From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
The heat pump rollout lurches from one disaster to another.
Last year, according to the Microgeneration Certification Scheme, installations were less than 60,000, despite increased government subsidies of £7500.
The total number of installations in the UK is now 275,000, just one percent of UK households.
Meanwhile government statistics show that heat pump installations covered under the public subsidy regime are running at around 10,000 per quarter.
Although the ban on fossil fuel boilers in new builds this year will increase increase installations, this will have no effect on the 27 million existing houses.
At the current rate, 26.4 million will still not have heat pumps by 2035.
Nope…60k per year is a paltry 600k by 2035
Shoot, it’s only 6,000,000 by 2135
27M installations will take 450 years 2585 at current blistering rates
In the year 2585 if man is still alive…
Oh well.. in 18 months they will find another magic unicorn to be the answer.
That’s what the article says.
27 million – 26.4 million = 600k.
Over 22m homes in the UK are on the gas network. With electricity 4 times more expensive than gas who in their right mind would want to switch to heat pumps?
Whilst government grants are available to install heat pumps millions of homes will need other changes, such as larger radiators,under floor heating, double glazing, better insulation, and in the many homes with combi boilers a hot water tank on top of the costs of installing the heat pump.
Then there are the 13,246,000 terraced houses mostly lacking the space to install heat pumps.
Miliband et al obviously live in a different country to the rest of us.
Has anyone in the UK got any data on the heat pump performance for hotwater.
I saw somer data for Norway that stated it cost EUR4.30 for a 5 minute shower. I assume that is with electric heating.
A lot depends on the temperature you want the water to be and the outside temperature. Heat pumps do well in Norway as they have a different starting point IE they use electricity for heating so a heat pump does drop running costs with a COP over 1. In the UK mains gas is used for most domestic heating and per kWh is a 1/4 the price of electricity so you need a COP of 4 before costs are even the same. Hence the need for the extra insulation, but if you had the extra insulation the gas costs drop too.
The coefficient of performance or COP of a heat pump, refrigerator or air conditioning system is a ratio of useful heating or cooling provided to work required. Higher COPs equate to higher efficiency.
I am located at 37S and have just replaced a 25 year old gas water heater with a heat pump. On metered energy the heat pump is better than 10 times more energy efficient.
The heat pump has a COP of 4 but the tank is much better insulated. It is not possible to extract 100% of the heat from the gas flame into the water and it is more difficult to insulate a gas heater than a tank separate from the heat pump.
We are a household of two and currently use less than 1kWh per day for water heating. The ambient temperature has been getting above 30C and night high teens.
We have a large tank because it runs off solar and acts like a storage battery. I have it kicking in at 11am and it usually runs for under an hour initially and then might have another run before it shuts down at 4pm.
At the time of writing this comment, Rick’s comment has a -1 vote score. Why would anyone vote this comment down?
He is correct to say that a sealed electrically heated tank will be better insulated, it doesn’t have to have a tunnel for the flame to enter at the bottom and a flue at the top. When not burning gas, this tunnel would work like a cooling tower, venting tank heat.
He is also correct to say that you can’t extract 100% of the heat from a flame into the storage water. A good burner will recover most but not all the energy, at best the hot air exiting the system must be no cooler than the coolest water in the tank, (60C?), but more than likely 80C or hotter, since the flame energy is last in contact with water at the top of the tank, not the cold water at the base.
My only question is WHY have the electric heater kick in at 11am, the solar boosted system hasn’t really had chance to heat the water in the tank yet. It would be more efficient to let the sun do more work on the colder water and only add electrical heat IF required after the sun has peaked but any solar panels are still producing, eg 3pm an onwards.
I would hope that anyone down voting could add a few notes to clarify WHY they are voting down, it only takes a second or two.
I didn’t vote down but I would note that 30degres C is pretty warm for an overnight temperature, rather different from the UK in winter. But we also use our solar to heat our water during the day because that is when solar actually is in action. Pretty useless relying on solar at midnight.
Votes are pretty much irrelevant on this site because there are people here who vote by ideology or ad hominin with no regard to the argument made.
Good heat pumps can achieve 500% efficiency with an output temperature of 35C, good for under floor heating and swimming pools.
Unfortunately the good efficiency quickly tapers off and by the time you get to 70C they are 100% or less efficient, in other words, you would be better of using an immersion heater for hot water, the most expensive way of heating water.
The UK housing stock and “standard” heating systems are, to put it mildly, not suitable for conversion to heat pumps, for many reasons.
If you are building a new home and design it for using a heat pump for heating, i.e. under floor heating, then that may be sensible, but you will still require a different source of heat for your hot water.
Note: district wide heat pumps do not suffer the same problems and can supply very hot water, however, we do not use distinct heating in the UK.
Heat pumps that can acheive a COP of 5 are very expensive from what I see. They never achieve that output in winter temperatures. They decline to 1.0 at their lower limit.
One repair incident wipes out all of the savings. My warranties don’t include labour, which is sky high for refrigeration equipment.
Heatpumps should be in general very reliable devices, they are not different from fridges and freezers. I’m pretty sure you had some fridge working 20+ years around.
We’ve had one for 20 years and it still runs (ie warms/cools) ok. Its bearing has been noisy for the last 10 years.
A COP of 5. Can you post a performance based curve for that heater/cooler showing how it performs with varying external air temperatures.
As an example, an air heating heat pump will have a COP well up in the 4’s if you are ask it to heat a room to 30C when the outdoor air is 30C BUT when the outdoor air is zero, with humidity, then the outside unit is going to ice up and require an ice melting cycle, drawing heat from the house OR using resistive heating.
COP statements really need the temperature span stated, else they are extremely poorly, limited information.
You need a hot water tank…
I like my abode to warm up in less than a day. You can’t beat a combi boiler.
Strativarius,
yes you can a system boiler is better as flow volume doesen’t affect capacity in the same way as a combi.
Wrong. You will need.. a hot water tank. That can affect capacity in the house. I prefer more space.
In my previous house I had a heat-pump, but with underground heat exchange not the crazy air heat exchange that the UK mostly uses. It was amazingly effective.
The problem is the huge amount of older housing – my house is Edwardian (1906). You can only really do the heat pump thing with a new build. Unless, you have very deep pockets.
Do heat pumps have to boost their output when heating a hot water tank which needs to be at least 60 degrees C?
Yes. You are basically heating your hot water with resistive heating. Think an immersion heater. In addition when the temperature falls below some level air source heating will also be supplemented by resistive. This is why its so expensive to run. There is also something to do with humidity which I don’t understand, but have read that in the UK climate, very damp, air source doesn’t work very well at lower temps.
The real policy problem however is efficiency. If the country is generating its electricity from gas, CCGT, this is 50-60% efficient. Then you have transmission losses and losses in the pump. However modern condensing gas boilers are 90%+. You extract more heat from the air using a heat pumps than you burn electricity to get it. But the whole process of first generating the electricity from gas and then moving it and running a heat pump off it is so inefficient by comparison to just burning the gas locally that you are probably not getting any net saving in gas consumption, and incurring lots of costs in equipment and transmission.
Generate the electricity from wind, they will say. Yes, and on a cold dark calm January evening, what then?
There is also something to do with humidity which I don’t understand,
Well in very cold climates you’ll get icing with the outdoor unit heat exchanger and that will require periodic resistive element heating to clear it. Had that with a tenant a couple of winters ago for the very first time in Adelaide with an exceptionally chilly humid spell and the ducted aircon had no such de-icing facility for our Med climate. Then I remembered women always have a hair dryer so you want long term warm inside you’ll need to get nippy outside occasionally my dear.
Yeah I know that’s climate change for you as that Mitsubishi Electric ozone depleter had never done it for the 35 years it lasted 😉
PS: It died the following summer so $10k AUD to replace it and the installers will tell you to only expect 10-12 years max out of the ‘sustainable’ ones now and I know of a couple only lasting 7 years particularly near the coast. That’s the tradeoff for cheaper power consumption with inverter compressors and variable refrigerant flow.
In order to extract heat from the air, the outdoor coils have to be cooler than the air. This often means the coils need to be below freezing. When their is moisture in the air, it freezes on the coils. This does two things, it insulates the coils from the air, and it blocks airflow through the coils. The more humidity the air is, the faster this buildup occurs.
As a result, the heat pump has to go through periodic defrost cycles, in which it uses either direct resistive heat to melt the ice, or it switches to AC mode and uses inside heat to melt the ice.
Not very efficient.
I see them pushing the efficiency side of things, and they are efficient, but when the electric is 4 times the price of gas it don’t make sense. Yes there are heat pump energy tariffs that sell electricity at reduced prices, but how long before those tariffs are taken away making everyone pay an increased price overall.
I have a video clip from a business tv station and to renovate to C label it cost 52.000 euros and takes 211 year to earn the money back. Saving from heatpump was 250 euro, annually.
Of course renovating is mandatory, it will mess up to housing market. Rentals will be force to sell and rents will go up phenomenal. This house is 30 years old and I find it comfortable, don’t have to turn on the heat much. The problem is not the usage of gas, but 70% of the energy bill is distribution and taxes.
Country Number of Heat Pumps Installed Percentage of Households with Heat Pumps
Estonia 180,000 34%
United States 17.2 million 14%
China 58.4 million 33%
United Kingdom 55,000 0.19%
There are UK surveys that claim over 80% of people who switched from gas boilers to heat pumps were happy with their heat pumps. I find that hard to believe and believe there may be some distortions of that percentage:
The few people who invested in heat pumps do not want to make themselves look bad by complaining about their investments, or the higher cost of electricity is no big deal for them
and/or
For some homes the benefits attributed to the heat pumps could really be from adding extra insulation to the home with the new heat pump
Is that China Figure correct?
China 58.4M / 33%
That would equate to 175M households in China which is roughly 850 people per household
Nationally, Australia has about 63% house with air-conditioners installed.
Can’t find any stats as to what percentage are reverse cycle.
“Estonia 180,000 34%”
no idea where you got that BS figure for Estonia.
Being as I have a flat there, I can assure you it’s nothing of the sort.
The vast majority of all heating in Estonia is done via ex-soviet designed communal heating.
In our case the idiots pre-2022 decided to change it to GAS! (ie Esti-gas=Gazprom!)
Perhaps you should go there sometime instead of coming out with rubbish.
Oh and btw at 60N they installed solar panels!
= PRC made economic suicide…
Today it’s below 0C and snowing while the wind farms can stand idle for days when no wind.
Estonia still gets a lot of its power from another soviet developed industry
OiI SHALE.
They can always sleep in their “electric” car to keep warm. When they wake up to the smell of noxious gases … don’t say we didn’t warn them.
I’m still angry over the loss of incandescent and halogen bulbs.
The boilers will outlive the Labour government.
I live in SC, and have a Heat Pump for heating and cooling. They work pretty well here except for days of extreme cold. i.e. Anything less than 20°F. Unfortunately those temperatures are fairly common even in the SC Upstate area. I will likely get another one when this on dies, primarily because a retro refit of AC/furnace set up would be prohibitive $$.
** fewer than 60,000.
Most people don’t understand that the COP of a heat pump is 1.0 at the lower operating limit.
The rated outputs are based on +10C ambient. The rated outputs are pretty well never acheived in normal use.
The water heaters have the same problem. They work well in hot weather but output declines to 1.0 at the lower limit. Then they switch to resistance heaters.
Vendors never provide output charts and even the standards are hard to look up. The US regulators give out bafflegab.
We spent last winter in southern Europe. Every B&B had new heat pumps and they were a pitiful replacement for gas.
I can’t imagine using them as the primary heat source in a cold climate.
What is important in a heater is that the peak output greatly exceeds the average output. Otherwise you end up having to pre heat an empty house.
The sooner government stops mandating things, stops subsidising things and stops giving preferential tax treatment the sooner things will return to normal. Government does not know better and screws up everything it lays it’s hands on. Get the hell out of the way government.
Don’t heat pumps use power? Does the UK have enough power to run them, especially if the Norwegians cut off power to stop upsetting their own citizens?
All those saying they don’t work well in cold temps. They do work acceptably well now. I have a chinese daikin rebranded as Senville. It heats our house reasonably well to -10F and does very will to the single digits F. It actually costs less to run than the coal stove we have used for years. I’d say the only time it actually suffers with excess ice build up is when the temps are around or near freezing. But as the air gets colder their is naturally less water and they actually improve quite a bit. It easily heats the air to 140F when outdoor temps are in the single digits. Amazing really. Last thing to note. If your unit isn’t newer than the last 5 years they aren’t the same. They have improved a lot.