Heat pumps

[teacoffeeorpassthegin]

Are they worth getting? Our boiler is going to die soon so looking at options before it happens!!!

I have one, would I have it again ? Not convinced. Love the fact the house is a constant temp. I have batteries and solar so can store ‘cheap ‘ electric to run it.

was sold the wrong size and the install was crap, had this fixed this year so will be interesting to see how much it costs to run. Currently I’m averaging £5 a day (includes charging my car) last year in the really cold bit was costing between £10-15 a day!

one of my friends got one and she says she really regrets it. Apparently on a cold day it does not warm the place up. She is fed up of having a cold bathroom. I am sure there will be honest reviews on the internet. My friend was saying on a cold day last winter it was costing around £15 a day.

They can work very well but it's not a straight replacement for a boiler, and you may need to spend a lot on upgrading your house for it to work efficiently.

You need really good advice and there are a lot of cowboys out there.

We replaced our about to die boiler last year with a new gass boiler.

Why you ask because even though we are in a newish house in order to have a heat pump that would be efficient enough to heat our house we would have also had to have all the radiators changed and the pipe work as the pipes are to small in our house currently.

And I'm not one normally to not go with new modern tech, as we have solar panels and an electric car but a heat pump expense didn't add up on this one.

£15 a day ! 😧 That's twice what I spend with a gas boiler.

I won't be changing any time soon.

I love ours, keeps the house nice and cosy, plenty of hot water. It's important to get good advice to get the right set up for your house, we needed new radiators and increased insulation. Definitely never spending anything near £15 a day on electricity and that includes charging the car as well, but we are mid terrace which also helps with keeping the house warm.

I’d get a new boiler with top rated efficiency incase it’s harder to get one in coming years.
But I fear change.

Quite a large modern so well insulated rural house with a 10 year old heat pump and underfloor heating throughout. It’s expensive so expensive we have had an additional heating system installed
The right system in a well insulated home is efficient but our flow temp in 50C for cheap running it should be closer to 27C
I also didn’t like the underfloor heating and I’m very happy to some radiators again

it's a different way of heating.
with a heat pump one hour in the morning and 3 in the evening is not cost effective as the ooomph mode (technical term) eats a lot of electricity . it's cheaper to have it running at a lower(ish) temp all day.
ours is on at 18 degrees and that makes our home comfortable.

late victorian terrace with triple glazing and new(ish) insulated roof.

Thanks all, looks like I need to do a lot of research before committing to anything! I was looking at octopus just because it popped up and it started me thinking!!

We have a heat pump and it works well. House is cosy and we have lots of hot water. But you do need larger radiators, good insulation and the right sized heat pump, We have an old house, about 150 years old, but walls and roof are extremely well insulated to higher than required standards.

I’ve had a pump for 5 years, I can honestly say we have never got anywhere near £15 per day. ( large 4 bed backing onto fields EPC Dat the time) The most we have spent is possibly £300 a month in Dec or Jan in a hard winter. We have also had an electric car for the last two years.
We have microbore pipes which our installer said were slightly more tricky but no need to replace them. We changed 5 radiators, interestingly including 3 rooms that we felt were on the colder side, which are now considerably warmer.
However, we had a failing oil burner if we had had a gas boiler, I would have replaced it like for like.

My technical knowledge is zero- I just don’t understand Kwph. Even watching YouTube videos with all this information on heat pumps confuses me. I’ve watched many heat pumps videos and it’s mainly people talking about technology data and it simply goes over my head!
I said previously I live in a 2000 detached four bedroom. Combi boiler to heat the house.
The octopus heat pump installations seem ok in price with the government grant. BUT two seperate gas engineers who have attended my property both said stick with a combi for now. One was a British Gas engineer who came to give my boiler an annual service. So yeah it’s probably in his interest to tell people to stick to boilers.
The second guy came out to install a towel radiator in my bathroom from an independent company.He seemed to know a fair bit about heat pumps and I think knew how to install them. He said wait a few years to see how the technology progresses before switching.

In addition to this , my mortgage is due for renewal next year. Halifax will pay up to £2000 if you have a heat pump installed if you have remortgaged to them within a year. Other banks do similar pay backs.

So in theory if I did go ahead with a heat pump install, with the government grant and a £2000 pay back from the Halifax , it would cost next to nothing..

However the water tank installation is still a concern of mine. Having to find somewhere to put it would be a nightmare in my opinion, as we have no airing cupboards in our house.

Agree with this, it was our experience as well. BUT so much depends on the skill of the designer/installer. It is worth paying more for good advice. Heat pumps can be cheaper to run than gas or oil even in a not-that-well insulated house, but it depends on being able to heat with radiators mostly only at about 40 degrees, running for long hours. So the radiators need to be big enough.

-If your radiators and pipes are big enough
-If the heat pump is set up to adjust to the lowest temperature you need on that day
-If the heat pump is the right size

Then you can have a very comfortable system with low running costs.

A good installer will assess your house AND your existing pipes and radiators and tell you honestly what performance you could expect with what you have, what you would need to change to get better performance if it isn't ideal already (as it happened, ours only needed one new, larger radiator in the largest room, which had always been cold before anyway)

If you are in the South West I suggest you contact retrofit west. They use Heat Geek installer standards. And heat geek operate nationally and they do an option with a performance guarantee.

If you opt to cook with electric too you can also save the gas standing charge. (and stop getting pollution from gas burning in the kitchen, which is definitely a bonus for people with asthma)

I had a conversation with someone this week about heat pumps, they had theirs installed for free, they are not well off and I think this must have been some sort of government initiative. They live in a maisonette and are elderly too.

They are well pleased with it so far but they had no central heating whatsoever so I would imagine going from no heating to what they have now is probably very noticeable.

Someone within this conversation has just started the process of having a heat pump installed, they have loads of solar panels, live in a pretty wealthy area with a large house and they are paying for theirs.

I replaced my combi boiler nearly four years ago, so I am not in the market to change anytime soon.

I have a heat pump. A 12 year old Panasonic with the wrong tank plumbed in. Large modern bungalow with 4 heating zones with underfloor heating. I also have a secondary heating system that runs off a log burner and powers 4 radiators. We only use the heat pump when it’s freezing cold. It costs £8-10 a day to run. It’s only running 2 zones in the house atm. And we’re on a heat pump tariff but we don’t have any solar panels.
It’s constant background heat, if you’re feeling a bit chilling you can’t turn it up for half an hour, that’s where the log burner and its radiators comes in when it’s really cold. When it’s mild just use the log burner and it’s radiators
Think about how you use your heating because ASHP need to be on mos of the time and if you’re a quick blast when you’re chilly person it’s not for you.

Ours is quite new. Our boiler needed replacing and it was £4.5k to do that and sort out the hot water system, or £6k to get a heat pump and all rads brought up to spec under a grant scheme. As our rads were quite old they were nearly all replaced. It just seemed a good bet to invest that much money in the new tech rather than the old - gas is only going to get more expensive. Plus it's the right thing in that using electric is greener than burning gas. My main motivation I suppose is not whether this month's bills are higher or lower than last year's. I don't think a higher bill would make it a disastrous decision IYSWIM. DH has spreadsheets and says it's improved our bills, not least because we are no longer paying the gas standing charge, but I don't have the figures to hand.

Our house was just big enough to get a well specced Daikon pump under the scheme. We are enjoying the house being so warm and we really notice the difference in that it is cheaper to maintain a steady temp than let it get cold. It messes with your head a bit but it's because the tech works efficiently when doing a small amount of work and inefficiently when doing more work. Inefficiency plus paying elec prices not gas make it £££, so it really is cheapest to keep it comfortable all the time. I find this a real luxury.

I've been warned that they can be v expensive when they go wrong, but we have a 9 year warranty which de-risks that a bit.

Ideally I'd have waited a few more years but with the grants available when we needed to spend so much replacing the boiler anyway, it seemed like the better bet.

I just don’t know if a heat pump will
be cheaper to run than a new combi. If I waist until next year , if I stay with the Halifax, I would also be eligible for a £2000 pay back for green reward ie a heat pump.
If that offer is still on aswell as the government grants , then that would make not quite cheap.

However, the upheaval of having a water cylinder, finding a place for it and the unknown of a heat pump really makes me question it , as opposed to a new combi..

We have a heat pump fitted by octopus and its been one of the best investments made. Currently we pay £55 pcm for our energy, we have no gas. This is for a 4 bed detached property with solar panels (no battery). We are never cold and whilst we do have a log burner, we rarely light it.

Yes but the solar panels presumably save you a lot? I can’t afford solar panels as , I don’t have the money. And also don’t see this as my forever home.

Even without the solar panels they are giving you up to 3 kW of heat for every kW they use. Combine that with other tweaks like cheaper overnight electricity and you can make a reasonable case.

But if you re planning to move anyway, it's the wrong time to be spending a lot upfront and it's less likely to pay back. We did need to have enough boxes ticked already to qualify for the grant - deep loft insulation, cavity wall insulation etc.

I wouldn’t have the room in my kitchen for all the pipes that are needed for a heat pump. I’d have to build a mini extension or live without my dryer and dishwasher.

I was surprised at how much space is needed. How do other people cope?

we didn't need extra pipes.
the reservoir unit & pump is 50cm high/50cm diameter, fits in the boiler cupboard.
even without solar it's a lot cheaper than gas, even when it's -10 outside.
we have reduced the running temp to 40 degrees and the rads are always on in a couple of rooms in the house. it's a pleasant temp but not t-shirt indoors type temp.

There are a million threads on here

I love ours. House never cold. In fact my mum commented that the house is too warm for her. Since we had it we’ve had three winters and not got out the winter quilts yet

however it takes a good installer to get it to work well for your house. Which means making sure you have the right heat loss calculations and investing in insulation and possibly new radiators. I’ve got used to ours but they are quite big. Excellent for drying socks on though.

there are millions of poor installers out there who don’t know what they’re doing and give heat pumps a bad name. You canNOT just install one “off the shelf”.

Ours takes up less space indoors than our old heating system did. The water tank went where our old hot water tank did, in the airing cupboard, and we have a space where the boiler used to be because the actual heat pump lives outside.

I appreciate it's trickier if you don't currently have a hot water tank, but both a hot and cold water tank are really normal things for houses to already have, or to have had until quite recently.