Add Another £2500 To That Heat Pump Bill
The Heating and Hot Water Industry Council (HHIC) has this week warned Government advisors that there is a potential £12.5billion risk to consumers when it comes to heating their homes in future.
They have claimed that five million homeowners will need to fund urgent system upgrades, costing an estimated £2,500 per household, to prepare for installing a heat pump.
The Heating Up to Net Zero white paper has been penned to inform future policy about how these costs can be avoided.
The issue is said to be that many houses built since the Seventies were fitted with microbore central heating pipework.
This means the diameter of the pipes is less than 15mm, typically eight or 10mm, while technologies such as heat pumps require a diameter of at least 22mm.
Microbore became highly popular in the new-build market for central heating installations as it was cost-effective and easier to install due to its smaller size.
But because the pipework is largely hidden from view under the floorboards, a replacement can reportedly be expensive and highly disruptive.
There should be little surprise about this.
It is the same problem that will require the installation of bigger radiators, because the hot water flow from heat pumps is low temperature.
The alternative of course is under floor heating. Either solution will be costly.
The report suggests that this problem is limited to houses built since the 1970s, but I would argue that the problem is much more widespread.
Very few houses were built with central heating systems installed prior to then. In the vast majority of these, central heating was added many years later, and will therefore almost certainly have the same small bore pipework.
Even if that is not the case, it is those older houses which will need huge amounts to be spent on insulation if heat pumps are installed.
This whole saga exemplifies how the mad rush to heat pumps and other low carbon heating solutions has been launched without the slightest attention being paid to what it might all cost householders.
See more here: notalotofpeopleknowthat
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Jerry Krause
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Hi Paul, PSI Editors, and hopefully PSI Readers,
First, I expect Paul will not read my comment but I hope the PSI Editor who posted Paul’s article will. And I went to Paul’s site to see WHO he was and by scanning the titles of his articles I trust he know about what he writes. But what I do not know if he and the technologists of UK are familiar with Ductless Heat Pumps which for practical reasons require certain ‘mild’ winter temperatures which seldom decrease much below freezing.
I read that Einstein stated: “The only source of knowledge is experience.”
We moved to the mild winter climate of the Willamette Valley (OR USA) from the frozen winters of norther Minnesota where heat pumps would be useless into a two-story home which was heated by Electric Cadets in each room because natural gas was available in the neighborhood. And the heating costs in this mild winter climate was greater than that in cold MN.
In the 70’s when the first energy crunch occurring in the USA one solution was to pellet ground up dried wood which could be burned in central pellets stoves like stove that burned firewood which required regular addition of more firewood. But the pellets stoves and required the addition of pellets once a day or so. I became interested in the technology of pelleting and I eventually had opportunity gain experience in operating a pelleting mill (experience). So to more economically heat our OR home I put in a pellet stove and discovered from the central location in the living room every room in the house could be heated to a constant temperature within a degree or two. But burning wood produces ash which created a dirt problem no matter how carefully we tried to remove the ash.
But the experience of the pelleting stove gave me the knowledge that I could heat the house from a central location and what the capacity of the heat pump was required.
So, by experience I know I can heat our home with a Ductless Heat Pump, perfected by the Japanese, as inexpensively as natural gas furnaces which require ducts and fire up and down a create noticeable drafts so the heating is not continuous as it is with the ductless heat pumps.
So, I share my experiences of heating homes during the winter season, because it seems that Paul might not be familiar with the ductless heat pump technology.
Have a good day, Jerry
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