Terrified of freezing in winter, and couldn’t sleep in summer: aircon, heat pump, or something else?

[FancyPoet991]

We’ve been in our house 3 years. It’s always been cold in winter, and this summer the bedrooms were hitting 29–30°C at night. After weeks of bad sleep, I want to properly sort heating and cooling this time. I’ve heard good installers get booked up months before summer, so I need to decide over the next couple of months.

What I’ve looked at so far:

• Heating on more, plus a portable AC for summer. No additional cost to start, but our energy bill is already £200-300/month. The portable unit we tried was just enough for one room.
• Fixed aircon / air-to-air heat pump. Does both heating and cooling, and I’ve read it’s efficient to run. But quotes have come in at £5+ for the rooms we’d need.
• Air-to-water heat pump. The grant helps with the upfront cost, but it means changing the whole heating system and doesn’t really help in summer.

So what’s holding me back is the upfront cost, the risk of making the monthly bill worse, and how big and permanent the decision feels.

For anyone who’s done this: what did you go with, and did your bills go up or down afterwards? And did one company handle everything, or did you end up coordinating installers, tariffs and so on yourself?

We have installed aircon in the bedrooms and it has been such a blessing. In the winter I don't have the central heating on in the bedrooms and just put the aircon on to heat for 5 minutes in the morning which warms up the room nicely. It doesn't cost much to run, but is much more efficient than portable units.
But we're about to move and will do air to air heat pump in the new house to both heat and cool while being very energy efficient. Looks like Daikin is our front runner atm

We bought portable air con units for the bedrooms which work very well. Cost about £250 per unit depending on size.

The upfront cost of aircon put me off tbh.

Our house is cold but not freezing in the winter. Our energy bill is £200pm for 5 beds 2 receptions plus big kitchen diner.

My issue is our water bill which is around £1000pa. Used to be £400ish.

We're looking at installing a proper unit (used portable before but they are noisy at night!). Have looked at Daikin and Mitsubishi Electrical.

We have a victorian conversion so not super efficient / insulated. So looking for an AC unit that does heating too, but thinking about adding a plug in solar to power it OR maybe a battery too (as running the AC over summer probs added £20-30/mo to my octopus bill).

Actually have been looking at the Octopus Cozy with the new AC add-on and Tuck (https://withtuck.in/) who seem to be newer but popped up on insta, and no cash upfront which works for us (but maybe not for others)

Our water bill also doubled! We're with Thames

Was just saying exactly this to dh yesterday! Also with Thames Water. I think we used to pay around £400 per year when we first moved in around 15 years ago. Now we are on about £200 per quarter, so that makes £800 per year! I don't know how they are allowed to get away with it. Especially seeing as we still have a hosepipe ban due to not enough rain ffs 🤬

I guess its the price of pumping poo out passed onto us

Daikin, Cosy, Mitsubishi Electrical have come up but I don't know if can justify the upfront cost. On first glance, Tuck looks really interesting and I will look into them more. This seems to be a clever proposition without the upfront cost !

We installed fixed split level aircon last year. We've got six indoor units (four bedrooms, living room, and conservatory) powered by three outdoor ones. Total cost £12.5k installed. We have Panasonic units, as the supplier reckoned they work fine on 13A ring mains whereas other systems really need a separate 16A circuit, which would have added another £500-800 to the cost. Sure, it was a big upfront cost but nobody ever seriously questioned the cost of retrofitting central heating in houses when that was a thing, and I don't differentiate between making a house liveable in the summer from liveable in the winter.

We did it primarily for cooling in the summer, but also because it gives us the ability to warm one room at a time in the winter rather than turning a while central heating zone on. However, in reality we've only ever used it to heat the conservatory (which is not on the gas central heating).

They cost us nothing to run because we've got a 13 panel solar PV system and a 9.5kWh battery, which will keep three bedrooms airconditioned through the night. We had hoped that we might also get some free daytime heating out of them in the winter, but last winter was so dismal we never generated enough.

We still have a gas system boiler for central heating and hot water and I'm not planning on changing that any time soon. Decent air to water heat pumps have co-efficiencies of performance in excess of 300% now (which means that for each unit of energy they use, they produce three units of heat). That's fine, were it not for the fact that electricity is four times the price of gas so head to head in direct comparison the gas boiler is still cheaper. The solar PV system doesn't really alter that because it generates relatively little in winter and none at night, which is when we need it.

The gas boiler is only nine years old so hopefully we'll get a few more years out of it. As and when the time comes we'll look at replacing it with an air to water heat pump, and possibly look at a cheaper overnight tariff, but realistically the central heating and hot water will remain completely separate from the aircon because there are parts of the house not airconditioned which still need to be heated. It's a newish (2017) house so not anticipating much in the way of changes besides a straight swap between the gas boiler and air-to-water heat pump.

We’ve got aircon in three rooms and it’s a minimal cost to run it tbh although it helps that we’ve got solar panels. All in all, it was £5.2k for the units including installation for all three. We work from home so one unit is in the office and it’s been a life saver. We’re in a new build which is very well insulated but the heating has started to come on when we hit 18 degrees which has happened a couple of times recently.

Before you look at any of those options, have you done as much as you can to insulate your house. Good insulation should help with both the extremes, before you spend money on heating and cooling options.

@Fairyflaps I came here to say the same as you.
We have a Victorian cottage that was freezing in winter. We put that insulation stuff around the front and back door and hung curtains in front of them. It has made the most amazing difference. Those areas have gone from draughty to snug.