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?

My bill is £140 on a normal month and I ration the hot water and electricity useage! We don’t have solar yet but I know it will only help for half the year.

Yes but the solar thats unused gets credited back to our electric which will then be used in the winter.

No, you get paid a small amount for solar generated electricity that you export back to the grid through the smart export guarantee scheme. It’s around 5p a unit although the Tesla rate is slightly higher. It’s tiny in comparison to the rate of the units you buy back from them in the winter (when you are actually using the heating)

there’s no such thing as a free lunch..

Heat pumps are a kind of cheap lunch in the respect you get more power out than you put in.

The problem is that they aren't cheap enough.

I suspect their popularity in North America is mainly due to the fact that the houses are spaced far apart and mains gas is not so common in these places, a bit like the countryside of the UK.

They stack up better if you don't have access to gas.

If they were so great at saving money the government wouldn't have to subsidise them by such a massive amount.

I think the government should really scratch support for heat pumps and invest the money in subsidising more solar installations and insulation instead.

Hmm that's not what we have been informed by the fitting company. But I have read about the 5p unit. Gonna go back and look at the info pack

Yes do look carefully because the SEG is a massive con. It definitely does not get credited back in units onto your bill to then be chipped away at in the winter months.

this is the reason we have a battery and solar immersion for hot water. We need to use every last bit of the energy we generate since the export price is criminally low.

I have a ground source heat pump in the plan for when my gas boiler dies, maybe 5 years time. Already saving up.

BUT the engineer who quoted us said we would need a log burner as well to provide short term boost to the GSHP background warmth.

How many rooms are you heating, do you shower or bath are you well insulated every home different

We have a wall mounted one which is just to provide more heat for the main bedroom (DH is on meds which make him particularly cold intolerant). It's excellent for when it's not yet cold enough to want to heat the whole house with the gas CH. This is therefore when the difference between outside and desired inside temperature is relatively small and so the coefficient of performance is high. Obviously a different story when it's so cold outside ... ye canna break the laws of physics.

ASHPs and radiators no good you got to have underfloor heating, and loads of insulation it's all about heating the thermal mass of concrete on the floor, you've also got to have the right tog of carpets etc, had ours 11 years not cheap but efficient never run out of hot water, never broken down, wood burner with free wood. Given up worrying about the environment look at the stats coming from China etc re the emissions

£12-£13 does sound a lot unless your house is quite big ? In our five-bed house (admittedly fairly well-insulated) we are only on about that per day at the moment for everything ie cooking and two of us wfh as well.

Heat pumps need to be given larger radiators and/or longer running times so they can get the same heat into your house but at a lower flow temperature compared to what comes out of the boiler.

Because in most houses the boiler fires up and down intermittently even when the heating is programmed to be on, there is already some slack in the system befort you start extending running times and enlarging radiators, but doing those gives further savings.

Trouble is you don't necessarily need to understand all this especially well to be allowed to fit a heat pump 😕.

If I were you I'd get back to the installer and tell them you aren't happy and ask them to look at rhe controls, flow temperatures, radiator sizing etc.

In the meantime I suggest you set the heating to be on for longer - this might not ac tually cost you more. Its definitely worth a try, and note what the smart meter says if you have one. I have seen cases where someone who kept turning their heat pump on and off, actually spent more than their neighbour in an identical flat, but weren't as warm. A bit extreme but illustrates the point!

We have just moved into a small house in the Highlands about a month ago, honestly I've been in tears almost every day due to the unexpected cost of running the heat pump. We are paying somewhere in the region of £25 per day.! For context there are only two of us, thermostat set to 17, and with the panic of the costs we are not cooking,showering and using the washing machine once per week etc. We're freezing and miserable. This was supposed to be our dream and I think it's going to have to go straight back on the market as we just can't live like this. The house is mixed age ,has loft insulation and double glazing,but I don't know what else we can afford to do to improve matters

Part of the popularity of ASHPs in North America isn't just lack of mains gas; it's that a single unit provides both heating and air-conditioning (you use ducting for both, not radiators). This is why they were originally popular in the South and other areas that don't have very cold winters. They're also very popular in townhouses, not just detached properties.

However the latest generation of ASHPs is suitable for very cold climates--think Minnesota, northern New England, Canada other than southern Ontario/BC. The key is the correct type of pump with an inverter and a correct installation. This has been a huge boon for many as previously, if you didn't have gas, you ether needed an oil burner or a propane tank. There was a boom in ASHP installation when the price of fuel oil and propane skyrocketed.

The reason the UK government is subsidising them is that the upfront cost is substantially more than a gas boiler; people can't afford to lay out that money, even if they might save more in the long term. Funnily enough there was an article in the New York Times last week about Germany pushing heat pumps.

The heat from an ASHP is gentler than from a furnace or boiler, for lack of a better term. With a gas boiler, you can blast the heating, get the house up to temp, and then coast along till it cools off. With an ASHP, this doesn't work very well. It takes longer to get the house warm, and trying to make it warm the whole house so much so quickly makes the pump turn on the aux heat. This is electric resistance heating, and it's expensive to run, especially at peak electricity rates. So running it 3hrs 2x a day may, paradoxically, be more expensive. (If the issue is heat loss that is another problem.)

Hi there
I am in fully on panic/sick mode. We have a new build house (2009). Installed an ASHP. Current electricity bill £600 a month. Its like a whole other mortgage. We have our downstairs heated floors off and the heating at 18 degrees max when the kids are home from school but otherwise it's off. We also have some solar for hot water. We had some new radiators installed when the ASHP went in but the others were fine. Our neighbours house, which is the SAME as ours and is on oil, has a monthly electric bill of £150 a month. Our other neighbours in their new builds in similar homes have similarly low bills. I would seriously do your research before switching from oil to ASHP. I am literally researching the cost of re-installing oil!!! I am not sure we'd even be able to sell the house with bills like this. Madness.

Problem is for ASHP you need your house outfitted properly. So big area radiators and good insulation. Even then the SCOP might not be good enough to beat oil/gas.

Of course your neighbour will have a smaller electric bill, because they are using oil to heat. You have to look at their combined oil and electric bill to get a real idea of what the cost comparison is. You might also find that although in deep winter the cost of the heat pump is very expensive, but in the autumn/spring when the SCOP is higher you beat the oil heating bills so it averages out better over the season.

I think I would look carefully at how I could get best value for money in terms of improvements. You may find for example that the cost to improve your insulation is much less than the cost of ripping out the pump and replacing with oil.

2009 is a relatively new house, but the insulation can still be pretty poor. I have a 2005 house and the loft insulation and certain other areas of the house are not up to much.

When I lived in France, there were big subsidies on both ASPH and ground source pumps. I couldn’t understand why so few people had them, ( obviously only talking about new build, of which there were many).

Our boiler service man told me that he had installed one in his new house, and it was ‘good for background heating’. They still had their electric radiators , which are very popular and efficient in France, and of course the wood burner ;
electricity is cheaper ( well, not so much now) in France as it is nuclear, and because they don’t have much access to natural gas. Running and installing two systems was not such a great option for most people.

don't get a log burner OP as PP suggested - terrible for environment and terrible for your health!!

Not so bad for outside in the countryside. If the poster is not on mains gas it implies they are out of the way a bit, so the woodburner pollution is less of an issue than in cities.

I think they will get banned in cities sooner or later though - and I agree that they are not good for your health !

Interesting, we are looking to buy a house (having sold ours and now renting), and would like a newbuild after years of old houses. I'm seeing newbuilds with ASHPs, some with oil, some with LPG, a few with gas. My preference is for gas, but anyone have experience of a newbuild with LPG or oil? DH would like all the new tech, but I see it as more maintenance, more to go wrong, not as responsive or reliable (eg problems with ASHP in very cold weather).

Problem with oil/lpg I think is that it is not protected by the price cap. It's the tyranny of the majority - a lot more people have gas, so more chance the government will look after you.

Gas is cheap, simple, relatively low maintenance, there are a ton of people out there who can maintain it for you - I hear people struggle to get ASHP engineers.

If I was interested in energy saving I would probably go for solar, either hot water or electric and have a gas boiler. But I think after 2025 there will be no houses sold with gas boilers.

Thanks so much. I’m on the phone to the ASHP supplier now and will be chatting to them again tomorrow (interrupted by school run). Our house insulation and other electricals are as efficient as possible (apparently). Our neighbours’ oil bills are relatively tiny (certainly enviable). The neighbours think we must have fault somewhere but the more I research it the less I think we have. Electrician coming in 2 weeks to test everything. Our summer electricity bill is still £280 even with solar hot water. Our annual electricity usage for our young family of 4 is 1700kwh in a month, down from 2000kwh with the electric floors off (installed before we got the ASHP). Our annual estimated electricity cost is £5k. It’s all honestly sickening. If you’re thinking about going ASHP just do all your research first.

If you are getting a COP of 3 then it should cost much the same as oil or gas.

My guess is you have got something wrong on the ASHP settings.

I think one other issue with ASHP is if you get the settings wrong, you burn electric. Which is 3.5x the price of gas, and so screw ups are that much more expensive.

I would have a long trawl through the ASHP/controller manual and see whether there is anything can be optimised.

It surprises me a bit that you think your insulation is up to scratch. A really well insulated house requires a surprisingly small amount of heating, which makes the amount of power you are using even more difficult to understand.

After much trying and resorting to tears we finally got an ashp engineer out. £180 later and a bit of fiddling to optimise settings and it basically made no difference at all. We just have to have it set at 12 degrees to stop the pipes bursting,but apart from that rely on our woodburner. It sickens me the fortune we are paying for the heat pump to even get to that level which is horribly cold all the time. I hate that heat pump with all of my being, and I hate that it forces us to rely on a woodburner that I know is horrible.for our health and the environment,but we literally can't afford to do anything else

Ours is currently running at £22 for electricity today and we’re not even at 7pm yet. £10 of which was used up before we’d even got up this morning at 7am. It’s really stressful watching the costs go up and up on the smart meter and it was only -2 here last night. It’s not even that cold outside. It’s set to be at 17 degrees.
Our house is just totally unsuited to the gentle slow heat of ASHP and we were taken for complete fools by the people who fitted it. We’re going to have to move house in a few years and I’m worried that we’ll have to reinstall a gas boiler to be able to sell which is super depressing. Were thinking about putting on even more solar panels to try to keep off grid energy a bit more in the winter months, but that’s sinking more money into this house that I don’t know if we’ll see any financial benefit from.
I really want us to be environmentally friendly wherever we can, but if electric heating is this unaffordable to install and run, how are we ever going to be able to move away from gas nationally at the scale and pace we need to?

Heat pumps, for most people in average houses, will be a complete (and expensive) white elephant.
DH is a Gas engineer and is on trade-only forums, there are so many people unhappy with heat pumps and having them ripped out after spending £20k.
Gas boilers aren’t going anywhere, they won’t be able to ban them as there is no alternative for the forseeable future - hydrogen mix is looking the most promising, DH is doing a course with Vaillant next month on hydrogen ready boilers.
Apparently, a good test of whether your house is suitable for an ASHP is to turn your boiler right down to 45-50°, if your house is warm enough when it’s minus outside then it’s likely ok.
Mine’s fine at 55° but struggles to get warm at lower temps.