To absolutely hate heat pumps?!

[Rosesandstars]

We moved into a house with a heat pump already set up. It is awful- it takes ages for the heating to get to any reasonable temperature and the hot water runs out after a 15 minute shower, it then takes over an hour to heat up again. Does anyone else find the same or AIBU?

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Updated by MNHQ
Landed on this page in search of heat pump advice? Find our guide to installing a heat pump in your UK home here. HTH!

No. I don’t know anybody who has that. Not common here at all. I’ve heard of it in some high end homes, but never seen it in person. Most common are baseboard heating (usually electric) or a furnace (the modern ones are electric, older ones could be natural gas or even oil).

Also, I’m curious about the people referencing hot water tanks being related to heat pumps. This is not a thing in Canada and it seems odd. The hot water tank isn’t connected to our heating system (unless people are using a furnace of some kind). Here a hot water tank is a separate appliance that is powered by electricity.

Yes! I’m learning through this thread that in the UK it’s common to have no heat on at all for large portions of the day or night in cool weather. Here in Canada, once it gets cold enough in the fall to require heating, we turn on the thermostat (at least in the main area of the house) and we don’t turn it off completely until the spring. We might adjust the temperature, but there is always some heat.

It’s essential to have a certain amount of heat on from late Oct-end of March. Not just to avoid frozen pipes, but to avoid getting mold (damp). People in the UK seem to talk about having issues with damp (aka mold and mildew) a lot compared to here, now I’m thinking this might be why.

Bathroom ceiling fan, kitchen range fan? Maybe tumbledriers are different in the UK, but here, there is a duct from the dryer that vents the steam outdoors. There are some ductless ones (heat pump technology, I have one and I do hate it because it takes forever) and the grey water drains into my hose thing.

15 minutes of hot water is not a big ask if you have thick hair and are the 3rd person in the house to use the shower while someone is also washing the breakfast dishes.

It takes me a couple of minutes just to get my hair wet.

15 min is a reasonable amount of time for a shower with the water running the whole time. Generally I can get in and out in 10 but it’s longer to shave my legs.

Even with high water pressure and no water saver on my shower head it takes at least 10 to rinse the shampoo and conditioner out of my hair.

Sorry OP, have no advice for your heater (but it does sound very underpowered) but the 4 min shower brigade annoyed me into commenting.

That doesn't sound very economical if you are running it 24/07.

Are they expensive to run in the long run?

We heat very differently here in Canada I’ve learned.

re underfloor heating, after a fire demanded a Reno, my father had it installed in the kitchen. Height of luxury. Rest of the house is heated by radiators (oil furnace) and electric baseboard. House was built in the 1890s though

eta my house built in late 70s is baseboard only. Once we replace more windows we will get a heat pump

Me when washing my very long, very thick hair.

Which would a plain why you have short showers, but we're talking about the use that OP wants from a heating system.

15 mins is not enough for her.

Heat pumps work best in houses with a good Building Energy Rating (BER) of A1 to B3 - possibly C1, and underfloor heating. They are less effective if connected to older radiators.

They need to run continuously and should not be turned on and off. They should go off automatically in summer when temperatures increase and then just heat water. They are slow to respond to big differences in temperature, ie if doors are left open - they cannot "ramp up" like a gas boiler.

They need to be serviced annually when refrigerant gas levels should be checked.

If all the above are in place, they should save loads of energy. The man who would not install one in an older retrofitted house probably has doubts about air-tightness and maybe wall and floor insulation.

A heat pump that is properly sized should not be struggling to hear a home to 21 degrees. OP, whatever the lowest rating is for the pump you have, it will start to be less efficient when the outside temp drops to about 7 degrees Celsius higher than the lowest rating. For example, mine is rated to -22 Celsius, meaning that once the outside temp is -15 or less, it does work harder.

I wonder if you’re not turning it high enough. The heat setting doesn’t always correspond to the room temp. If you’re setting it to 21, that’s the max temp of the air it’s forcing out. So if you actually want your rooms to feel 21, you should be setting the heat pump higher for a bit. 24 degree air will heat your home to 21 faster than air that is 21 degrees.

I keep mine set to 21 in the night, which usually results in most of the flat being about 19. In the morning, I turn it up to 26 for an hour or so, which brings the room temp to 20-23, depending on the room and distance from the unit. Once the place is warm enough, usually when I’m making my second cup of tea, I’ll turn it down to 24, which maintains the room temp of 21-22 degrees until I go to bed.

And this is not wasteful. Heating a home to 20-22 degrees is not extravagant. It’s also how you avoid “damp”, and is how your unit is designed to be used. Where I live, it’s a standard requirement for home insurance and apartment leases that you must maintain a minimum indoor temp of 17 degrees, so 18 degrees is cutting it close IMO. North Americans and their insurance companies do not mess around with mold.

I find the British attitude to heat pumps odd. I live in Canada, and we get quite cold, and lots of people have heat pumps and usually rave about the money they save. And I don't mean only in nice, new, insulated homes, I mean in cottages, or old places too, sometimes with limited insulation, although obviously that's not ideal. I'm hoping to get one for my house which is 200 years old and rather cavernous - my limitations are going to be on the duct work required, which is an old house thing.

I've never heard anyone here say they need in-floor heating, and that doesn't seem ideal to me since both are slow. But we do normally use them with a second heat source. Occasionally (not often) a furnace, or a wood burner, often electric heat or even solar, whatever, for the dead of winter when the heat pump won't keep up. The heat pump is used through the shoulder seasons, and maybe the summer for cooling in certain areas. Most insurers here won't insure your house with just a heat pump.

We don't typically use the same ones you see in the UK. They are generally much smaller.

If you go way back, a lot of people here in Canada did use their wood stoves to heat hot water, there would be a tank attached to the cook stove.

At some point though we separated our hot water tanks from the boilers used for heating. Which seems odd in a way since we have our heat on so much of the year compared to the British, it seems like it would make more sense the other way around. They turn off the boiler but keep an electric hw tank, we use both most of the year. Though our summers can be hotter in some cases.

It's especially weird when people have hot water heating, plus a water heater, it seems a bit redundant. I wonder if it was when many people started to use forced air instead that it changed?

We have both heat pumps powering mini split units (AC and heat) and hydroponic underfloor heating powered by a gas boiler. If I want the house to heat up fast, I use the heat pump.

Heat pumps absolutely do not need to be installed in new homes and actually are NOT recommended for underfloor heating. Ours coped just fine with the 15f temps we just had here too.

They absolutely can! I don’t know what’s going on with heat pump technology in n Britain, but the core idea is that it can pull heat out of cold air and use that to make a room warmer, or even can do the reverse and pull heat from the door air outside, I.e air conditioning. If you need a room to be warmer, it pumps heat in, but if you need cool a room, it pumps the heat outside.

If youu have an older house, you may struggle if there isn't sufficient insulation. Heat pumps need the Insulation to retain the heat.

I guess the moral of the story is that every country has its weird quirks, such as:

• British people think Canadians and Americans use extravagant amount of home heating and tumble drying, and have poor quality chocolate. (I agree with the last part).
• Canadians and Americans think that the British have cultivated an odd cultural identity where they keep a stiff upper lips while mildly suffering in their chilly, damp homes, worrying instead of turning up the heat a bit. We also wonder why so many British people make a point of having tumble driers but not actually using them.
• British people must think that Canadians and Americans have all gone paranoid with our continental-wide terror of mildew and mold. One spot on the windowsill and we run for the hills and call the mold remediation people.
• Americans think nothing of using dryers and gas guzzling cars, but they have a weird belief that electric kettles waste huge amounts of electricity, so they make sad, lukewarm cups of tea in the microwaves. British and Canadians laugh at the Americans being terrified of kettles and sipping their sad microwave tea.
• Canadians like to think that we on par with the British in that we make tea correctly (unlike the poor Americans)…but I’m guessing that our British friends don’t think that Canadian tea is much better than American microwave tea and we are just oblivious.

Love this! 😁

I'm guessing that the heat pumps they have in the UK are quite different from the heat pumps the rest of us use. I was bamboozled by the talk of water heating too until I worked out that they are talking about something quite different from what I think of as a heat pump.

They sound rubbish to me, YANBU.

Literally not true, the lower temperature of the water and continuous nature of heating makes it perfect for ufh. We're just installing ufh after two years of a heat pump. Our 1950s home has been retrofitted and now we have solar panels, underfloor heating, air source heat pump and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery. Many ashps are not installed or planned properly, radiators are not large enough, and people are using them incorrectly in terms of temperature and flow rate. You have to tinker with it a little to optimise it, which we have done. We love ours and it keeps the house a nice stable comfortable temperature, I like not having that blast of heat from a gas system, it feels odd now when I go to friend's houses!

Our heat pump has been in for two years now and it's fab. No UFH (which I'm not particularly keen on).
We have a decent sized water tank and can get 3 long showers or deep bath and two showers out of it. Takes about 30 mins for water to get hot again.
OP there may be an electricity override on the water cylinder. Won't be cheap to run but that might help.

I think you're talking about an ASHP and something else, in the uk an ashp would just heat water that runs through radiators and underfloor heating, there's no mechanism to remove heat with a standard ashp. If you have an mhvr system, that does remove stale heated air and replace it but that's an additional system that requires ducting throughout the ceilings etc.

I think ASHP or air to air pumps can also do cooling. We just don't use that technology in the UK.