Add Another £2500 To That Heat Pump Bill
By Paul Homewood
h/t Ben Vorlich
Add a other £12 billion to that Net Zero 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.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
In any case, ASHPs are so last year. Dale Vince was on TalkRadio this morning selling his new idea – Green Gas. Hilarious:
https://www.ecotricity.co.uk/our-green-energy/green-gas
One of the comments he made was that gas produced like this would be cheaper than usually-sourced gas, and not subject to market pricing.
Unicorn farts have more chance of solving the gas shortage!
Actually, I think green gas IS unicorn farts, or at least derived from the solid waste of real animals and humans.
“… and not subject to market pricing”
I can believe that! 🙂
“from grass cuttings” – and what I pray, powers the grass cutting? And how much land would be required for this – “on all the marginal land in Britain”! Really? And how much is that going to cost them to buy/rent?
And you think they couldn’t get any more insane! They’ve just excelled themselves, buy an order of magnitude.
If the markets aren’t going to price it, who is?
He seems to think market pricing is bad when it in fact is the best method we know of establishing a price for something.
It’s the ‘new normal’ with top-down imposed pricing, i.e. communism. This also implies rationing of course (and why I’ll never get a smart meter).
Any proposal that seeks to avoid mrket pricing necessarily involved government direction which is socialism and it results in the misallocation of resources, as does the entire green agenda. Actually these outcomes are what the green agenda is all about.
He was probably talking about something like this, from the local French newspaper translation by Google.
An ambitious anaerobic digestion project is emerging in the north of the Haute-Vienne department and in the Indre, thanks to the grouping of 74 local farmers.
The inhabitants of the area and passing motorists have been able to spot in recent weeks in Peyrat-de-Bellac, on the edge of the D951, major earthworks and the construction of a large concrete platform. The beginnings of the anaerobic digestion project led by 74 farmers, united within the company Bioénergies 123.
“Our starting point is that farmers have a role to play in the ecological transition”, executive Axel Le Quéré, farmer and president of the company. “We want to reconcile agricultural production and the general interest. We, farmers, create nuisances with the use of fossil fuels and phytosanitary products, with the necessary aim of feeding the population. By using agricultural biomass to produce biogas, we avoid CO2 emissions and we provide a diversification opportunity for farmers. ”
When their thinking began, the farmers involved in the project bet on a growing demand for green gas. “Our goal from the start was to be able to inject biomethane into the gas transport network, which did not yet exist in France,” recalls Alex Le Quéré. Producing biomethane makes it possible to recover 90% of the primary energy contained in biomass, when cogeneration, or the production of electricity by biogas, has a much lower efficiency (50% maximum says the physics of Carnot machines, rather 35% in fact) and produces heat which is often lost.
https://www.lepopulaire.fr/peyrat-de-bellac-87300/actualites/la-methanisation-a-grande-echelle-le-pari-de-74-agriculteurs-de-haute-vienne-et-de-l-indre_13684935/
The plant wasn’t running at the end of 2020 and I don’t think that it is yet. In the area around the plant the agriculture has changed. maize and Sunflowers for biofuel, cattle and sheep gone. Limousin is / was famous for cattle, including the Plateau de Millevaches.
The elephant in the room is that the farmers will be assuming the free availability of Nitrogenous fertilisers in order to grow their biomass. As the recent news about CF’s UK plants has demonstrated, the production of Urea, Ammonium Nitrate etc. requires huge quantities of Hydrogen which can, currently only be derived from Natural Gas. When you scratch the surface of initiatives like this, they really don’t turn out to be very green at all, except to the lawyers drafting the regulations, few of whom seem to understand the science.
Government lawyers understanding science? That would be like believing in unicorns 🙂
This is one of those “the end-user always pays, eventually” things. That’s a simple fact that politicians always try to avoid admitting.
When you’re worth over £100 million, based on conning a whole load of punters who are more stupid than you, and are as thick as 2 bricks you can make these claims as you don’t have the intellectual capacity to see you’re talking absolute rubbish
Green wishful thinking, yet again, hurtling straight off of the cliff of economic reality.
“Add a other £12 billion to that Net Zero bill!”
My understanding is the NetZero cost of £1.4Tn is to the Taxpayer.
The real cost to householders who will be responsible for conversion of their own houses, under threat of them being illegal to sell if not converted, is between £75,000 – £100,000 for an average (presumably 3 bedroom) UK house. (Professor of Engineering Michael Kelly).
The cost for that will far exceed the already woefully under-costed £1.4Tn.
Even allowing for several billion GBP more than the ‘estimated’ £1.4Tn to the Taxpayer, when was the first time a UK government infrastructure project came in on budget?
In my opinion we are looking at three or four times the £1.4Tn to the Taxpayer and at anticipated rates of inflation, a doubling of the cost to the consumer of converting their homes.
NB. I costed my own Victorian, EOT, 3 bedroom, two story cottage for conversion before Michael Kelly published his calculations and they were identical.
I also costed for a two storey extension to be built. Pre covid it was ~£50,000 – £60,000. Post covid the cost has now shot up to £100,000.
And how many years will it take to get a return on that £75-100K ‘investment’? Infinite. So the entire housing stock will take a major value hit in a stroke, ushering another period of painful negative equity, trapping people in their homes and in debt. And politicians see this as a ‘benefit’???!!! WOW!!
£2,500 to replace an entire house’s central heating pipes? Even if they were just talking about the plumbing on its own – what planet are these people living on? When did they last have a major plumbing job done?
Then if you add the access, re-flooring and re-decoration of multiple rooms, you could easily end up with a figure of 10 times that number for a normal family house.
What a total farce.
Yes, our 1930s build ex council house falls into that category. Central heating was installed sometime in the mid/late 70s
What politicians refuse to acknowledge is the massive risk they are taking with this stuff. If you change energy supply from low cost, secure and reliable to high cost, unsecure and unreliable with the vague hope that at some point in the future that changes, you are betting – literally – people’s lives and livelihoods in an extraordinarily reckless way.
They have destroyed what was good about our energy system, years before they have an adequate replacement. All at the behest of mad extremists who have bullied them into believing in an imminent crisis.
Imminent!!?? It seems Facebook’s ‘fact checking’ (not) sub-contractor says the context needs to be (i.e. speculate) 1000 years into the future. They just can’t see how ridiculous they are.
“In the vast majority of these, central heating was added many years later, and will therefore almost certainly have the same small bore pipework.”
Undoubtedly. When my parents fitted a new boiler in their Edwardian flat 5-10 years ago, they went through several cowboys – one of whom being British Gas themselves – who told them it couldn’t be fitted to a microbore system and the entire thing would have to be ripped out before they found someone who’d do it. (It takes a bit of jiggery-pokery, apparently, but it’s worked flawlessly ever since.)
Many modern CH installations use ‘combi’ boilers with no hot water tank. They are often pressurised and hence have no header tank either.
A heat pump solution requires, at the very least, a hot water tank, usually with top-up electric heating.
Space must be found inside the residence for the hot water tank, and other equipment associated with the heat pump.
What is the price difference between a 3-bed house and a 2-bed house, if the smaller bedroom must be filled with the heating equipment?
And let’s not start asking where to put all the bulky and noisy external heat pump elements (compressors, fans) so that they won’t be sabotaged by noise-crazed neighbours!
Perfecty OK if you live in a large detached house on a 1 acre plot perhaps.
In the real world….
What’s the betting that any politician’s house(s) that need re-plumbing – and a few that don’t – will slap in BIG expense claims for the work.
Ah, I see, no takers.
My house was built in 2001. I bought it in 2006.
Unless you have time, knowledge and (mainly) money, you’ll be lucky indeed to find a house that exactly fits your list of ‘wants’.
In my case the house is built to the same standard that 95% of houses have been built over the last 150 years. Not very well.
But I thought (and still think) that the period around 2001 was good to aim for. Decent thermal insulation. Before GangGreen had persuaded Blair & Brown that the target housing density must be boosted to avoid ‘concreting over’ all the countryside, such that many owners of new houses can’t get a wheelie bin up the side of the property.
And before housing policy (in York) had dictated that 25% of housing developments had to be “affordable” (which seems to largely comprise of Housing Trust properties filled with those thrown out of Council Houses for not paying their rents and / or being blatantly anti-social.)
And that these “affordable houses” had to be “pepper-potted” throughout the new development rather than concentrated in one area. Simple arithmetic shows that an ‘average’ house sold for over a third of a million (2006) pounds would have at least two close neighbours with some personal “challenges”.
It is true that, a number of years later, a Planning Appeal struck down that bit of Social Engineering.
But anyway, my new house has some features I was looking for (not least a proper flue, so I could install an efficient wood / smokeless burning stove, unaffected by power cuts.
But one of the disbenefits is that the central heating uses microbore. Certainly sub-optimal, although it works when the electricity is on.
Now, I considered replacing the microbore with 12mm copper. But actually accomplishing this, in a house where the flooring is large MDF panels (rather than old fashioned floorboards) on rather skimpy section joists, through which you’d have to drill 15 mm diameter holes and would then physically get the pipes into position, would be a challenge. Not to mention all the fun of braying big holes through the plasterboard to install vertical ‘risers’ and ‘droppers’.
So, I would have to run all the pipework along the skirtings and install ‘boxing out’ in room corners. It is fair to say that this notion failed to enthuse my better half and would have had a bad effect on the property value. When I looked at this, (around 2010), I thought it would cost around £2,000 – £2,500. Not worth it. And the amount of disruption would mean that it would be necessary to put all the house contents in storage and reckon on replacing most or all carpets, floating wooden or tiled floors.
All this suggests to me that retrofitting larger radiators and 22mm circulation pipes into a comparatively new house would only really be practicable at the time the property changed hands. And would cost a bloody sight more than £2,500.
We’re from the Government. We’ve come to help you.
All my ground floor pipework is cast into the concrete floors…..
Should I live long enough, I would love to see how a goverment could legislate this: converting one’s house to ASHP.
For how many years have they been trying ro persuade us to have smart meters installed? They coukd have legiskated that tgey be installed, but haven’t.
With ‘smart’ meters they have probably been made aware that there are parts of the country that have no mobile phone network coverage as well as buildings where the meter would be shielded from a signal. Even they are not so stupid as to mandate something that it is impossible to deliver…..although having put NetZero in law you could argue that they have.
Stupidity knows no bounds!
Clearly those people wont have remote reading. Its a minor issue in the scheme of things
My bungalow was built in 1961 with a chimney for the fireplace which would mean no central heating. It has been extended and chaleted so the heating system dates from that in the 90s I would say. My pipes are 15mm diameter so not suitable either.
Having read all the above, I think I’ll just go and buy another jumper…
My microbore central heating pipes are within a concrete floor (1980s build).
In most houses that do not have microbore central heating pipework the two pipe system has a short length of 22mm copper pipe from the boiler and this reduces to 15mm run in the timber floors with notches cut in the top of joists. To take out 15mm flow and return would be very expensive and difficult. Using a sufficiently powerful pump would allow a greater quantity of tepid water to circulate. Additional radiator would be necessary or doubling the size of existing. A pressurised highly insulated hot water tank could usually be fitted in a wardrobe sized cupboard or in the roofspace. Otherwise a cold water storage tank would be fitted in the upper roofspace. The cost of this would be much more than £2500.
I wonder if the ‘science’ that says that microbore won’t work is the same ‘science’ used in climate models; i.e. guesswork.
I have a multifuel boilered stove and oversized radiators (because the water temperature rarely exceeds 55C) connected with 10mm pipes. I have a variable speed circulator (custom controller using an Arduino) and it rarely runs above 15% of maximum speed to maintain a boiler differential temperature of 5C.
The problem seems to be that few installers can spend the time properly balancing radiators and selecting the appropriate pump speed. Most of them set the pump to the middle setting and walk away.
This looks to me like deliberate over-specification.
Clearly not a countryman. Where is this ‘marginal’ land? Is it accessible to some sort os a reaper? Laughable boloxxx as usual. Perhaps he was joking?
Kuppy has an occaisional blog – he’s a fund manager, and more sensible than most. Here’s his take on where were are going with anti-carbon expensive green nonsense:
https://adventuresincapitalism.com/2021/09/29/will-esg-create-the-next-lehman-moment/
“Ever since I can remember, billionaires have been taking private jets to conclaves where they strategized on how to reduce other people’s carbon emissions. At the time, I thought little of it—billionaires need hobbies and all. Besides, true billionaire credentials are gained when a squadron of luxury jets arrives to lecture some impoverished country on why they don’t deserve electricity. It is as cringeworthy as Marie Antoinette advising starving Parisians to eat cake since they couldn’t afford bread. Then again, part of being a billionaire is proving how tone-deaf you can be, while getting away with it. Boys will be boys…”
An enjoyable read Peter. With western politicians doubling down on funding green projects that don’t work, and penalising ‘carbon’ projects that do, he rightly concludes that there’s a massive global energy and attendant inflation crisis coming down the tracks and, when that particular train really does hit the buffers, it’s going to be very, very messy.
Thank you. Kuppy is “long on inflation and energy-related investments”. -whatevs. (I’m not an investor – I’ll just try and keep warm – if that’s possible…)
Air source heat pumps are a no no. The noise is intolerable. Even people with Acre plus plots will put them as far as possible from their living quarters – probably close to a neighbours living room! This stupid government needs to keep its nose out of our domestic heating systems. AND practically everything else!
They arent intolerable. Modern inverter types use DC variable motors and fans. Once the place is at the achieved temperature the motors and fans are turning at very low rates.
Generally they will be against an outside wall as the distance the pipes are to the inside heat exchanger are a big effect on cost
I dont know that ASHP household heating would be tepid water. They have units that produce household hot water which is 55-65C. The heatpump is just a way of producing heat and water tank with a heat exchanger inside will just keep heating up till the thermostat sends a signal not too. The inverter heat pump starts out high energy output and then reduces as it nears the set temperature. The circulation to the radiators will lose heat of course but the inverter control will keep the unit running at lower output to keep up.
“They have units that produce household hot water which is 55-65C.” They may well do that BUT you will have an excruciatingly low efficiency to do so. The co-efficiency of performance (CoP) of ASHPs is often quoted at 3 to 1 meaning for every unit of electricity in you get 3 units of thermal energy out. BUT that is assuming an outside air temperature of PLUS 7°C to achieve a water temperature of just 35°C. With either/both a lower outside temperature or higher water temperature the efficiency drops away dramatically. Trying to achieve a water temperature of 60°C with an outside air temperature of say minus 7°C will mean the CoP is barely better than 1 to 1 and will be even worse at lower winter temperatures.
On the Green Gas production delusion, a serious difficulty will be the lack of plant growth from October through to the next May. To be any good, the plan would have to be total substitution for fossil gas. We currently have a few days overall storage, and perhaps two weeks if the Rough store could be revived. So it would need perhaps 20 more of similar capacity. Not cheap!
Perhaps they could build indoor grass farms with all year round lighting & heating? 🤣
For a fraction of the cost of heat pump, an electric boiler looks like a more credible option for average sized properties if gas is ruled out. Straight replacement, same CH system.
https://www.boilerguide.co.uk/articles/best-electric-boilers
Duker:
Carnot’s principle (for heat engines) points out that the higher the difference between the heat input and the heat output (waste heat) the greater the efficiency.
Heat pumps are a sort of reverse case. Extracting heat at low temperatures and using it to make heat with high temperatures requires lots of energy. The claim that they output 4 times (or more) energy for the input (electricity used) comes from artificial tests involving temperatures equal on both sides, but politicians are always keen on “getting something for nothing” even if it doesn’t happen in the real world (which they rarely inhabit).
So, if it is a hot day outside (say 30℃) and you want to use that to heat your house, you will use very little electricity. If on the other hand you are one of those eccentric types who want to heat your house when it is say minus 10℃ outside it will require enormous energy use.
And trying to have a heating tank at 55℃ makes the idea even less attractive as it increases the difference. It would be simpler and probably more efficient to use direct electricity heating.
Sure . I have 2 heat pumps for home heating, one upstairs and another downstairs. WE dont use radiators as it transfers it to the air which a inverter fan then circulates in the rooms.
Im not suggesting gas heating is pulled out to be replaced by heat pumps. There is a lot of misunderstanding how they work. Noise is the main one but certainly the efficiency is worthwhile compared to my previous choice of in home electric.
I would consider a hot water heat pump to replace my 3kW tank when it gets to end of life ( mains pressure)
Other places Ive lived in had domestic hot water from gas as an ‘instant’ set up.
Like you suggest the efficiency may not be the same for internal heating at say 21C when your hot water should be 55C-60C. Still works as the supplier claim 1 in 3 advantage
What did it cost? If I may ask..
I am in a warmer place (the Adelaide Hills) than most of the UK so I can’t really be exact about heat pump performance there, but know that they aren’t the “wonderful solution” expected by politicians.
Recently I had to stop my heat pump as the outside coils froze up when the outside temperature was around 1℃. So coils underground or in a pond?
As for a hot water heat pump my sister (some years ago) had one and found it noisy and inefficient. Her solution was to move house.
And in the unlikely event that “global warming” means summer temperatures become like here, I pass on a tip for days reaching 40℃; spraying a mist of distilled water on the outside coils results in a noticeable improvement in cooling. Unfortunately you have to repeat in minutes once the water has evaporated.
From the ‘brochure’ claims of a UK heat pump company, they consider many places with oversized radiators will be fine for lower flow temperatures…
‘As the radiators are oversized for a high flow temperature, they are almost always the right size for a lower flow temperature. This fact coupled with a weather compensated heating controller means a heat pump can put a constant flow of the correct temperature for your house based on the outside air temperature. For example, on a warm spring day, your house may only need a constant flow temperature of 25oC to keep the house at the desired 19oC temperature. On a colder day, the system may run 40oC through the radiators constantly to keep the house at the desired 19oC temperature.’
https://www.isoenergy.co.uk/latest-news/isoenergy-news/can-you-use-existing-radiators-with-a-heat-pump
However it doenst make sense to me to rip out gas to put in electric
Duker,
19 degrees C, that’s eskimo temperature. I’m unhappy if it’s much below 23 to 24 degrees.
For an effective heating system it is it’s performance with below freezing outside air temperatures, I’m not interested in how well it works in relatively warm days, that’s irrelevant.
We have concrete floors and 15mm pipes.
Imagine the fun of a team of blokes with angle grinders for a couple of weeks.
No thanks.
I have the same problem with my 1990 house. It would be a total nightmare.
I’m just thankful I don’t live in an apartment block: getting agreement of all the residents would be impossible.
These people are mad, mad, mad!
There is, in my view at least, a big misunderstanding of air pump efficiency or it’s Coefficient of Performance as they call it. It is based on electrical units which is not an energy source but an energy carrier. To get that energy to the heat pump entails significant loss from the energy source, i.e. the power station which I would put at a conservative 50% so halving COP at a stroke. For an air source heat pump that is significant. The air source industry body also classes resistance electrical heating having a CoP of 1, which is less than realistic.
Then the consideration of the cost of electricity which will, due entirely to government policy of increasing renewable generation capacity, rise significantly.
Also the increased demand from both heat pumps and electric vehicles will severely strain the local area network which must entail uprating that network at huge cost and disruption
The government should urgently review their policy and research what will actually be needed to accommodate their pie in the sky ideas.
It cannot reduce CO2 emissions as we will need so much more gas generation to provide the power, renewables will not be able to do much more than it does now proportionately, as there is a technical limit as to what proportion of the grid is renewable and still remain stable and reliable.
You only have to look at the Smart meter roll-out and how much over budget that already is and the failure to completed by 2018, the regulator has allowed an increase of £15.00 per year per household to cover the additional cost of completing this project. Why are the government forcing people to super inflated electric bills??? I thought the government was their to protect the consumers from over inflated prices???? the regulator is failing to protect the customers who are in the most impoverished who cannot afford the massive hike in their energy bills
I am coming round to the idea that we should go full speed for a ban on all fossil fuels by 2030.
Greta and her cronies says that is what we should do and as our democratically elected leaders let her upstage them, they can sort out the mess.
Where is the evidence that ASHP actually cause less CO2 emissions than gas for home heating.
Evidence?? That’s so old world. All you need now to flush £trillions down the pan are wacky beliefs as held by ill educated teenagers.