Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[raywilb]

has anybody have heating sourced by a heat pump ?

[TheBoy]

Why would we?  Expensive to install, no cheaper to run....


Unless, of course, you are a tree hugger, and fail to realise that the manufacture of such things probably outweigh and reduced emmissions in life....

[Marks DTM Calib]

I did look into it.

Quite challenging to site as they have to have quite a bit of space on three sides and be circa 1m from the boundary, not small either!

[dave the builder]

The "FREE* £5000 boiler grant" has stirred up lots of attention 
Unless your house is very well insulated and has wet under floor heating ,heat recovery ventilation etc (in which case your heating bills are probably quite low anyway  ) then you will need to add/spend 10 grand plus of your not "FREE" own money and have your house raped by tradesmen to make the house suitable for air source heat pump .

the national grid is antiquated ,it can't cope long term with increasing power demands without massive investment .

the massive investment will come from increased costs for electricity to the end user ,as demand increases, so will cost (like gas now )

I don't sound very "on board" with the saving the planet from global warming do I ?

If you want to make a difference to energy bills look at your appliance ratings etc ,turn the heating down 

something as simple as swapping from a big plasma TV (some use 400+ watts  ) to a modern LED one (sub 100 watts) can actually pay for the new toy energy efficient alternative appliance in a short time .

100w old incandescent light bulb/lamp costs £1,20 to run for 3 days constant (2.4 KWH ), buy a 5w LED lamp/bulb for a quid, 3 days constant running (360w) is 6 pence , you've paid back your investment ,any usage after that is a big ongoing saving

most people have swapped to LED lamps already but there are still loads of people with halogen downlights and ye olde fluorescent lamps  .

I can see a lot of poorly installed ,costly ,inefficient air source heat pumps being installed  with the lure of "FREE* MONEY"

* not free at all 

[STEMO]

It's a non starter for most of the terraced houses around here. Built in the 1920's with no cavity in the walls, and no loft insulation (except for the eaves) because the attic was built as a bedroom. The cost of lining all the interior walls and putting heat retaining tiles on the roof would cost more than most of them are worth. That's without a heat source pump.
Glad I'll be dead before all of this nonsense becomes compulsory.

[Doctor Gollum]

I wouldn't wish the time away quite that quickly 

[Olympia5776]

The only thing you all have to look forward to is being colder and having to pay more for the privilege .
You get nothing for nothing in this world and is it a coincidence that all this posturing and promises  by politicians and royalty comes just before they take centre stage at COP26.
They want the glory but you'll all have to pay AND suffer  for it .....
The householder heating his house is low hanging fruit .

I watched a programme on the making of laminated shaped auto glass recently and was aghast at the energy required to make a single piece . And yet they want to replace every IC car with an new design electric equivalent  .

"GREEN IS GOOD" ... oh f\/ck off Boris .

[Rangie]

Hopefully my gas boiler will outlast me.

[raywilb]

has anybody have heating sourced by a heat pump ?

why i asked is as an experiment nearly 4 yrs ago my bungalow was one of 6 that had our oil systems replaced & heat pump systems installed. they are all mitsubushi pumps & out of the 6 , 4 have malfunctioned & had to be renewed. before it was installed all the old cavity wall insulation was sucked out & reinstalled.all rads had to be replaced .  the heating is supposed to maintain a constant temperature but doesn,t  also what I have found is there is no instant hot water hence gallons of water is wasted when hot water is needed. also my electric bills have more than doubled but its my only source of power. i would swap it for a combi boiler system tomorrow if i could

[TheBoy]

Also, there seems to be quite a lot of people commenting that theirs is struggling to heat the home in cold conditions.  Which I guess, seeing how they work, makes sense.

So if we get a good snap of -18C like we did a decade or so ago, will they still work?

[Sir Tigger KC]

They were talking about these on Whine earlier and some 'expert' was on waxing lyrical about the things, but at the end admitted that he has to wear a Puffa jacket around the house to keep warm!     

[LC0112G]

They work like inside out fridges. At the back of a fridge/freezer there is a radiator, and if you touch it you'll feel it gets hot. You're using (say) 100Watts of electrical energy to 'pump' heat out of the center of the fridge, and dissipate it out of the radiator on the back of the fridge.

The physics then is that if you 'pump' 50W of heat out of the fridge by using 100W of electricity, the total heat dissipated in the radiator is 150W - and you're generating 50W of 'cold' inside the fridge. So you're generating 150W of heat by using 100W of electrical energy. Its 150% efficient. A well designed heat pump can actually be 400% efficient - 1KW of electrical energy in, 4KW of heat out.

A good home condensing gas boiler on the other hand is what? 90% efficient maximum? So the heat pump will be 4 times more efficient than a gas boiler. The trick then is to generate the electricity in such a way that you don't have to burn gas - which is what all those big propeller things do that they're building all around the coast (plus nuclear & hydro power) 

If they can get the cost of production and installation down to levels comparible with a gas boiler, then I'd have one next time. But the current boiler is only 3 years old so I'd hope it'll last another 20 years.

[STEMO]

Does anyone think that all of this is actually possible? My opinion is that the attempted implementation is going to cost an absolute fortune, I'm talking hundreds of billions of pounds.
If, by some miracle, we got close to our goals by, say, 2040, would people quickly realise that it wasn't really making any difference at all because the biggest polluters baulked at the cost? Or just didn't have the money, or will, in the first place.
I'm not a climate change denier, but this risks costing everyone of us tens of thousands over the years, and I can't see it being money well spent.

[STEMO]

There are those, of course, who see it as something much more sinister.

[LC0112G]

It's kind of chicken and egg. They need higher acceptance and installed units to get the costs down, but unless costs drop people won't be keen. If the costs of replacement gas boilers and heat pumps can be made similar then there is no real reason not to take up the heat pump IMV (assuming all other things are equal).

I suspect that in time the govt will start increasing the taxes on home use gas as a method of incentivising the switch over to electricity. VAT is currently 5% on home fuel - relatively easy to increase that back to 20%. If electric heat pumps can be 4 times more efficient than gas CH, then once the price of gas exceeds one quarter that of electricity (per BTU/KWh) then the cost of running the heating becomes lower on leccy.

Just got to stop grannies freezing to death as a result of gas price rises.