Air Source Heat Pumps... Questions!

littlespark · Oct 24, 2021

Listening to the radio the other day, and UK govt has announce no new gas boilers to be sold by 2035 and everyone should go with ASHP... £5k grant to get one..Let me add... only england and wales. We'll stick with peat up here for now.
The following questions.
Probably easy to answer, but just pretend i'm an idiot for 5 minutes

They work by extracting any residual heat in the open air, compressing it and using it to heat the home.... so why are they outside and not inside, extracting already warmed air?

They dont work very well with microbore to radiators. The phone-in callers on the radio said they had to increase the pipe sizes, thus adding to the install costs. Also having to increase the sizes of many of their radiators.

The heat that comes out of these isn't as hot as a traditional boiler... so where do you get hot water? Immersion heater to top-up?

What i saw on a news programme, you get the unit outside... another inside, plus a water tank.. So takes up much more space than a wall mounted combi boiler, that can hide in a kitchen cabinet if need be. Not a lot of one bedroom flats have any space for such equipment.

And discuss.....

adamstanly · Oct 26, 2021

Zerax said:
Firstly... you need to take what you read/hear about in the media with a pinch of salt... reporters are generally not technical and mis-understand alot of things... I think the plan is to ensure that boilers sold after a certain date can be easily converted to run on Hydrogen as well as Gas.

Yes! that's true,

The Committee on Climate Change estimated that the scheme will install 2.5 million heat pumps in new homes by 2030 in order to meet future carbon targets.

So if it’s not gas, what will it be? Well, hydrogen could play a valuable role as part of a heating solution. Combining hydrogen with heat pumps will allow homes to stay comfortably warm, without harming the planet. Everybody wins!

adonis2 · Oct 26, 2021

What about reliability and cost of servicing heat pumps, will we have to find another 15 grand every few years to replace them?

snowhead · Oct 26, 2021

adamstanly said:
The Committee on Climate Change estimated that the scheme will install 2.5 million heat pumps in new homes by 2030 in order to meet future carbon targets.

So if it’s not gas, what will it be? Well, hydrogen could play a valuable role as part of a heating solution. Combining hydrogen with heat pumps will allow homes to stay comfortably warm, without harming the planet. Everybody wins!

The problem with with trying to convert the Country and the World to heat pumps is the shortage of chips.
That problem isn't going to be sorted in weeks months or even a few years.

Modern gas boilers can run a 20% hydrogen + 80% nat gas mix and that's the immediate future plan.
However it will have to be a localised changeover and injection of the 20% into the network as not all appliances can run on the mix and as with town to natural gas conversion all premises will have to be visited and updated if required.

Zerax · Oct 26, 2021

Getting the general public to like Heat Pump technology... faces the same problem as many other things... Gas Boilers are very cheap to run, are easy to install and everyone expects their house to have one.

It's similar to getting EVs against ICE vehicles... they are relatively cheap to run, plentiful, go 600 between fuel stops and everyone expects to have at least 1

Or getting people onto buses and out of cars... Cars take you from door to door, are often cheaper than buses, you can smoke in them if you want, comfortable and you probably won't have a smelly tramp say next to you !

If they want more Heat Pump technology in the home, and for us to move away from gas... they need to make the argument for gas much worse... I think all you can do though... is put the price up ! Imagine if gas wasn't <4p/kWh, but 15p/kWh the same as electricity. I think then... you'd see alot more people embrace the technology and see who they could implement it. I often go into houses where it's like almost 30°C !!.. the price of gas is too cheap...

snowhead · Oct 26, 2021

Of course now I've watched a couple of Youtube videos their algorithm is bombarding me with more Heat pump company installation videos.
I found this particulary amusing, obviously not run past the Company H&S officer before posting to Youtube.
Just to note as well the steps seem to be on crushed slate not on concrete or other firm material.

marconi · Oct 26, 2021

It is not the falling which hurts; it is the abrupt stop at the end of the fall which does. (Newton's less well known law he coined after falling out of an apple tree as a young man while scrumping).