Heat pumps - what if you don’t have room for one/your house is not suitable?

[Notcontent]

I very much support the phasing out of fossil fuels but I am starting to worry that people who can’t have a heat pump are going to be left in the lurch. What I mean is that government policies will be designed to incentivise people to get heat pumps, with more levies on gas. Which is great if your house is suitable for a heat pump…

My house is quite a typical London terrace. There are probably thousands like it. It’s small and has a very small back yard. I could maybe just about squeeze a heat pump there, but it would take up a lot of room and if all my neighbours, including neighbours at the back had them, the noise would be pretty horrendous. Also, even though I have new windows and some insulation, it’s not possible to insulate it further and no room for a hot water tank.

Does anyone else worry about this?

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Updated by MNHQ
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As this government has cancelled the ban on gas boilers, due to come in in 2025, existing ones can be replaced with a new gas boilers. Minium standards for new builds mean they can’t be fitted to new properties, but it’s easier to design heat pump / other solutions to work effectively in them I guess.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jan/06/uk-government-scraps-plan-to-ban-sale-of-gas-boilers-by-2035#:~:text=The%20government%20is%20to%20scrap,in%20its%20new%20housebuilding%20standards.

Unfortunately the reality is that by imposing a ban you are doomed to fail. It's simply not feasible for some types of homes. As such they have shifted the focus to new builds. It's a start. It isn't perfect but its better than nothing.

I can't help but be wary of anything that needs to be so heavily promoted as heat pumps are.

I know this is an old thread but glad it’s been revived - I was lying in bed last night calculating costs of a heat pump vs costs of electric plug in heaters 😂
I’ve noticed when we travel in Europe that lots of places just have on-the-wall electric heaters. Often with solar panels and solar water heating, and in colder countries, a wood burning stove.
i roughly worked out that having six heaters in for four hours for six months is £900 per year @ 25p per kWh.
though I might need to redo the maths, that sounds rather low?
a heat pump uses avg just under 6000 kWh per year which is £1500?
or am I getting something very wrong here?

The only way it would work in our 80-year-old cottage would be to have huge radiators. The walls in our small rooms aren't big enough--we would have to get rid of sofas and cupboards, or take out all the ground-floor coverings and put in underfloor heating. It doesn't seem exactly carbon-neutral. We would also have to have a lot more insulation, meaning the damp we work so hard to keep out would be an issue, so we would probably need a mechanical ventilation system.

It's just not worth it on smaller older houses where you can't just increase radiator size very easily.

Thats the problem. Our oil heating is not something we are attached to in any way and I would replace it but we have parquet floors throughout the ground floor of our 1940s house. I am not ripping them out for underfloor heating. Even replacing the radiators with larger ones would cause damage.

I am going to focus for the next year on improving insulation. We already have quite a lot of loft insulation and got cavity wall insulation about 15 years ago (although I suspect it's crap). We also have argon filled double glazing which is only 2 years old so should be decent. We can increase the loft insulation though since we don;t use all of the space up there. Presumably the more the better.

Gas boilers aren't going anywhere soon. If all the gas boilers were replaced with heat pumps tomorrow then we would have a massive electricity distribution and generation crisis. And this is without the extra burden put on the grid by electric cars which add even more problems.

The government needs to introduce pumps slowly so that the electric infrastructure can cope.Still, the uptake of them is pretty poor, with the government currently having to subsidise them with massive grants in order to get people to install them.

What the government really should do is give a grant to get your house heat pump ready. Which would mostly be insulation and maybe under floor heating. This would not only make the switch to heat pumps easier but also allow people running gas boilers to use less energy and therefore decrease carbon emissions that way. This is part of the stupidity of net zero though. Where the aim is to fail to achieve the impossible rather than actually achieve the realistic. For me it is better to say aim to cut our emissions by 20% and actually achieve it, than aim to cut by 100% and achieve nothing.

Heat pumps don't look that attractive vs. mains gas either in terms of install cost or in terms of fuel saving. Personally if you are on mains gas I think you would be nuts to switch over. Oil/lpg heating is a different issue.

I do expect that the government will start adding addition taxes to mains gas in order to try to force people off it to achieve net zero. This will probably start when heat pumps achieve enough critical mass in uptake. So boiler taxes and additional domestic gas taxes will come in, but probably not until the government thinks it can do it and still get re-elected. I'd be surprised if it happened before the next election, but maybe the one after.

We had electric heaters of the sort you describe in a house in France. They were very good at warming a room quickly ( put on in the kitchen diner for 15 mins, room warm enough to eat in when about 14 dégrées outside.) however, the heat dissipates very quickly, it doesn’t warm the fabric like central / underfloor heating. Most of the people we knew who lived there in the winter had oil or calor gas heating for that reason. If you couldn’t have that, dual radiators are popular which basically are a combination of a fan and and oil filled/ storage radiator. So I don’t think you are comparing like with like.

The heat pump owners ( mainly ground source) all had wall hung heaters and wood stoves for a ‘boost’.

The compressor and the water tank, so that the hot water doesn’t take ages to reach the tap

What the government really should do is give a grant to get your house heat pump ready. Which would mostly be insulation and maybe under floor heating.

Amd here we have a major problem.

Involving as it does not only the expense of buying and fitting the insulation and underfloor heating, but emptying your home so that the work can be done. So, moving all your goods and furniture, both fitted and unfitted, and probably kitchen and bathroom plumbing, either one room at a time (probably impractical) or all at once, meaning the cost of storage and/or a rental property while the work is done, plus the inconvenience in terms of commute to work and school.

it would be great if the burden could be shifted to house builders to install compulsory:

solar panels
batteries
heat pumps
effective wall, floor and loft insulation
window shutters
triple glazing
rain water harvesting tanks
ev chargers

there are also some great street innovations with planting for shade and water absorption, solar wildlife friendly lighting, community growing spaces, recycled paving materials etc.

@user989 It’s planning regulations! Builders are not responsible for government policy or planning policy. I think gas boilers are not being fitted now but many newly built houses got planning permission before they heat pump requirement. We have a shortage of batteries and solar panels. However I agree they are necessary and car charging points.

@Chersfrozenface You can use radiators perfectly happily with heat pumps. All our first floor is radiators and partially on the ground floor too. However they need to be larger ones so we have double ones with fins. They are not bigger in terms of space, just deeper. There’s not much disturbance changing them over. You absolutely don’t need replumbing unless your plumbing is very old but most people have no issues. We didn’t change any bathroom or kitchen plumbing.

Yes, everyone needs water tank space and a pump to move the water within the house. If the tank is on the ground floor, the water doesn’t get upstairs on its own.

I tried to get a heat pump. The engineers said it wasn't possible in my property!

Heat pumps aren't practical in terraced houses. For the cost of prepping the house you are better with electric radiators.

They won’t be getting rid of gas boilers in my lifetime. We don’t have the infrastructure or housing stock and going all electric is madness when we use gas to create electricity !

The radiators in my house are old and I have slowly been replacing them.

But when I replace I always go for a double and sometimes larger.

This way if I ever replace the boiler for a heat pump I should be able to run them at the lower temps and still heat the house. In the meantime if they heat the room up to much you can just control the output with the TRV or lock shield valve.

Nobody said builders were responsible for government policy. I said it would be great if the burden could be shifted to house builders. Clearly that would be most easily achieved via building regs.

Yes. We have radiator valves anyway! They are useful for saving money. As are thick curtains if people don’t have double glazing. We used to have secondary double glazing but now it’s all double glazed units. Good thick curtains do a very good job though. Add interlining if you can sew.

Can I ask, my daughter lives in a flat in a 19th century stone built tenement. There are loads of people living in these in Edinburgh, they are a very popular form of housing that has stood the test of time. Advert for one attached for context: https://espc.com/property/20-12-dickson-street-leith-edinburgh-eh6-8rn/36286121?sid=418596
How would you install a heat pump in tenement flats like this?

And there must be many other houses like ours!

We went to look at a new build apartment, spacious, well designed, opened a door in the massive hallway. to the engine room from the QE11 - ENoRMOUS wide cylindrical tank, wide curved vents up through the wall, many rubber pipes, outlet thingies and one of those horizontal red wheels you see engineers in disaster moves turning to close the submarine hatches, dive! dive! dive!

the agent said, “You won’t need to touch this” we thought, we won’t! - but what if it starts gurgling, will it be noisy, will it drone, is it costly to run and incidentally, where do we hang our coats, boots, vacuum cleaner.

Into the unknown we did not venture, came home to gch.

We watched vids on YT of heat pumps, never anything remotely like this ^^
now wishing we had at least photographed the behometh, better still a mini video.

I have seen a few videos on YT showing equipment like you describe. A room full of plant, piping and buffer tanks.

I think it looks worse because in boiler installations all the gubbins for the hot water cylinder are normally separate from the gas boiler, whereas with a heat pump they are all together.

You've also got all the additional stuff such as controllers for the solar, which people often have with heat pumps.

Needless to say, the more piping and joins/valves/connections you have, the more chance there is for a leak, or something seizing up.

When I first looked at my unvented cyclinder it did look a bit more intimidating than a standard vented tank. But I soon got to know all the bits and what they do. My current gas boiler is a really compact neat looking unit that takes up a tiny amount of wall space in the garage. Even the flue is not that obvious. It's pretty compact compared to a heat pump.

@GasPanic thank you for this reply - we didn’t buy the flat, apparently the builders are having difficulty selling them through uncertainty, exactly as you say, there seems so much of it to go wrong, filling as it did a large cupboard.

We would have liked to see and hear it running but apparently this wasn ‘t possible