Air Source Heat pump costs

[NextInLine]

How much is it costing you per day to run your ASHP?
I'm currently at about £12-£13 per day and I've only got it on 15degrees!
Do I need to amend the settings? Or is this right?

No idea but we have just moved into a house with one and are shocked at the cost, it is making me feel sick. I think they are a stupid idea as you can't turn them om and off easily (without being freezing for 8 or so hours when you need them again) like a gas boiler. I really don't understand how anyone thinks they are a good idea!

Can they be run by solar?

More green, alternative heat source such as a log burner cover the few hours it takes to heat up and can be run off solar. They also remove an explosive source from homes which looking at what has happened in Jersey is a win!

Ground source coils are the way to go if you want to be green and save money. Air source heat pumps are also great for things like swimming pools you want warm but not hot hot.

They are not designed to be turned on and off, you risk damaging and breaking the Pump by doing this. They are a big thing here in irrland with new builds but to my understanding a house needs to be airtight for it to work

Ummm. I am not feeling the love for these things.

In order to "beat" gas you need about 3.5 as much "free" power as you put in with electric.

I think most pumps struggle to get 3. Funny thing is in the cold weather they are actually less efficient, exactly when you don't want them to be.

Plus you can't turn the things on and off as much as a gas boiler. So it's hard for example if bills are high to turn it off, or if you are out all day to stop it working and then switch back on at night when you come back.

I think they make sense vs. electric only. So if you are in the sticks where there is no gas then they are a better alternative than electric. I am not sure how they stack up against oil probably a bit better than gas but still not good enough.

I think if I bought a house with one of these I would rip it out for a gas boiler, assuming there was mains gas. I would want the gas price ratio to be up to about 2 at least.

I suppose the good news is that any new build built with one of these will probably be insulated to within an inch of its life, so what you might lose on electric costs and lack of flexibility you may gain on the fact you use generally less heating because of the insulation.

Get a log burner, this new fangled climate friendly stuff is emerging technology and doesn't work very well in winter time yet.

Give it a decade or so and the boffins might have figured out how to make the ASHPs work in the cold. Best not to be an early adopter given the costs involved as once the decent technology arrives you will need to replace your existing system.

Log burners are just about the worst thing you can have from an environmental AND health perspective.

Having an ASHP and a log burner just defeats any environmental object and you’re massively increasing the indoor pollution you’re exposed to. Breathing in the particulates they produce raises your risk of asthma, cancer, dementia, and also still birth and low birth weight if you’re pregnant. It also stunts lung growth and causes asthma in children.

Not worth it. . You and the environment would be better off with a gas boiler.

I appreciate this doesn’t help you much, though Op.

Ohhh.. sadly I have found my people. We moved into a house recently and fitted ASHP. We are now freezing and it feels so, so expensive. I’ve only got a few rads downstairs on full. The rest are on ❄️ to save money. Even with that it’s 12-14 pounds a day and we’re never even getting up to the very low setting I had it on of 16 degrees. It’s currently 10.5 downstairs. It’s heating up water too for that cost but honestly we are super frugal so it’s sickening. It was at about £5 before we even got up this morning.
Also the whole thing furs up with frost outside and I have to defrost it each morning with buckets of warm water (on professional advice).
The solar panels we put in have definitely been worth it, but I feel gutted that we installed the ASHP as it’s clearly so completely unsuitable to this house- only about 60 years old but it’s definitely not insulated enough and it’s way too open plan. I’m sick to death of shouting at DCs to shut internal doors to try to make it all work. Bah humbug!

place marking for now

ASHPs are very popular in North America and some municipalities are pushing their use (banning gas in new construction). It's difficult to do cost comparisons between countries, but I dare say we are not spending anything like that. I do think having good insulation and double glazing makes a significant difference. They're certainly not 'emerging technology' though.

It did take us a bit of time when we moved here to get used to heat pumps: you don't turn them off, you just adjust the temperature. We have a programmable smart thermostat so we can adjust it easily, set a timer, and even change it remotely. If the heat pump is having to work to keep your house at 15-16C, I would say that you've got heat loss going on. If it gets very cold, then the aux heat has to come on, and that is expensive. Right now, given UK temps, you might be using it some of the time.

I moved into a house with one in the spring

1. make sure the immersion heater isn’t on. It’s quite common to leave it always on with an ashp and it increases running costs.
2. depending on the tanks you have you can programme it. I have the hot water on at set times.
3. join the uk heat pump group on Facebook
4. They should be serviced annually but getting someone is difficult and getting someone who can actually program it properly almost impossible. So do point 3 above.
5. Insulate your house even more and remove as many draughts as possible. I am working hard at this.

Household electricity use averaged 17kwh a day in November for us. Room temp 17, we do is the log burner constantly and timed hot water heating

Can I ask how you are all programming yours? We do 6-8.30am and then 5pm-8.30 to 16 degrees and a fall back of 10 degrees. I wonder if I should be leaving it on all day or something to try to get the heat up but it’s so expensive already that I don’t dare. I’m desperately hoping someone will come along and tell me that it’s me that has been doing it all wrong- but from the sounds of this maybe they are just pretty useless unless you have a Passivhaus!

We know a family with it installed. They leave it on permanently

It’s best to have it on during the warmest part of the day as that’s when it will be most efficient.
Flow rates and temperatures are important but I haven’t figured it out for mine yet.

Ours is being fitted next week, but are having PV panels to power it, we are on oil, no mains gas. But do have a log burner which is fairly efficient in warming up the living room and upstairs. We looked at getting ASHP last year but the running costs wouldn't have seen much benefit to us.... However the pump and panels are free so I'm hoping my current £140 a month electric bill will reduce dramatically!

Solar panels don’t generate much in the middle of winter when you need the heat

Thanks for the replies!
it seems I’m not the only one struggling with the cost of the thing.
it is an old house with solid brick walls so I expect I am losing a lot of heat through that.
I put foil down the back of the radiators and closed curtains in the hope that it made a difference but sadly the running costs are too high.
ive applied for solar panels and insulation through a government scheme so fingers crossed!
Until then I’m just accepting the fact that I can’t afford to run my heating and only heating the room I’m using with an oil filled radiator for a couple of hours a day.

Did you keep the existing radiators when you got the ashp? They run at a lower temperature so usually you need to increase the size of the radiators.

Saying thay I'm spending more than that a day on gas costs at the moment with this cold snap.

This is what we've just had, 70mm insulation put on all external walls along with panels and pump via the Gov incentive. You may want to ask them about the radiators as well, if the pump was put in previous and private, the radiators may not have been upgraded. The whole point in these companies doing it is to get people off oil and increase EPGs for older houses like ours to reduce the carbon footprint.

Its not the best time of year to convert, however hoping that come summer we will have a fair amount of credit to see us through next winter.

I was looking into ASHP and the defining advice was these are next to useless if you house isn't airtight and you have cheap insulation. Both of those need to be of a high standard for the ASHP to be of any great efficiency. If your house isn't airtight then it's constantly fighting against itself to raise the temperature, the air you are heating is escaping at the same time as it's getting warmed. Same with the insulation if it's cheap and poorly fitted then it won't be sending the heat back out just losing it in the insulation.

That's why they were not an option for us, old windows and cheap insulation. So its a new boiler instead.

This page seems to list the national schemes: www.gov.uk/green-deal-energy-saving-measures/getting-the-work-done

We looked into this recently and realised there was no way a pump was viable for our Victorian house. The info we gathered seemed to suggest they are fine in new builds that are insulated to the nth degree, but it's financially prohibitive to retrofit adequate insulation into an older house.

Heat pumps have actually been around for several decades on the colder continent where they are used successfully and economically.
The problems here are that people install cheaply- they buy cheap heat pumps and get them installed cheaply by installers who do not know what they are doing.
Get your house insulated well, buy a heat pump that is designed for purpose and get it installed by experienced professionals who provide an accurate heat loss calculation and can show you how to work and understand the system.
Unfortunately, badly fitted, cheap heat pumps cause a lot of misinformation and fear when the technology has been extensively proven to be efficient and economic and most importantly better for the environment.

I have no idea if we got given a heat loss calculation or not. I don’t think so. I think consumers probably need a bit more protection though if we’re being sold completely inappropriate technology this easily.

We were with good intention just trying to be a bit greener and it seems to have bitten us on the arse. And I don’t understand what colder countries are doing differently with their ASHP outdoors when -5 or warmer has caused our whole unit to frost up here in the UK.