Air source heat pumps - cost / installation questions for anyone who's recently put one in

[Sadik]

Wondering about people's experiences and how much the pump + installation has cost.

Our heating currently runs off a 1980s multi-fuel Rayburn, mostly designed for coal, though we most burn wood in it. So no fire = no heating which is fine for now, but I'm concerned about as we get older.

I definitely want to replace our rayburn with a more efficient & modern burner, & keep that as an option, since we have several acres of coppice woodland which is an important habitat & needs to be continually cut on rotation. But I'm thinking that ideally while doing that we'd add a backup source of heating that could hopefully run on a timer system & wondering if ASHP would be the option.

I don't think that we'd get the £7.5k grant since our system is already low carbon (but am slightly uncertain as many/most people would burn coal in a rayburn like ours).

As a minor question, I assume that a heat pump would need to be reasonably near to our water tank because of the piping?

The other very much cheaper option is to buy a couple of oil filled radiators and have them as a backup with timer switches!

..

If you do a search, there have been a few recent threads where people talked about their costs.

Oil filled rads cost an absolute fortune to run and I would not recommend relying on them!

I'll search again - couldn't find any with costs, though useful chat about ASHP generally.
I guess my dilemma is whether to wait & hope costs fall as they become more common (as right now the burner is fine, rads would be a short term emergency solution) - or whether they're likely to get more expensive (because everything does!)

If you have lots of land, ground source heat pump might be worth considering? I think they are better but I could be wrong about that.

Our house isn't adjacent to the farmland, so sadly ground source isn't an option, only air source.

We have an oil 680K Rayburn, so has controls - both heating and hot water - on thermostat & timer, turn on the cooking side to cook and as well as treat like a storage heater for the kitchen (no radiator in there) as well as gently warm rest of house.
We also have solar, and an iBoost that when generating 0.2kw more than we are using, it heats the hot water (to a higher temperature than the Rayburn would, so the Rayburn doesn't heat the water instead). We have halved our oil use (completely off March to September other than the odd time we all need showers on a wet day and I have to top up the hot water, or I'm catering for 5000 and need the hotplate/ovens to cope - we have an electric cooker & combi microwave too). We also only use low electricity as a result (£55/month year round constant low use, as obviously cooking on electricity balances out extra lights etc all winter.
I'm looking at solar + battery (we don't currently have this as ours is older and we are on a high feed in tariff and not permitted to use battery to get this tariff ) for our other large south facing garage roof for added winter use, before looking at heat pump technology. I absolutely LOVE my Rayburn.

It's interesting to note that once solar grants / higher FIT petered out the price of solar dropped pretty quickly to the same as previous after grant taken off - so don't worry about not qualifying for the 7.5k grant for heat pump, price will drop to that level quickly IMHO.

Your set up sounds very similar to ours @Ariela except that our Rayburn is multi-fuel. I've also got solar & dump to hot water when exporting, so also don't need to light the rayburn from March through to October-ish.

I've also recently added a second PV system (like you the first was on the high level FIT) & currently our electricity bills work out to about £450 p/a.

I feel like we're a good candidate for ASHP as we've done loads of insulation inc internal solid wall insulation throughout, everything double glazed etc, & low grade heat over a longer period would actually work better for us than short high bursts. But like you say, a little patience & the price will most likely come down substantially. I did consider sorting out our heating a few years ago when we were doing all the insulation, but a combination of not wanting to be an early-adopter, plus everything suddenly becoming more complicated mid project because of covid meant it got put off.

And I too love my Rayburn, but I'd like to change it up for something broadly similar that will burn more efficiently, wood in a multi-fuel is a bit of a fudge.

@Sadik can you do anything with woodchip? Thinking feeding coppiced wood through a chipper...
We too have our own wood - that goes on the log burner. This wasn't installed by us but apparently has the capability to run as a back burner to heat water if plumbed in (it isn't), however it's the far end of the house, just too far from the water.

I think chipped wood becomes more complicated in terms of drying etc ?(though I do chip all the brash for use on the farm).