The inconvenient truth about heat pumps
By Paul Homewood
I have been highlighting these problems for years, so it’s nice that Ruth Bloomfield, who is I believe a property journalist, sums it all up better than I ever could:
In Britain’s battle to cut carbon emissions, the government sees heat pumps as a key weapon. Unveiling the latest energy efficiency plan in March, energy secretary Grant Shapps doubled down on Boris Johnson’s offer of a £5,000 grant for anyone willing to install one. These smart bits of home technology work by transferring thermal energy from the air, ground or water. They are powered by electricity, which can be generated from solar or wind power, providing cheap and fossil fuel-free heating and hot water. So what’s not to like?
The concept is nothing new. In 1856 the Austrian scientist Peter von Rittinger worked out a technique for drying out salt in salt marshes using an early iteration of the heat pump, and in 1951 the Royal Festival Hall in London opened with a water source heat pump fed by the Thames.
Yet despite their obvious attractions, domestic heat pumps remain outliers. According to the European Heat Pump Association there are now around 20 million air and water source heat pumps in operation in Europe, providing heating to about 16 per cent of residential buildings. The other 84 per cent of buildings are heated the old-fashioned way. In the UK, 55,000 heat pumps were fitted in 2021. During the same period, 1.5 million people installed new gas boilers.
Heat pumps became a political hot topic that same year when Johnson, then prime minister, announced he wanted to phase out gas boilers and offered substantial grants to anyone who would replace one with a heat pump. This, he hoped, would result in 600,000 heat pumps being installed every year by 2028. Offers of free money tend to go down well with the public – consider how insane the housing market went during the pandemic stamp duty amnesty. But the silence in response to this £450 million offer has been deafening.
If you drill down into the reality of heat pumps, the idea of a £5,000 cheque from Downing Street starts to lose its appeal
The latest figures from Ofgem show that fewer than 10,000 installations were completed under the scheme between May 2022 and March this year. The reason for this lack of uptake is simple. If you drill down into the reality of heat pumps, the idea of a £5,000 cheque from Downing Street starts to lose its appeal. For a start, a heat pump costs, on average, about £10,000. For an air source model that rises to around £20,000. You can buy a decent, energy efficient combi boiler for about £2,500.
And what ministers seem unable – or unwilling – to grasp is that heat pumps are not simple, plug-and-play options. To start with, you need space. An air source heat pump requires around 10 square feet of outside space – bad luck, flat-owners – plus new pipework to deliver the heat it produces. Homeowners also need space indoors for a heat exchange unit (of about the same size as a normal gas boiler) plus a hot water cylinder (which those with combi boilers can often do without).
Ground source heat pumps are even greedier, space-wise. The most cost-effective system involves digging shallow trenches in the garden. These need to be around 100 metres long and up to two metres deep, meaning that anyone with a less-than-sprawling garden can forget it. And even those with plenty of space can come up against obstacles – Blur singer Damon Albarn has reportedly received complaints from parish councillors that the sight and sound of the two ‘intrusive’ heat pumps outside his Devon farmhouse could disturb walkers on the nearby footpath in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.
If space is not an issue, your existing radiators could be. Heat pumps have far lower flow temperatures than boilers, which means they require a much larger radiator surface area than a normal boiler does. This means either supersizing your radiators (impractical, ugly) or installing underfloor heating (expensive, disruptive). And of course there is no point producing lots of lovely, clean heat if your house isn’t well insulated. Think not just loft insulation but also wall and floor insulation, and double, ideally triple, glazing.
Collectively these practicalities mean that the only time installing a heat pump is going to be feasible is during a major renovation of a substantial house or a self-build – which means the only real beneficiaries of this flagship policy are well-off home improvers, grand designers and property developers. Ordinary, regular people living in ordinary, regular homes don’t have a hope.
What ministers seem unable to grasp is that heat pumps are not simple, plug-and-play options. To start with, you need space
The problems don’t even end with cost and space. Buying a heat pump isn’t like choosing a new phone. Professional advice on the type of system you should have, its size, how it should be installed, where, how to set it up and work it and how to maintain it is alarmingly patchy. If you want a heat pump you’re going to have to be prepared to brush up your GCSE physics and get your head around the technology because you are going to need to ask the right questions and work a lot of this out for yourself. Any errors will be expensive; while many homeowners adore their heat pumps there have certainly been cases of amateurs lumbered with bulky, expensive and inefficient heat pumps for want of good advice.
So why is the government still so sure that heat pumps are the great white hope in our battle against carbon emissions? Perhaps the answer can be found at the school gates, where many affluent mums ditched their previous status symbol of choice – a four-wheel drive – in favour of earning brownie points on the middle-class dinner party circuit with tales of how much they love their Kia e-Niros.
Politicians also love to burnish their green credentials, and the government’s constant pressure to ditch gas boilers and embrace heat pumps feels like it stems largely from a desire to prove themselves to be at the cutting edge when it comes to green technology. Promoting loft insulation – which is lacking in almost a third of Britain’s 25 million homes with lofts, according to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, and is cheap and easy to install – is a far less sexy rallying cry.
But beware of ministers bearing gifts. A chronic lack of policy thinking-through puts anybody idealistic enough to attempt to harness heat pump technology at risk of being left – literally – out in the cold.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-inconvenient-truth-about-heat-pumps/
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Why , why , why don’t the milli-wits in government think to ask the right questions before leaping into these gormless schemes ?
Bimbo Johnson is fond of likening himself to Churchill . Churchill would have decided what questions needed to be asked , asked them – of grown-ups , not woke spads – and getting these answers would have cancelled the plan .
The epitome of the current rampant cretinism is of course Theresa May , but none of the others are far behind her in crass vanity and utter dim uselessness .
My historical advisers have pointed out that the original governmental eco – shill was of course micro – brained Bedd Billiband . Downhill all the way from there to the utopia of net – zero land .
Yes, and if, as expected, we get a Labour Govt after the next General Election, we’ll be saddled with the idiotic Milliband as Energy Secretary. Expect even more extreme eco measures from him
Ed Milliband may not be a mere idiot but seems more like a fanatical, paid or unpaid, to change our society to the left by first ruining it.
“Whom the Gods would destroy they first make mad”.
And/or broke, perhaps aided by bribery and corruption.
Only the labels change. Look at what the TINOS (Tories in Name Only) have already and still are doing to destroy the economy and society due to the “climate”, “green” and “net zero” obsessions.
The current bunch of so-called “Conservatives” should simply merge with the Labour party and stop pretending to be different.
>>change our society to the left by first ruining it
While household heating boilers can last upto 50 years. Anything “green” has to be replaced and in the case of heat pumps 10 to 15 years and as they are not capable of producing enough heat at cool temperatures owners should factor in a secondary heat source and the costs of running it.
Every substitute for today’s means of power generation is dud, no help to the climate, unnecessary and leads to ruin for our nation.
The manmade CO2 output from the UK is negligble at less than 1.3% of the global total.
Those Eastern countries opting out of our dud politicos’ misguided attration to Greenery (“burnishing credentials”) should be sent to China or India to see for himself, on a one way ticket.
The “manmade” CO2 output from the entire world is only 3% of all the CO2; even the alarmists admit that. And that 3% of zero point zero four percent means a lot of zeros after the decimal point.
When I ask people if they know how much carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere, they reply with something like ‘ Oh billions of tons’, which is all we ever hear from the media. They don’t have a clue what percentage of the atmosphere it is, let alone what small percentage of that is man made.
“For a start, a heat pump costs, on average, about £10,000. For an air source model that rises to around £20,000.”
I suspect Ruth has made a typo.
If the average price is given, that’s the cheapest, commonest variety, which is the air-source model.
It’s the ground-source variety that is the most expensive.
Sha has definitely got that the wrong way round, however, I am somewhat wary of her figures generally such as “You can buy a decent, energy efficient combi boiler for about £2,500.” Perhaps someone should let her know that Screwfix offer 3 models for less than £600.
https://www.screwfix.com/c/heating-plumbing/boilers/cat6660001?boilertype=combi&sort_by=price
There are some Vokera models available elsewhere online for just £510!
Can anyone tell me how to upload a screenshot for you to see and evaluate that I have taken off the TV this evening? Following the cancellation of the Imola Grand Prix due to the floods in Bologna, Formula One is saying it is actually already in the “sustainable” business, then quoting extraordinary figures for Italian Extreme Weather in a four second “subliminal ….?” advert, and seeming to imply that by Italy installing 600 Electric Buses it will solve the local extreme weather “problem”, and also saying that F1 is helping the world by achieving Net Zero by 2030.
On an earlier post I asked what was the crucial minimum PPM for C02 to sustain life on Earth, 200. Apparently its about 400 now. As this is a trace gas yet crucial for life on the planet, surely we should more concerned about LESS C02.
Will people wise up before we get to year zero?
We and vegetation, including crops, would benefit from more CO2.
Historiically even ten times the present level of CO2 was torelable.
A major point that is overlooked is the energy required to drive the system. They are about 25% efficient, which means that if you have 3 bar radiant heater and walk it from room to room, it will be much better. Others with Alexa can have an IR detector which will signal your presence and switch heating on.
Those looking at home insulation should be reminded of the “pink batts” scheme dreamed up that eco fanatic Kevin Rudd in Australia. The number of deaths resulting from this rash experiment needs retelling.
I have an air sourced heat pump in my new build house (2019). It was designed in from the beginning and works well enough, although there is some background noise from the unit in the garden. Our rural location is off the gas grid leaving propane, oil, log burners and other electric systems as options.
Are they cheaper to run? No, we moved out of an earlier new build (2015 and similar in size) that had a modern gas boiler. Even accounting for recent price hikes it was cheaper. Don’t be fooled, heat pumps policy is driven by politics, not science, technology or engineering. Don’t waste your money.
Every MP and every Civil Servant with influence in drafting these regulations must be obliged to publicly declare whether they have replaced their gas heaters with a heat pump, and they must explain why not.