Forced to install heat pumps

[forcedtogetheatpumps]

Yesterday, there was an article in the DM (yes, I know) about a Bill currently going through Parliament which basically says that home owners and LLs are going to be forced to install heat pumps otherwise they'll be fined or imprisoned.

How are people going to afford this?

We're sleepwalking into some kind of tightly controlled, no freedoms, taxed to death, expensive, rented/leased hell.

That’s an idea. Maybe I will commit a significant crime when I’m 70yo to avoid care home fees. 😁

I think the long term plan is for most people to be in rental properties

How do we afford those if we're taxed to the hilt like one poster wants? and what happens to those of us who own our homes outright?

Only 9 MPs voted against it

I wonder how many actually read it?

That will change if it turns into potentially workable legislation. The reality is large parts of the UK housing stock are not suitable for air heat pumps without tens of thousands in expenditure for house remediation works.

I've had a recent quote for a boiler and once again did the rounds of looking at other options and the costs of heat pump systems have gone up not down as they are supposedly "more popular and widespread".

Interestingly two of the quotes were from companies who do both heat pump and oil/gas based systems and both said they had requests to convert back to gas from home owners whose electric bills have gone through the roof.

Basically the steer was if you can install ground source and solar panels and your house has good insulation/underfloor heating you should be able to heating "almost as good" as with my existing gas based heating system. Like PP I wasn't keen on the loss of ventilation either.

OP, it sounds like the conspiracy theory is strong with you.

How do you feel when you think of other examples where we are "controlled" in order to promote societal or individual well-being? For example:

• compulsory seat-belt laws
• compulsory car seats
• no smoking laws
• regulation on gambling companies (like payout requirements on slot machines)
• NI contributions and their flip side publicly funded health and pensions
• education and training requirements for teachers, doctors, nurses, dentists, structural engineers, lawyers, accountants and architects
• anti-child labour laws
• the Highway Code

Because when these things were introduced there were people making similar points to you about control and financial implications. And these are valid points, but they do need balancing against the good the rule can bring to us.

Take a fictional example, if we started fining people who didn't pick up their dog's poo. Obviously, this is controlling, and would cost money for the offenders and to administer, but as a society we might decide that it'd be worth it to live in a world where we don't need to constantly look out for dog poo. Unintuitively, it may end up making some people more free - maybe I could let my kids kick through the Autumn leaves on the side of the path on the way to school without having to control them by saying "mind the leaves, there'll be dog poo in there". So the freedom of some people to leave their dog poo around has been traded for the freedom of kids to kick through leaves.

With the heat pump issue, any regulation that is pro-heat pump will undoubtedly be controlling and cost money. But there is another side. Heat pumps use electricity that we can make pretty cheaply with renewables, here, in our country, without the need to pay another country for a fuel, that we just burn, so we have to return to the country the next day, to pay for some more fuel to burn. Using homegrown electricity, is a way of being more free, and less controlled by geopolitics. It also means we're paying out less money - if all our energy were homegrown the prices would be reliable, and we wouldn't have had the energy crises.

It's all nuance and balance. Please watch yourself against those who are black and white thinkers and spread simplicity, fear and anger and who never come up with any answers themselves.

What I want to know is where is all the electricity going to be generated to charge up 'our' electric cars we are meant to be moving towards and the heat source pumps to heat our homes? Electricity providers are asking people to turn off everything so we don't have blackouts. It's back to candles and horse and cart.

Electricity is unaffordable to heat a house.

Picking up dog poo and putting a seatbelt on is nothing like the changes we are currently facing.

I don't think what they're doing amounts to a conspiracy, but I do think it's to generate shitloads of money for some people and greed drives everything. The fact that even the term 'prison sentence' is included in the Act says all I need to know about this.

Net zero is a GOOD thing people, and needs to happen much quicker than 2050 when we will all be fried.

Quite. Hasn’t Sunak stopped anymore wind farms from being built, or made it harder for them to get permission? Guess the U.K. still has two coal fired power stations running so that will help provide electricity 🤔. I believe there is talk of more nuclear power stations, not sure how long they take to build but maybe we can have a couple finished by Xmas. 🤔

Electrification will come. Just like every house (even the very old ones) now have inside toilets, central heating, electrics and telephone lines installed.

The timescales, combined with where the costs fall is the question.

And the new prisons will need heat pumps. 🤣

I was under the impression that the 2025 ban was specifically new build properties. We have a heat pump, but the houses here are very well insulated and on average quite a bit bigger than the average British home. Heating is also more likely to be centralised in apartment blocks, which is still uncommon in the UK.

We're all going to be fried anyway because it's literally impossible to control the behaviour of other countries. China, USA, India, Russia and Japan aren't countries we have any influence over. They'll do what they want and the effects of climate change will continue until wars break out and the entire geopolitical system is thrown into chaos. What is happening cannot be halted or reversed.

@forcedtogetheatpumps I'm a teacher and that argument is hurled all the time in class 'they aren't being quiet, so why should I'. What do you think of it in that context?

One person being quiet amidst 20 people being noisy has no discernible effect. Sure we can cut our carbon emissions, but the overall effect of climate change will still continue. It won't have any discernible effect. It's akin to throwing a teabag in a lake and expecting to have a cup of tea if you fill your mug with the water.

If you think it's worth threatening, fining and imprisoning the population over then we're definitely marching in the wrong direction. I'm actually pretty alarmed by it.

@VeloVixen I was going to say the same. Although the DM print utter BS I'd say keep an eye on which government people are benefiting from this.

Laughing at rural people being given an allowance for miles to get them to ‘transport hubs’ ok so how do community nurses, carers, delivery drivers, tradesmen etc then do their jobs?

Yes we have to rethink everything

And that includes some things taking longer and being therefore more expensive.

Perhaps we can have more community nurses on buses and bikes like the 1960s

I don't see the current model of economy is working - ever more efficient means ever less for most people as only the top few percent have seen wages not fall in real terms over the last 20 years

You can't not change - the only question is how painful do you want the change to be

Embrace and control the changes or suffer bigger harder changes

Oh well we will need to have a huge cull of the elderly then because the way things are going there is going to be way too many elderly and not enough young people so community nurses will always be needed to cover rural areas and because people are living way longer than when nurses rode bikes to patients our caseloads are vastly different so that’s not going to change

Or how about those in towns and cities have better access to services such as transport and those of us who are rural and rely on a car to work are left alone?

OP do you propose we all just cross our fingers and wish? Or do you actually just deny climate change entirely and that's why you don't give a flying f?

The police cant cope with actual crime, never mind locking someone up for not having a heat pump. Never going to happen