To think low take up of heat pump grants is due to more than just poor advertising.

[overitt]

There's a BBC story today about low take-up of the £5k grants available for heat pump installation: www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-64710225. The criticism focuses on poor marketingnof the scheme and difficulties in funding installers, both of which are true. But I think there's more to it than that. I managed to find a potential local installer and had a telephone conversation with him. He told me about the size of the pump, the restrictions on where it could be installed in relation to neighbouring properties, and the internal infrastructure that would be needed. The picture on the BBC article illustrates it well. I would need to rebuild my kitchen to accommodate it. He also said that for the system to work effectively I would need to install interior or exterior wall insulation on my solid brick house, plus either underfloor heating or bigger radiators in all the rooms. All of thus would cost many £££££. The installer told me that for these reasons he was mostly installing heat pumps in new build homes or complete refurbishments.

Aibu to think these factors are probably a much bigger part of the reason why the scheme has low take-up than "poor advertising"?

Certainly our housing stock is some of the least insulated in Europe. The scheme could have been better designed then to accommodate the greater cost of bringing everything up to scratch.

Heat pumps are part of the solution, but actually a very small part, realistically

Too many cowboys.
Initial costs are too expensive even with the grant.
They need to bring installation under 1 umbrella rather than leave it open to rip off merchants (like the cavity wall insulation scheme). This would raise confidence.
They need to help people finance it via part-loan as well as grants. Relatively few people can risk such a big up front investment compared with the cost of a gas boiler.

I’ve looked into heat pumps quite a bit recently as I’m in the middle of a whole house renovation and big extension.

On paper we are the ideal candidates to install a new system, but I’ve found the cost prohibitive in an already tight budget.

£5k off isn’t enough. For our house, total cost for heat pump parts labour, radiators etc would be around £11k (accounting for the grant). Comparatively, cost for a combi boiler install plus radiators is £7k. Building costs are so high, we don’t have that sort of money to spare in the renovation budget.

It’s a shame there isn’t better support. We’d take it up if there was a similar scheme to wales where they give you up to 25k interest free loan, payable at your own pace. That would also allow us to install solar panels and use the money saved to pay off the loan.

I'm with you OP. We needed to replace our boiler last year (1920s detached house) and did a ton of research into heat pumps in the hopes of going as low-carbon as possible. Everything pointed to exactly what you said. The £5K grant wouldn't even touch the sides of the amount of work our house would need, not to mention the scale of disruption to our lives. We were so disappointed but concluded that we simply couldn't do it.

Maybe in a new-build or lottery-win forever home?

I live in a pretty decent sized 4 bed house with integral garage.
I won't have a heat pump because:

1. There isn't room for it in my kitchen or my garden without major work;
2. They're expensive;
3. I don't want underfloor heating;
4. I've just replaced a 20yo boiler with an A rated gas one;
5. I don't want to clad my house with insulation;
6. I don't want to replace perfectly servicable double glazed windows;
7. I'm not paying to replace radiators when they work perfectly well.

There's other reasons too, but those are the main ones.

Putting an advert on ITV won't change my mind.

My understanding is that unless your home is insulated to almost passive house standards, they're a bit of a waste of time and money. My builder BIL is of the opinion that they're only worth putting in in new builds, because it's near impossible to retrofit insulation to a high enough level.

My DB had one fitted to his (very poorly insulated) house a few years ago. It was done for free as part of some regeneration project. His house is still freezing, he still has to run oil-filled radiators and fan heaters, and it made no difference to his electric bills.

Even a lot of new builds are built so close together, there's no room for them.

I would have to build an extension to house the thing - my kitchen is tiny.

Heat pumps aren't an option for most of the population, including me: lack of space inside and out, lack of money to make the other adjustments to the property which would be necessary, and living (as a large number of Brits do) in a 120+ year old terrace which frankly I'm not going to ruin with external insulation, and not going to compromise by making all the rooms even smaller than they already are with internal insulation.

If you were renovating a property by taking it back to bare brick, then a heat pump could be an option. Most of us want to avoid having to do that. Heat pumps are for the rich, in large houses, with bottomless renovation budgets. A 5k grant is not an incentive for must when installation is likely to cost 3 or 4 times that.

You won’t get the cost back so I’m not going to change my boiler that works and is small and discreet for one.

We put in a new boiler last year and looked into heat pumps as an alternative. Every installer we spoke to said that it could not heat our whole house to the extent it currently is heated. It would need topping up with extra electric heaters.

It would also cost twice what a gas boiler would. Unfortunately this made it a no-brainer for us.

Agree. They are possibly an option if you are building a house from scratch or remodelling to the extent of ripping a house apart, but for most of us they're just not an option.

I have a friend who has bought a wreck of a house standing on a massive plot and is keen to go eco with loads of insulation and things like solar panels, she asked about ground source heat pumps and despite her field-like garden, the builder did that teeth sucky thing and said it probably wouldn't be big enough. Air source I think use less space.

And what about people who live in flats?

We had a look and they weren’t suitable and expensive.
Why aren’t all new houses built with them as standard (and car charging ports)?

We had one put in. Needed planning permission for the pump due to how ‘close’ it is to neighbouring properties. The only difference to us is, we no longer have gas in the property but are stuck with high electricity bills to run it.

Also if someone runs a bath of water, it shuts off the heating for a while. Once the house reaches 15c, the heaters shut down, even when the thermostat is at 20c. Which is only for a couple of hours a day as I can’t afford to run it any other time.

I dont think they are the right solution for a lot of housing stock due to the insulation requirements. It makes the total cost so high. I also think retrofitting underfloor heating when you have a mix of suspended and concrete floors is hard. And they still seem to have high running costs. Its a great idea for new builds. New builds coukd also have ground source heat pumps because they are already doing massive ground works anyway so its a cost effective time to install. People need good quality advice on the correct insulation for their home that wont cause damp and then a grant or interest free loan to install it.

I have one, but it was installed in a new build. There's no way we could have had one in our old house:

• no outdoor space (mews house so a wall mounted one would have been hanging over the road!)
• conservation area, council won't even allow solar so no chance of mounting something the size of a washing machine outside

-sandstone with fuck all insulation and single glazing so it wouldn't manage to warm the house.

• nowhere for the water tank
• radiators were already as big as possible really.

They're great in the right property and I love it in this house - it's really efficient especially paired with solar and batteries

They're a part of the solution for houses which suit them, but by no means right for everyone.

I think new estates should be built with community ground source heating ( I think they do this in Europe )or sone kind of low carbon district heating but that would mean rules ( aka red tape) , the builder will say it slows down building process too much ...

Air source heat pumps are pretty ineffective especially in the colder regions , in larger homes never mind the insulation

We looked into heat pumps recently as we had to replace our boiler. After doing lots of research, it was clear that the expense would be prohibitive and the grant barely even scraped the surface. So I'm afraid we went ahead and installed a new gas boiler. Not ideal, but there you go.

My neighbours have one. It used the existing radiators I believe, and the house is kept at a steady, comfortable temperature. … but it’s more expensive to run than they anticipated. And they now have a unit the size of a fridge freezer in their outbuilding.

I agree. I went through the options recently and the technology is not suited to my house. Even the energy advisor agreed this (Scotland).

@CouldIBeAnymoreOuting solar panels have come down a lot and there's currently no VAT. It's more like 5k for the panels, more if you want a battery.

Given the costs you outlined you can see why people would choose a new boiler and solar for the same cost as a heat pump.

Too big and bulky. Too expensive

Yanbu. Most houses these days have tiny gardens as well, even the most eco minded is going to think twice about putting a hulking great box in their tiny patch of green.

I agree, OP. I heard the item on heat pumps on the news this morning and my first thought was that the problem isn’t awareness or lack of it, but the entire concept itself, encompassing all the drawbacks mentioned above.

@Calmdown14 in an ideal world, I’d go for both heat pump and solar, but you are right, at least solar is an option we can consider in future alongside a boiler.

@WhereAreMyAirpods i am director of a freehild companybfornour purpose built block of flats (1930s) and we have been grappling with this issue.

Apparently we used to have a communal oil heating system and individual flats had a open fire place in the living room. Back in the seventies this was removed and the block put on mains gas. Since then most flats have upgraded to a combi gas boiler, ripped out their water tanks and boarded up living room fireplaces.

We can't work out if indivudal heat pumps would work (there is room to put one on balconies where gas meters currently are but would planning rules let us?) or one massive one for the whole block.

Whatever happens it will be massive external and internal works for everyone and there seems to be little guidance. When it comes to blocks of flats policy makers either seem to think they are social housing or very fancy luxury blocks. However there are a lot of private purpose built blocks lived in by people on ordinary incomes and managed by small companies or volunteer boards.