heat pumps but I am still not convinced. Plus like you our roof ridge is NS aligned so no good for supplementing electricity with solar.
Thank you for the insight Mr Mac
No worries!
We ripped out our central heating system last year and replaced it with air con (air to air heat pump) and its cost us about £60/month to run through the coldest months. Almost instant heat, cooling in the summer, havent looked back. Much cheamer than a new central heating system too.
Really good video and well done, on your work so far on your home. When heat pumps costs come down I think they would be a worth while investment assuming you have copper pipes of the correct size already in the house... unlike mine which is riddle with plastic pipe and according to heat geek I would need to basically upgrade all the pipes in the house to a larger size or change them to copper, which ripping the house to bits is not an option.
Also, your air source heat pump can be supported by Solar and battery storage, saving more and the payback faster for the solar!
That was a great insight to making people aware of the amount of energy they use! As an electrical engineer I believe and totally agree with your analysis at this time! Well worth renovated property! Keep up with the videos, you have done a great job 👏 👍.
That 90 second rant at Government regulation and MsM was perfect. You would never believe that the video would then end with "I'm definitely getting a heat pump ' though. Keep up the good work. Learned a fair bit from this channel 👍
Fair play for making some corrections.
I have a geothermal heat pump installed (Water Furnace 5). Only sound coming from it is the movement of air, and this is when standing right next to it.
Who needs heating anyway with the warm fuzzy feeling from the views of the Ouse Burn in the spring sunshine !
Thanks for the update, I share your views on much of this, (being a grumpy old cynic) I'm yet to be convinced on electric cars although I agree they are probably the answer in the long term but there's still far too much selective nonsense talked about pollution - we all know how wonderful battery metals are for the environment for example, and I've been telling people for years that much of the particulate pollution is down to tyres & brakes !
This is why it's great to have channels like yours, as you talk more common sense and frankly do more meaningful research than most of the mainstream media output, so thanks again !
I'm gonna stop there before I get into the cost of living crisis and house prices !
One thing to add, if you want to do one thing for the environment, don't be afraid to plant trees and do plant native ones, we have a very similar sized plot to you and we planted around 150 native tress when we moved in, most of these are maintained as a natural hedgerow around the garden and is coppiced so as to provide us with all our firewood. you can't do this the same with things like Laurel and they don't support our native wildlife as well. The only way anyone can approach carbon neutrality is to plant more than they use, but you don't need acreage to make a difference ! Looking forward to seeing how your garden develops !
You can also eliminate the standing charge if your property no longer needs a gas connection at all. For me that would be £135/yr at the moment.
Yup!
Great comments and a brilliant discussion
10/10 vid and info so well presented! As usual, your mileage may vary. Funny how the brochure and sales pitch is usually overly optimistic. I got sold a new gas forced air furnace claiming my 15yr old unit was less than 75% efficient so a 94% efficient unit would pay back in X yrs. Turns out the new furnace was much more noisy due to small fan running too fast, but gas consumption didn't change despite a slightly warmer winter and our programmed thermostat settings remained exactly the same. The rub for me is discarding perfectly operable and reliable equipment 10 yrs ahead of designed life expectancy. That is a bigger waste of energy than a few whiffs of NG.
eating your own humble pie in a very constructive way is very good Andy. I know from your videos that your floors and ceilings are well insulated but I cannot remember if you insulated your walls. 1920’s house sounds like it might be solid brick construction. Does your house cool down quickly overnight? I keep our house at about 18ºC, but when I setting the schedule for turning off at 6PM by the time the heating started again at 6AM the internal temperature had dropped by between 3º to 4º and it would take the boiler 90mins to 2hours to heat the house up to target temperature again. I now keep the target temperature at 18ºC 24 hours a day and depending on the weather it comes on between every 90 mins to 2hours for about 15 mins a time. some days I make a loss over scheduling it but on the whole I am using less gas.
I know I need to insulate the solid brick walls in our 1904 built house but doing that isn’t a priority at the minute for me. But I knowI would save a lot more money. I’m still out on the whole Air Source Heat Pump thing but thank you for your well thought through analysis.
Absolutely agree re the noise. And no pump gets quieter as it ages, quite the opposite!
In my apartment block we're told not to turn them off ever. They 4 hours to heat radiators on a cold day, if I set my water temp it's always 5 degrees lower. Ireland here but the electricity bill is st very expensive
Andy, combi boilers are expected to last about 7-10 years ish. If that's the case I'd look to change then. Regards Jim.
Yup, I think that could be a sensible timescale. 👍
If you get proper OEM service ( where they open it up and clean the heat exchanger) and it’s set up with low flow temp correctly, you should get 15 yrs or more. New WBosch combos come with 10ths warranty
Agreed jlm, we replaced ours last year 10 year warranty £2k installed that will take us up to the point the HP market has matured.
Hundred percent agree with this video mate. Top work. ❤
Cheers bud! 👍🤘
I'm in Canberra Australia. It regularly gets to -5C in winter. We use reverse heat pumps for our heating cooling and they work well and are cheap to run. But when it came to hot water we chose to go with an immersion heater during our reno's a few years ago because the cost of heat pump water heaters was absurd. When it's 5 times the cost of a standard old immersion heater, it just doesn't make economic sense. We put on a large solar power system and a timer on our hot water circuit so that it only heats the water through the day. Our total energy costs for the year for a 160m^2 house are around AUD$1000. That is super cheap to me. Before the renos, in the middle of winter our energy cost for 2 months was $1650 for gas heating and electricity supply. There are better ways to achieve efficiency than just choosing the most expensive option for every appliance you can find. Using solar to offset our electricity has definitely paid for itself in the 4 years we have had it.
Interesting! Wish we could make better use of solar. 😭
@@GosforthHandyman it’s the land of sunshine where all the convicts were sent, we deserve some benefits 🤣
Good evening Andy. That was so interesting. A few years ago I had spray loft insulation and I now run a plug in hybrid car charged overnight at 7.5 pence per kw hour. I love it BUT in the winter the range reduces by over 50%. Like you, I am confident that technology and infrastructure will grow to accommodate future growth. As always, it’s great to hear from you and look forwards to future videos. All the best to you and your family. Ray 🌞
Cheers Ray! Fantastic stuff. I personally see no issues with the spray foam if it's done right - used all over the US for years. 😎
Before we could get a mortgage on a property with spray foam it had to be removed, right or wrong that was the situation.
MCS guidance states 45 litres per person so Octopus will probably quote a 200ish cylinder. You can request a 250litre or more tank if you are worried about running out. As long as you have the physical space, there is basically no cost difference between the different size tanks.
Last time I looked you need to mount the ASHP at least 1m from any window. Can limit where you can site the unit.
Haven't heard that - any links? Cheers!
We have a Diakin ASHP and it is very quiet when running. Also it is a nine year old unit too so not the latest. I have previously had an oil fired boiler and it was noisier externally when running.
Definitely consider an air to air system rather than air to water
Much easier to install, faster response times, and you get air con in the summer
Not to mention none of the issues with hydronic heating like sludge, water leaks, big radiators in the way etc..
Don’t forget , can also change radiators to K33 where required instead of the regular k22
You are correct you won't be stuck with lukewarm water the 3kw immersion heater will heat your hot water the same 3kw immersion that is used to heat your hot water the whole time. For the sake of legionella hot water should be stored above 55degrees your heat pump won't do this if you want to keep your scop high this needs to be taken in to consideration.
So far this year I have removed 4 ASHP and replaced with combi boilers because of running costs and inability to get them repaired or serviced correctly they are good in principle but have a bit more of a way to go
Respect owning up. And very thorough video. Calculations should take into consideration that electricity will become cheaper and gas will increase in price. So you should add those into your projections.
Well done on diving deeper and rethinking. It's certainly a fluid situation, but it is almost a no-brainer now for anyone fitting new central heating to be "heat pump ready", oversizing the radiators to work at a lower temperature. We just did that on a house. Your situation with such minimal help is awful. Here in Ireland, where we also have a lot of old and cold housing stock, anyone (not just people on benefits) can get 80% of the cost of cavity wall or loft insulation - and even a grant for "the wrap" external wall insulation for hard-to-fix older homes - plus grants for solar panels, and a car charger, and the grant for installing a heat pump is more. There are of course shortages in all the skilled trades, including the registered retrofitters, but it's moving, and the trainee numbers are rising well. The UK government seems to have an ideological block against offering much at all: given the housing stock that needs all the kind of work you've done and more, that's going to make reducing residential CO2 emissions hard, and they are a significant chunk of the total emissions.
Nice to see you reasses your earlier assumptions. But I'm a bit confused, if the payback is likely to be 45 years+ and you'd need a cylinder (with limited hot water supply), why would you even think about getting one in a few years?
Only if the tech moves on, the price drops and there are more engineers. 👍
The problem of course is the variables which totally skew things. You’ve shown your gas prices as 10.6p - had you been on Octopus tracker the max it went was 6.2 and is currently 3.95 . Had you used those figures, you’d not be tho king a pump was a good deal!
Obviously if you pair with solar and battery storage, it skews it even more.
I’ve not really got anywhere I could place one, so it’s a gas boiler all the way for me - even though I have 16 panels that can make 6.7kwh and a 9.5kw battery.
Great video.👍 I do remember raising an eyebrow when you went with the cheap gas install. However your right, the spending has to end somewhere. My family and I are just about to complete our 2000 Sqft new build and we went with an Hitachi ASHP as there is no mains gas where we built. Get the council energy assessor to Energy assess the whole house as air tightness and insulation values are key to the correct sizing of the ASHP to meet your family needs. Your right, the lower designed flow temperatures may require an odd larger radiator to properly heat that particular space but the energy assessor work that out for you. We are also fitting a house battery as soon as funds allow. U.K electricity and gas prices are bad now however when the government price cap lifts and next winter arrives I fear prices could rise ten fold. Order your solar set up now lad!
I'm about to replace my oil boiler with ASHP. Why? The lack of routine maintenance, the engineer has gone to breakdown maintenance only, highly agravating 2 breakdowns in 2 months, no service but 2 call outs and days of no heating!
When I used to go to work, central heating came on timetable. Now I've retired, my routine is no longer predictable. My radiators are set at 1 or 2 at the moment so there is scope to have a lower flow temperature. I am having a double fan ASHP which is theoretically a replacement for my boiler and can have similar flow temperatures.
I live alone so can shower, wash clothes etc as hot water is available. My hot water tank is adequate for 2 showers together. I have had solar panels and a battery installed so hope to take the cost edge of some of my electricity costs.
Major peeve is the electric company hasn't increased the payment it makes when I sell mine to them, but have to buy back at the inflated rate! Ie they are profiting from all those micro generators. Grrr
We live in Somerset and recently had a quote for air-sourced heat pump install for just over £10k and with a grant of £5k plus a possibility of selling on our oil boiler and remaining oil, we would be looking at less than £5k, so for us it's a viable alternative. Add on a 4.5kwh solar install coming in around £11.5k I think we could be looking at a quicker pay back. As you say it's very much an evolving technology and with improvements on battery tech etc, another few years on will see a more possibilities of energy-independence for more people, even in our climate 😀.
RE cold weather operation mathius wandle has a good video on the subject on the significant effect of humidity, which is most significant at just above ) 0 deg C. So unfortunately for UK homes air source pumps MAY be less efficient in our mild damp environment compared to colder environments.
I want to see you go hydroelectric and put that stream at the bottom of the garden to use 😅
I like your thinking! 😂
I thought that a while back. So much power that could be harnessed from all the network of rivers that we have in the UK and it isn't utilised at all.
Thank you for being self-critical and honest and all the information. We'll have the very similar problem here in Europe - no difference to what you told. I thin e-cars won't solve anything. As far as I know they only really come out on top if you drive them (the car) to it life end. Batterie changes not included. Cars must be reduced, public transport up. Small electric transporter and new ideas will help too. Electricity/energy storage in big terms is key I think. We need to look wide! Like the sand heat storage some blokes Finnland made.
Sorry if I missed it but with the heat pump would you also cap off your gas if you’re using an electric hob etc. So your standing charge may be around 30p so another £100 per year saved. I know it doesn’t make a massive difference but worth considering.
Always interesting. We are in a 3 year old new build so hopefully the boiler will see us till things settle down 🤞🏼😬🧱👍🏼
Too right Steve! The market will sort itself out. Very early days still I think. 👍👍
@@GosforthHandyman 🧱👍🏽
COP of 5 sounds incredible. Only a few years ago heating engineers were (I think) talking about 3 to 4 at best.
Yeah thanks ,I found your vid very informative,, actually I believe heat pumps can be installed alot more cheaply then your figure.. I too (down the road ) am thinking of getting a heat pump but as an option keeping the gas boiler...The down side of doing that is the standing charge on gas ,,,that is the biggest con going!!!!!
If you are buying a ASHP monoblock system, you do not need to be F gas registered as the ASHP comes pregassed and the only connections you need to make are for the flow and return for the central heating and hot water cylinder, plus electrics. Check out the LG THERMA V R32 Monobloc S
I think prices are dropping for heat pumps, and there is some promising technology driving COP upwards (variable compressors, and more efficient compressor design) but yes I agree with your thesis. Heat pumps only really make sense if you combine them with solar PV, batteries and a sensible (Octopus style) tariff arrangement.
And much easier to retrofit a heat pump than to retrofit insulation. So your priorities were definitely correct!
Cheers! If we could work out a way of doing solar that would be a game changer, but roof pointing the wrong way. Perhaps studio room roof... but that would take it over the permitted development height limit. 🙄👍
@@GosforthHandyman how big is that garden?? 😉😏
EDF here in France currently charge me 0.206 cents/kwh - that equates to around 0.177p/kwh. (depending on the current exchange rate). That's under half the price you quote - and presumably EDF in the UK is also charging double what they do in France. Rum old world, eh!
Good video
I don’t know if anyone has asked
How would an electric combi boiler compare to what you installed
Or even electric radiators
What an interesting post, we are set to move to a bungalow and we are of a certain age. I’ve investigated ASHP to death and will arrange to get a quote to replace the gas boiler etc. The bungalow has cavity wall insulation and a few solar panels. When you add all that into the mix it could be worth while. Don’t think at my age I will get a ROI, for me it’s about comfort and keeping costs low. I think in the U.K. we are turning a corner and costs will continue to lower. When you look at the take up of solar panels a lot don’t exist anymore which may have resulted in the change of government policy, don’t know. But all new technology comes with a guarantee risk and following some of the sparks channels fixing issue isn’t cheap. Great post.
Electric infrastructure. Yes you are correct.
I'm having a solar / battery system & car charger (no EV yet) installed on my 1986 built house & it turned out that we had a looped mains electrical supply with our neighbour. The shared incoming cable size (into ours & looped to our neighbour) was not large enough to handle the extra load of the 7kW car charger (32 amps) on top of the existing usage for both houses. The solution was to disconnect the looped cable between the two houses & run in a new cable from the street into my neighbours house which involved digging up the street & parts of the front garden. To be fair the guys that did the work, with the engineers from National Grid, were quick. 3 days start to finish & the power was only off for less than 15 mins on the last day. They replaced / repaired our neighbours block paved drive, tarmac pathway & even re-seeded the grass on the pathway out the front of the houses. Both outside meter cupboards were also upgraded with new manual isolators &100amp fuses (from 60amp). All free of charge thank god.
The National Grid engineer I spoke to admitted that if 10 more people in our cul-de-sac wanted to install car chargers or heat pumps then not only would they have to un-loop & upgrade all their house supplies they would have to install a new larger mains cable right down the middle of the street & upgrade or replace the local electrical substation as well. That's just one small example of the amount of work that that will be required to upgrade the outdated domestic electrical systems that serves probably 90% of UK houses.
As for heat pumps, they have a place, especially in well insulated new build homes. Indeed I've heard that at least one main stream house builder is now installing heat pumps with underfloor heating for ground & rads for 1st floor as standard on all their new 2/3 & 4 bed houses. However, retrofitting them into older houses is expensive & invasive - much like central heating was when added to old 1930's houses back in the 1960's. I still have a gas boiler (only 5 years old) & plan to divert some of my solar energy to heat the hot water in the summer. However, longer term I will probably go for a multi Air to Air (not air to water) Heat Pump system installed for house heating with a separate or integrated Heat Pump hot water cylinder located in our loft or garage. Not only are A2A Heat pump system cheaper buy & install than A2W, they can also provide cooling in summer somthing A2W systems cannot do without expensive changes. For more info on an Air to Air Heat Pump example installation have a look at www.youtube.com/@TimAndKatsGreenWalk who have documented the reason why they chose a A2A over A2W system & their forthcoming Solar / battery installation - part way through. They also have an EV.
Right or wrong, your videos are always a good watch Andy. Keep them coming.
Yup, I know a guy who does the telemetry in substations. The current street-level infrastructure is designed for max 2.5kW per house. 😬
@@GosforthHandyman yikes!
I be pulling more than 3 to 4 that overnight at some times. Between the hot water, storage battery, car if it’s on charge. Spose not many folks are doing the same as me in my street. I think my neighbours must think I’m mad.
I’d have fitted a system boiler with cylinder and rads sized for 50C flow, gives you many opportunities to change the heat source, add renewables etc
Will allow you to fit a smaller better sized boiler and run that boiler at 90+ efficiency most of the season
Very interesting review of the issue of home heating. I am facing an end of life combi this year and with a large rear garden considered a ground source pump as an alternative. The costs to upgrade my internal heating pipes and the disruption involved plus the groundworks really did not add up in my case. We have a new build along the road with an air pump and you hear it when walking by so that put me off.
If you have a new build with modern insulation and underfloor heating then a heat pump is a great solution. I pad around our house in shorts and a T-shirt 365 days a year.
The noise is no problem in my view but a cover for your pump can reduce the perception of noise significantly. It also doesn't run all the time even during weeks of minus temperatures. In the summer, I often chat with our neighbours directly in front of ours to benefit from the cool breeze. We are a terrace of three houses with a pump in front of each house and I have never perceived the noise as a nuisance.
The 'common sense' of heat pumps is different though. Getting used to a low-temperature system with a long time lag is not so easy. How you feel it works and how it really works are two very different things.
I agree with a reply from Australia below. I live in Arizona and use a heat pump for cooling and heating using forced air not radiators. The heat pump does not handle the hot water. Most people, me included, use an immersion heater (electric or gas) that is in the garage. Modern immersion heaters are well insulated and mine costs very little over the year. Of course being in the garage means the Summer ambient temp can get to 95F inside, so any heat loss from the water heater will be minimal. I live alone in a 1540 square foot house and pay approximately $100 per month for electricity. I don't have gas and use the electricity for all my power needs. I reckon that the heat pump uses about 1/3 of my power per year so I am very happy with system.
Are solar water heaters big over there? I’ve seen loads in places like Turkey where they get painful sun, even seen quite a lot on roofs in Ireland (probably EU rebates on em).
Air to air what I'm thinking about (mini split) but weirdly they're not common here and not subsidised like ASHP.
There is a lot of replacement ongoing in the power industry this has & will be ongoing as infrastructure needs replacing (most was designed to last 30 years, however because most was over engineered have lasted around 50 years) new installs are up sized to cover the increase in use !
Heat pumps and installations are very expensive compared to a combi boiler install but you can help reduce the costs further. Octopus have an electric tariff called cosy which offers lower rates through the day to help heat pump owners. Home battery storage can be charged over night on cheap tariffs to power your home until the next overnight charge. Granted even a modest battery solution isn’t going to power your heat pump all day but it can be all worked out so you can make the most of it.
Those thinking about powering a heat pump with solar. During the coldest months I barely produce enough to power the house….and this is on sunny days let alone cloudy days.
you made the right decision to have a gas boiler !! theres no way ill take out my gas boiler for a heat pump system !
We'd certainly miss the infinite hot water!
thanks for your response ! the green agenda propaganda from the authorties is about control ! alarmist and over the top ! @@GosforthHandyman
You really need to be think again about solar panels, as these would make a significant difference to your heat pump calculations. Like yours, our roof pitch faced the wrong way, so I built a 'solar pergola' in our back garden facing south. Consists of 12 panels, giving a peak of 3.6kW and as added bonus some nice shade in the hot summer months to enjoy a cold beer. Oh and I now drive one of those pesky Tesla's, love it!
Just check for the mcs installers in my area we have none .. the nearest is 10 miles away in Bradford or 12 miles away the other end of Huddersfield...
We have two Solar installers ..
As others have said insulation is a must and the best ROI. I went from 13,000 kWh gas in 2010 in a yr 2000 house with regular boiler down to 8,000kWh in 2022 with successive insulation improvements mainly in the loft. Summer of 2022 went with an ATAG combi and already down to 5,800 kWh for that year and predicting 2023 5,170kWh. An air source for me would be approaching sweating the small stuff as its easily undone by electric unit and standing charges compared to gas. That might change but i doubt it like diesel was once cheaper than petrol but it aint now.