Air source heat pumps - a bit off putting, or is it just me?

[FolornLawn]

I was surprised to see how big and ugly they are.

This article shows a picture of one, and I wouldn't want it in my small garden. Also the report says people will need room for a boiler and a water cylinder.

I'm quite surprised at how negatively I feel about the new plans. There's something about having to remodel bits of my house and garden that feels like an imposition, when I happily recycle, use washable sanitary pads and kitchen roll, go without a tumble dryer etc. Is it just me?

@Xenia why do you feel it's necessary to "fight" against measures that can help us reduce climate change?

We don't have to have them anyway yet, the government is only giving grants to a few people, it will be like most things, a lot of worry on here and in real life only very few get them. It will be on the news when the COP26 is on and then forgotten for Boris's next big thing, he seems to swing from one thing to another. Weren't the last lot of home grants that the government gave out a fiasco.

Because we will be the losers for it. If instead we got easier to operate cheaper and completely free of charge new heating systems with no time having to be spent on them and lower income tax to boot I might be in the market for it.

Also if they are crap, expensive and unreliable ......

By coincidence, and interesting analogy presented itself to me this afternoon. A dear friend of mine recently inherited his father's Mercedes-Benz 240D. This is a four door diesel saloon built in the early Eighties, the W123 model whose successors eventually became the E-class. It was quite common as a taxi in Frankfurt or Hamburg well into the Nineties, and in places like Lisbon or Athens into the Noughties. There are still thousands chugging around in Africa and the 230E petrol version was selected by James May for the Top Gear Botswana special; this is the one model that for anyone under the age of 60 gave rise to the reputation that Mercedes cars can run forever.

My friend has spent the thick end of £10k restoring it - a lot of rust had to be repaired, the brakes and wiring almost completely replaced, and new suspension bushes etc. And of course, to get it back on the road it needed an MOT, which it has just failed spectacularly on emissions.

No sane person would seriously suggest that this car should be exempt from current or future emissions standards simply because it is vintage, or of historical interest to a few car enthusiasts, or because my friend has just spent £10k on it. No, any reasonable person would agree that the right of pedestrians and other lifeforms not to have to inhale the great clouds of black smoke it produces trumps one individual's desire to pootle about in it.

This car might have been state of the art for a diesel passenger car in 1982 and with some care it might well run for another 40 years, but things have simply moved on since then. My friend can either spend more money re-engining it - he got a quote on electrifying it for a whopping £80k whereas a newer diesel might be under £5k - or he can retire it to a private barn and stare at it all day, or he can scrap it and buy a new one which meets standards. He cannot just stick two fingers up to everyone else (or "fight it") because none of this is what he wants to hear.

I'm reading some frighteningly silly things on here which sound remarkably similar though. Greta Thunberg called out leaders who make promises but don't actually do anything, but what about people who just point blank refuse to comply with community standards?

And I'm also with Pelouse: there's some real bollocks being espoused on this thread.

@Xenia

In fact at present there is a huge shortage of any kind of builders/ workers and heating engineers for any kind of work in some parts of the UK. I certainly will have to be dragged kicking and screaming to changing my gas boiler system and would guess with such a big house, 23 radiators, 2 gas boilers and in a conservation area even if planning allowed it (unlikely as even solar panels are banned) I doubt I would give me much change out of £100,000 particularly if we had do to things with windows and perhaps under the floor and including costs of repairs as these new things all break down much more than gas boilers and do not last as long.

If you can't afford to heat an house large enough to require 23 radiators and to gas boilers in an environmental friendly and socially conscious way then arguably you can't afford to live in a house that size, and should sell up and move to a more suitable property.

Surely people will just carry on with their gas boilers until they can't any more and then just use something like portable heaters or the old storage type heaters, people aren't going to be shoehorning these things into small houses when they cost a fortune, they are something for the middle classes to have in their large houses with big gardens at that cost and size

We have air source at my work and lots of places where I live have them
Yes the box is abit ugly but if it's better for the planet it's good to eat up that
Some people have them wall mounted
If my boiler breaks or needs replacing I would be happy to have one if better for the environment

@Otherpeoplesteens

By coincidence, and interesting analogy presented itself to me this afternoon. A dear friend of mine recently inherited his father's Mercedes-Benz 240D. This is a four door diesel saloon built in the early Eighties, the W123 model whose successors eventually became the E-class. It was quite common as a taxi in Frankfurt or Hamburg well into the Nineties, and in places like Lisbon or Athens into the Noughties. There are still thousands chugging around in Africa and the 230E petrol version was selected by James May for the Top Gear Botswana special; this is the one model that for anyone under the age of 60 gave rise to the reputation that Mercedes cars can run forever.

My friend has spent the thick end of £10k restoring it - a lot of rust had to be repaired, the brakes and wiring almost completely replaced, and new suspension bushes etc. And of course, to get it back on the road it needed an MOT, which it has just failed spectacularly on emissions.

No sane person would seriously suggest that this car should be exempt from current or future emissions standards simply because it is vintage, or of historical interest to a few car enthusiasts, or because my friend has just spent £10k on it. No, any reasonable person would agree that the right of pedestrians and other lifeforms not to have to inhale the great clouds of black smoke it produces trumps one individual's desire to pootle about in it.

This car might have been state of the art for a diesel passenger car in 1982 and with some care it might well run for another 40 years, but things have simply moved on since then. My friend can either spend more money re-engining it - he got a quote on electrifying it for a whopping £80k whereas a newer diesel might be under £5k - or he can retire it to a private barn and stare at it all day, or he can scrap it and buy a new one which meets standards. He cannot just stick two fingers up to everyone else (or "fight it") because none of this is what he wants to hear.

I'm reading some frighteningly silly things on here which sound remarkably similar though. Greta Thunberg called out leaders who make promises but don't actually do anything, but what about people who just point blank refuse to comply with community standards?

And I'm also with Pelouse: there's some real bollocks being espoused on this thread.

If it's a 1982 model then In 2022 it will be exempt from the MOT test & ULEZ restrictions will it not?

The news this morning said you have to have your radiators replaced too. So that will disrupt every room in the house, and you’ll have to re-plaster and re-decorate, and the new radiators will be bigger so might not fit around your existing furniture. It just sounds like a nightmare.

@Otherpeoplesteens

No sane person would seriously suggest that this car should be exempt from current or future emissions standards simply because it is vintage, or of historical interest to a few car enthusiasts, or because my friend has just spent £10k on it.

The pollution caused by a 40 year old vehicle hobby is tiny. Much smaller than a new car which gets driven every day mostly for short journeys.

It strikes me you aren't factoring in the production of goods or pattern of usage as part of their carbon footprint, or the considerable environmental costs of disposing of all this stuff.

Incidentally, I checked my heating bill and my victorian home used less gas than your modern eco home last year. We treat it like people used to treat homes before there was central heating (we wore a jumper when it got cold).

@Marelle there are high temperature versions that work with your existing radiators.

@LovingBob the point of heat pumps is that they 3x as efficient as direct electric heating.

If you can't afford to heat an house large enough to require 23 radiators and to gas boilers in an environmental friendly and socially conscious way then arguably you can't afford to live in a house that size, and should sell up and move to a more suitable property

Oh come on. I'm a million miles from Xenia on green issues but telling people that if they don't have tens of thousands of pounds to replace a currently functioning heating system with one which may not even prove sufficient is a "let them eat cake" argument.

Vast areas of housing stock in urban UK are brick built and solid walled, not large but densely populated. Every spare inch of space is used by families inhabiting them because that is already the largest they can afford. They simply don't have the money to replace functioning heating systems, even with a percentage of the money coming as subsidy. For those which are rented, people don't even have the choice.

As I said upthread - we were quoted a minimum of 25k for a heatpump system which would almost certainly need top up heaters in several rooms. Our neighbour (similar house construction method, similar overall size of house) was quoted in excess of 40k because less of her radiators could be reused and more additional insulation would be needed.

Its lalaland to think most families can conjure up this kind of money.

@Otherpeoplesteens - my take on that is different. I don’t see an issue with making exceptions to preserve historical objects, cars or buildings where the overall impact is not great. If 1980s cars were extremely popular they would be a problem, but they aren’t. The overwhelming majority of cars on the roads were not made as long ago as that. We don’t have an emissions problem because of people driving vintage cars - you rarely see them - but because of the volume of cars. Tackle the bulk of cars in circulation and allow exemptions for vintage cars.

Same with houses. People keep talking about the high percentage of older properties in the uk, but the percentage of listed properties or those in conservation areas is much, much lower. Making an exception for those (or just those where retrofitting is clearly going to negatively impact the building) seems sensible.

I don’t believe that the number of vintage cars and listed houses alone is going to make a huge amount of difference, whereas scrapping them or ripping them apart will have a huge impact on our heritage. I think it’s disproportionate.

I’ve got no horse in this race btw - Victorian house but not one of historical interest, and no vintage cars. I just think it’s a shame not to look at this in the round.

My analogy above was never about the emissions from one ancient car. The thing about making exceptions is that it inevitably becomes the thin end of the wedge. Everyone will want one, and it is ultimately divisive. Doesn't anyone remember Covidiocy? It seems that a lot of people are taking the same approach of completely ignoring the future-of-humanity-driven objective of the strategy and trying to find any old loophole which suits themselves. It doesn't take too long before the whole exercise is doomed to fail, and is probably one of the reasons why government has buried its head in the sand about CO2 emissions for decades, and basically left it until it's almost too late. And still people are in denial. Some of the sentiments I've read here are really quite sad.

I can see in the round, but ultimately facts don't lie: the UK has some of the oldest and leakiest homes in the developed world, and domestic energy use is a massive contributor to our carbon footprint. We cannot afford the luxury of exempting millions of solid wall dwellings on the "too difficult" grounds, especially not if we then want to start lecturing the rest of the world about it building a global consensus on fighting climate change. Nearly 40% of our housing stock is pre 1945 and therefore amongst the worse offenders, and there have to be the same rules for everyone or no-one will follow them.

We've got 14 years until gas boilers are banned, and then probably another 10-15 or so years after that before the ones in situ then come to the end of their lives. This is where we're about to discover that Britain is living beyond its means at the moment. It's nonsense that the best selling model of car costs more than the average salary. It's a fallacy to think you can buy a £800 smart phone every 18 months but not afford £10,000 to bring your home up to environmental standards in 20 or 30 years time. And if you genuinely can't, then we're about to find out that the value of property can go down as well as up because I'm afraid your property will effectively become worthless in the not too distant future if you want to sell it to anyone requiring a mortgage.

@Marelle

If you've cut half the back wall of your house out, unless it's magic glass radiators are probably the least of your worries.

@therpeoplesteens I would love to get a heat pump but I live in a flat. And am likely to continue to live in a flat as I am in London and don't drive (so don't want to move out to further zones). I have posted previously on how this can be done but it would require everyone to agree. I suppose they would agree if their properties would be worthless otherwise . But there are no guarantees.

It would be difficult to get a mortgage on our house now so it wouldn't really make any difference in the future with selling it, heat pump or not. Cash buyers generally just buy houses like mine at a cheaper price.

My analogy above was never about the emissions from one ancient car. The thing about making exceptions is that it inevitably becomes the thin end of the wedge. Everyone will want one

The exceptions for emissions, tax and MoT for old cars have been around for years.

Despite that, everybody doesn’t want one.

I understood the analogy but I don’t agree with it. Specific legal exemptions that recognise competing interests (preserving heritage in this case) would not allow everyone to claim they too should be exempt. To take the old house example, I’m not keen on the sounds of heat pumps at all and I think they could well spoil older properties like mine but I also recognise that my particular house, much as I may like it, is not of sufficient interest to be listed. If heat pumps really are the only way to get heating emissions down I wouldn’t like it, but I’d accept it because there are just far too many homes like mine for it to be subject to an exemption. I do think it would be reasonable and proportionate to make an exemption for listed properties since they are few in number and recognised as being of significance. It’s not the thin end of the wedge because there is a clear classification that your house either falls into or doesn’t.

@Marelle

The news this morning said you have to have your radiators replaced too. So that will disrupt every room in the house, and you’ll have to re-plaster and re-decorate, and the new radiators will be bigger so might not fit around your existing furniture. It just sounds like a nightmare.

We had to paint a small area in 2 rooms, and no replastering anywhere, one of the those two rooms we choose to move the radiator even though the bigger one could have gone where the original one was as it was better for how we wanted to lay the room out.

I think some people are deliberately trying to find problems where there aren't any.

@TheAntiGardener heat pumps are unlikely to be mandatory, but they are highly efficient. I'm sure direct electric heating via either fan, radiators or infra red would be an option for some people in some properties, just be prepared to pay 3x as much for your electricity.

I will probably be dead by then so won't need to worry about the cost of electricity

To take the old house example, I’m not keen on the sounds of heat pumps at all and I think they could well spoil older properties like mine.

My house is a chocolate box type cottage but I don’t see why a heat pump would spoil it. My husband is very keen and seriously looking in to it. He is considering installing the pump machinery in a sound deadening enclosure so all that will be visible is a nondescript box that should be easy to disguise if we feel the need.

I’m sure back in the day people thought there was no space for a gas boiler and it would spoil the look of the house. And people would have objected to ugly radiators cluttering up the rooms and the cost of installing them, when they were used to their gas or electric fire, and before that their open coal fire. Eventually, coal fires were banned and people were forced to make changes. Heat pumps are not much different - they will become commonplace and normal and people will look askance at houses with gas boilers and want to rip them out and replace them with an efficient heat pump. If that means bricking up huge walls of glass and bifold doors, that’s what they will do - and they’ll wonder at the folly of those who installed them.