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"?

DH was meant to be training to fit them (he’s a gas engineer) but we’ve cancelled the training course. We had a proper look at the housing stock that he works on, which is mainly 1939’s interwar properties without cavity wall insulation. The retro fit costs to bring the properties up to spec so that the heat pumps are efficient are totally prohibitive to the people who live in them. And he’s never been asked about one.
So what’s point of losing a weeks income to pay to train to fit something no one can afford to put in their house?

We installed a heatpump 5 years ago, so got the old grant. Our house is a 1960s one with no UFH.

Our (oil) boiler was ancient, and we were told that , if it went wrong, the parts wouldn't be available. If we had a new oil boiler installed then it would have to be elsewhere as the original one was in a place which would now be illegal to install.

We did have to upgrade some radiators, so the cost came to £12k. We had to pay upfront and then got a quarterly grant payment back, which will total £10kover 7 years. We actually moved 2 months ago, so the new owners get the payments for the next 2 years but that was factored into the sale price.

So the whole thing cost us £2k whereas a new oil boiler plus repositioning it would have cost us far more. Plus the heat pump was amazing and we never had to worry about running out of oil.

We probably wouldn't have done it if we were only going to get a £5k grant. We were lucky in that we could afford to pay for the new systemupfront, and that although our house was 50 years old, it was very well insulated - you only got the grant if your house met a certain thermal threshold, which ours did.

totally agree. most existing housing stock doesn't have the space for it and can't be adequately insulated to make it work. a house with rooms that are already tiny can't lose a few inches off each direction for adding insulation and bigger radiators, the rooms are already barely big enough to be livable in most cases.

it's fine to specify that all new builds should be designed and built with sufficient insulation and technology for heating that avoids burning gas, but a lot of the existing housing stock would need to be demolished and re-imagined from scratch rather than retrofitted, and that's simply not going to happen. the forthcoming deadline for no new combi boiler installations will surely be over-ruled. if it isn't, people will be installing less efficient and more old-fashioned technology like oil-filled electric radiators rather than the heat-pump technology that unsuitable for most older homes.

Why would householders pay out £5-£10k ON TOP of the grant, rather than £2k for a new gas boiler? Unless you're in your forever home, there's no way you'd recoup that cost.

And new build houses are still going up with gas boilers, surely that tells the government something?

It's not marketing, it's expense.

We put a heat pump in last year. Haven't done under floor heating, no more insulation though the house in 1990s built. We've not replaced any radiators though theres one room we think we might. Never even considered the doing anything to the windows.

It's worked grand all winter. With the grant it was about 2k more expensive than replacing our old gas boiler would have been.

I suspect some of the companies either want the easy jobs so put people off or are trying to up sell you on radiators etc.

And there weren't loads of adjustments to make inside either. We already had a water tank so that was replaced with a better insulated one.

The space outside and space for a water tank I can see being an issue for some people.

They're just far too expensive still. The £5k addition is just being swallowed up by increased prices. We had a quote and all in (with changes we needed to make etc) we are looking at over £16k. There's no way we can afford that. A gas boiler (which we can't have as no gas in our area) is more like £3-£6k. No wonder take up is low.
Not to mention the fact that we need solar panels and battery storage as with two car chargers and electric showers our house load couldn't cope with a Heat pump.

I agree with you. Plus the public sector bodies I look after have had a really difficult time with heat pumps. They haven't done what was promised and some of them are now having them taken out.

The govt would be far better giving everyone a grant of £5k for household insulation. The hear pump grant is greenwash to make it look like they are doing something.

Our terraced home and garden are far too small to have one. There’s already barely enough room for us. The kitchen is tiny; no room for dishwasher or tumble dryer. Our garden is so small that we’ve not extended into the back despite struggling with lack of space, because any smaller and the DC would have nowhere to play.

I think the people thinking up these schemes and saying that everyone will have one by xyz don’t live in the real world and see how many of us live.

Here they’re talking about bringing in four different types of recycling sacks instead of a general use one - where are people in tiny houses who have no garage etc supposed to keep those?! Rubbish is already only collected once every two weeks - and black bins were also changed to tiny ones - which is a struggle.

We live in a modern, reasonably well insulated house that has wet UFH downstairs. In principle an ideal candidate for a heat pump. One of our neighbours in an identical house has gone down the solar/heat pump options. I don’t know about running costs but we visited their house during the cold snap this winter and it was freezing. They had oil filter radiators all over downstairs as the heat pump couldn’t keep the house at a decent temperature. It may have been a poor installation but it didn’t fill me with confidence!

• Not sure if they work (in our type of home/whether we have enough insulation)
• Not sure if they will save us money
• Too expensive even with grant - new boiler would be less.
• I will replace my gas hob over my dead body - induction hobs are shit.

I agree

I'd have to build an extension to house it

Do you have a link to this Welsh scheme? I'm in Wales and haven't seen anything about it, sounds good!

We looked into it. Our boiler is 17 years old so likely will need replacing in the next few years...but a 5k grant was just the start of it, and the level of disruption to the house compared to a standard boiler replacement.

Yes, I think the extortionate cost on top of any grant may have something to do with it. The extortionate cost of housing may also be a factor. Once we’ve finished paying 20 years worth of rent to idle landlords and then paid 4x more for housing than people just a few years older on the same wages did, there isn’t much lifetime left to scrape up this kind of money.

The majority of people in Britain have all been impoverished, and that means none of us have any money spare. I do not understand what the useless government of rich elites don’t understand about thus - they understand how to take wealth away from people well enough.

@DazzlePaintedBattlePants we put an ASHP into our 1960s house and it was toasty warm. You do have to treat it differently to a traditional boiler by having it constantly switched on in cold weather, so it kicks in if the temperature in the house falls below a certain level. Rather than the traditional twice a day option.

Not an option for me either. My house is just too small.

I’ve been on MN a long time and ten years ago there was a long running thread by NZ bound or NZ located MNers. Everyone complained about the cold cold housing heated by heat pumps and it stuck in my brain…. Didn’t go down the pump/retrofit route despite all the pushing for it here in Ireland. To insulate, floor, retrofit , install , move out for 3 months whilst they do it etc etc etc was coming out in excess of 70k.

Installing a heat pump would be a complete waste of money in our house. Although it is relatively new (90s) it is timber framed with a brick outer with poor insulation between the two. We have been quoted over £40k to either internally or externally clad the house in order to improve it's efficiency which is just not worth it.

When I lived in France , there was a major subsidy for installing ground or air source heat pumps ( this would be 2006 Onwards). In our area there were a lot of new houses being built, all with decent size gardens ( 250m 2 at least). Virtually no one was installing them , you could tell because they always had a little sign in the garden during building.

I asked our boiler service guy about them, as his firm was an installer. He had one in his house. He said they were fine as background heating, but you still needed your woodburner. ( everyone had one) and electric radiators for boosting. So effectively two systems….okay if you are the installer.

I found out about it via the DIY property forum here but I just googled and looks like that scheme has now retired and the new scheme is just the same as the crap England £5k one.

We looked too. Too expensive even with a grant. That’s the sum total of the reason. It needs to compete with a Regular boiler cost wise, especially with all other prices going up for building works.

Ours is warm, but I've had to help out a couple of neighbours who were finding it cold and expensive because they were running it like an old boiler, just a couple of hours at a time. It's far more effective set to a constant temperature, and in these houses costs less that way. It's not running constantly but it kicks on and off throughout the day to just maintain temperature.