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?

I don’t think it is different with cars, though . It’s an example of how people have been forced over the last few years to make changes that they didn’t want to. Those that live in London aren’t necessarily rich, too. London has some of the poorest households. They can’t “easily afford” anything. I live in central London and earn less than the national average and my DH earns even less. There has been a marked change towards electric cars, though. There are charging points everywhere. But until the cost of electric cars comes down, especially in the second-hand market, it’s going to be a while to take off. For heating, it’ll be the same. Use of gas will get more expensive, there will be fines and surcharges, there will be bonuses and discounts on new heating systems. First, there will be, or should be, a push on insulation - run by reputable firms. At the moment it seems there are a lot of fly-by-night firms pushing up prices on these sort of deals because of government /energy company discounts.

I can see how, in London, you wouldn't need a car. Here though its completely unreasonable to expect people to rely on current public transport- to conpare to your congestion fees etc, one bus day ticket is around £5 for here, for my family of 5, youngest is under 5 so free, then it would be £3 for my other children, so one trip out would be £11- and take far longer than driving, thanks to poor public transport. We don't have off road parking either- I mentioned earlier in the thread about our Victorian draughty miners terrace, people just park on the streets wherever they can. I think its similar to the boiler/ heat pump/ alternatives issue really- when a boiler costs around 4k vs a 15k or more cost upfront for adapting a house it becomes a problem, and one where we need better, affordable solutions. And the same with cars- when you're comparing the practicalities of owning a cheap run around in South Wales (our main family car cost £1.5k, my DHs car cost £400) with not needing a car thanks to inner London's public transport system, we're comparing apples and oranges. Yes, we need to make changes- things are not sustainable as they are- but they have to be affordable as well, and scaleable to different areas, and different lifestyles. I am hopeful that by the time the changes roll around there will be a better infrastructure that isnt so London centric, and that takes into consideration the realities for different economic areas.

Missed my DH off the public transport cost. £16 for our family for a day out on the bus.

@daisypond But the poorest Londoners can't afford or rather can't easily justify cars when a bus costs £1.60, and kids go free on public transport (the poor outside London can't really afford cars either, but outside London, you often need your car for work so you can't really give it up). My DH and I are in the top 15% of households in the country in terms of income and we can't justify a car either (whether petrol, diesel or electric) because said car would be in its parking lot 5 days a week as we commute to the City from zone 3 (and have to pay for travel cards irregardless of whether we have cars) and we can't justify paying out at least 2000 per year for insurance and petrol and other costs (plus car depreciation) when we have a mortgage to pay. And we can't justify shelling out for an electric car (which tends to have a higher ticket price) either simply because we might want to drive to Ealing (which takes an hour on a bus), or Ikea,the airport or pet boarding. As in my PP, it is cheaper to get a Uber on all those occasions.

So the government's policies on cars don't affect me. It does affect my neighbors who for whatever reason can justify the cost of a car. I know quite a few who barely use their cars but feel they need one. However, they do tend to have more disposable income. Zone 3 is also different from zone 1 and 2, it is more suburban so there are quite a few families here with 2 children at 2 different schools and who also live quite far from the tube station (as the housing is cheaper), so they need cars more (and they are also middle income so can afford the convenience)- but at the same time, they are also the most likely to move out of London for bigger housing.

Which is why I think it is different imposing ULEZ and congestion charges on Londoners as opposed to imposing such requirements on the rest of the country.

@DinosaurOfFire in London, its £3.50 peak and £2.80 off peak. So it would be £5.60 on the weekend for me and DH to go from our zone 3 suburb to Central London. Children go free. The costs can add up if you go into central london for work everyday during peak times- my DH goes in everyday and last month, he spent £188 on public transport (though he likes to go grocery shopping on the way back in central london which adds to the cost) which made us think he should get a monthly travel card which is £172 per month and to be fair, some of that cost probably included me as I might have accidentally used my debit card when tapping out. But he would need to spend this anyway as it isn't possible to drive to his workplace in Canary Wharf.

But yes its why I have never learned to drive as I don't think having a car is sensible in our circumstances.

@DinosaurOfFire

Missed my DH off the public transport cost. £16 for our family for a day out on the bus.

That’s still cheaper than what a Londoner would pay, though. Say you lived in zone 3, which is relatively central, it’s roughly £3.40 peak one way, £6.80 a return trip on the tube. Two adults -that’s £13.60. Children are only free up to a certain age. Over-11s it’s about 85p each way, £1.70. So two adults , two children making just one journey there and back would be £17. What the London dweller gets that people in other parts of the country don’t is the convenience and ease of public transport that makes it pretty much a no-brainer.

[quote Ringsender2]@FolornLawn that's an air-source heat collector and heat pump in the BBC article. It has a fan which pulls air across the heat exchanger. The heat exchanger is like a reverse fridge and sucks the heat out of the air, and
condenses it into a much smaller volume of liquid.

Ground-source heat collectors are usually pipes buried in loops under a field, or in vertical wells below ground. The heat is collected in a fluid then passed through a heat pump. The heat pump is above-ground and would be like the air-source picture but minus the big fan, so more compact.

The temperature under the ground is much more stable than the air temperature overground, so in cold climates, it's worth going to the extra expense of drilling a well, or digging trenches to put the heat collector pipes into. This is because in the coldest part of the year, you can draw on the heat stored in the ground. In milder climate places, it's a less clear-cut choice. In very cold snaps, you'll just be using an air system like a regular electric heater, but if there are only cold snaps every 5 or 10 years, that might be ok, as it will still be cheaper over, say, 15 years to install and run an air system compared to a ground system.

The time it takes to get to the same installation and running cost point is called the 'payback' time. So it's cheaper to install air systems, but more expensive to run (compared to ground systems). In cold climates, you get to the cross-over point quicker, as running costs are higher for air systems as they are not as efficient as ground systems.

Both systems need a well-insulated and draught-free house at a minimum, as they are not high temperature like piping-hot rads, or an open fire or log burner.

I think overall they are a good idea, but a rush to install them without proper consideration is a crap idea. Subsidised roof and wall insulation and double glazing of all properties would probably be better in the first instance.[/quote]
Very interesting, thank you. I live in one of those cold weather climates but people in my town rarely install ground systems and I wonder if it's because we're on granite.

Our local government has been subsidising insulation and double glazing here for donkey's years. My attic has about 4' of insulation sitting on the joists, meaning that the snow on my roof sits there all winter, unmelted.

@daisypond I think she means per way. Also I do think Londoners spend less than people outside London on transport if they don't own cars. A fallacy of car ownership is that people believe it is just car insurance + petrol + cost of car. You have to calculate in car depreciation and repairs (particularly if car is old). On average uk car owners spend over £3000 to run their cars each year excluding depreciation. An annual travel card from zone 3 to zone 1 costs £1740 per year and they don't need to worry about car depreciation or repairs.

@onlychildhamster , @daisypond, that is 2 ways but is for a 15 min, 2 mile bus journey, when driving to town with a full car of 5 of us takes 6 minutes and car parking is £1 for 2 hours, or £2 for all day. I do try to be as environmentally conscious as possible and walk as much as is feasible, but public transport infrastructure really is lacking here. Our cars certainly don't cost 3k a year to run or repair, probably closer to £1800 inc fuel and repairs. We do intend to use them to the ends of their life though, and then will consider electric however at the moment electric cars are a: out of our pice range and b: we couldn't charge one on our current street without trailing a cable across the pavement.
But I feel like this is a bit of a derail now from the original thread topic, apologies.

Won’t be getting one. I don’t have the room or money. I will be replacing my boiler with a normal one before gas boilers are made illegal. I’ve heard so many bad things about heat pumps and it sounds so badly thought out that I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if it never went ahead anyway.

If they make all gas boilers illegal, that are unlikely to keep the gas flowing.

they are

@Dontgetyerknicksinatwist

Won’t be getting one. I don’t have the room or money. I will be replacing my boiler with a normal one before gas boilers are made illegal. I’ve heard so many bad things about heat pumps and it sounds so badly thought out that I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if it never went ahead anyway.

Where are you going to get the gas from to make the boiler work? There will be no gas.

No one knows when the gas will be turned off yet so how can someone on MM know

MN

All that has been reported so far is that new boilers are likely not to be fitted after 2035, reported to be 2025 for new builds

Like a PP I am insulating my house (period property) myself. Impossible to find builders to do it because builders don't like to do anything they haven't done before. The Even the plasterer refused to do the insulating plaster even after I showed him the wall that I had completed myself after watching a YouTube video!! Agree ASHP will not work efficiently in a lot of/most houses in the UK. Even new builds can be very draughty and poorly detailed. A vast improvement in building regulations and a mind shift is required. Going back to another previous point I am also installing an air circulation system (MVHR) so it is possible in an old house.

@LovingBob the UK has made a commitment to be net zero by 2050, the gas will be turned off before then. The government has also committed to halving emissions from current levels by 2035.

This article today pretty much sums up my views. I will be hanging on to my 2 gas boilers for dear life.... particularly as with most gas boilers of the 60 degrees temp (the other new stuff is capped at 40 and the people in the article below have to wear a coat in the kitchen!)

www.dailymail.co.uk/money/bills/article-10147319/We-claimed-70-000-grants-heat-pump-saved-NOTHING.html

@Xenia that's a ground source heat pump in that article, although I'm surprised it's not working well as they are supposed to be great.

We have an ASHP and it works effectively. The house is 50 years old so it's a retrofit. We certainly don't have to wear coats in the kitchen! At the moment we are still using a summer weight duvet and sleep with our bedroom.window open and it's still warm in our bedroom. Two years ago we never bothered to swap over to a winter duvet as we didn't need to.

That said, we only swapped to an ASHP because our (oil) boiler was so old that the guy who serviced it said he could no longer get parts for it if anything went wrong. If we had a newer boiler we wouldn't have swapped over.

I like to hear all sides. I tend to be so busy that any change to anything is never good as it involves not just time but also money so I am yet to be convinced - even if changing meant I didn't spend a single extra penny to what I spend now and the house were just as warm it would take a huge amount of compulsion to get me to switch. (I still use a blackberry {priv a - smart phone of sorts) and have landlines etc etc.... laughing as I type).

Xenia, I think a lot of the anxiety around this is that it is all very unclear and information is conflicting. I have read things that make me hopeful (technologies coming that could do away with the need for a water tank, insulation projects in older buildings that are pretty unobtrusive such as cladding a gable end only and using special thin liner elsewhere, accounts from users on here that are positive) and then I read others that sound awful (tanks very much essential, insulation involving fully wrapping anything without a cavity wall, unreliability). Ditto noise - some people don’t hear them, others do and videos I’ve seen demonstrating how quiet they are did the very opposite in one case. People may talk about the impact of a single pump, theirs or a neighbour’s, but none of us know what it will be like when we have terraces where each house has one.

Other technologies - the guardian had an article about tests for domestic hydrogen supply the other day which sounded very extensive, but then quoted Scottish Power as saying it would simply never happen for residential users.

Too many unknowns about the whole thing.

I don’t think we will have the option of hanging onto gas boilers as, when they pack up, they will need to be replaced by something. I just hope that technologies do improve by the point at which gas boilers cannot be purchased. I certainly would not want to be an early adopter.

@Xenia no worries, we still have a landline too - no mobile service here in the sticks!

I'd take that article with a pinch of salt. The girl might be wearing a coat in the (stone floor) kitchen but the boy is barefoot.

The only property I've ever been in with a GSHP was a stone Greek Revival style property built in 1831, now a Grade II listed building. It was absolutely fine.

However we probably all agree that to change from gas boilers and hobs for cooking will involve a lot of our time and a lot of our money. So those 2 things alone mean I hope I never have to make the change.