No gas boilers in new homes after 2025.

[Evanivitch]

Terminator X said:

Heat pumps? Absolute ste and bloody expensive!

TX.

Care to show your maths?

[PeteinSQ]

How effective would an air source heat pump be at heating a large georgian house in a rural area?

Currently we're on LPG which is delivered into a large communal tank. We only got the new condensing boiler a few years ago but eventually it will break down and I'm curious what we'd use to replace it.

I know one of our neighbours had a ground source heat pump installed at great expense, but we don't have a large enough garden I don't think.

[Tlandcruiser]

It’s irrelevant discussing ground or air heat source pumps in Georgian houses, no new gas boiler installations are only applicable for new builds.

[Biggy Stardust]

Tlandcruiser said:

It’s irrelevant discussing ground or air heat source pumps in Georgian houses, no new gas boiler installations are only applicable for new builds.

Do you not anticipate mission creep in this?

[rxe]

PeteinSQ said:

How effective would an air source heat pump be at heating a large georgian house in a rural area?

Currently we're on LPG which is delivered into a large communal tank. We only got the new condensing boiler a few years ago but eventually it will break down and I'm curious what we'd use to replace it.

I know one of our neighbours had a ground source heat pump installed at great expense, but we don't have a large enough garden I don't think.

Depends entirely on your current CH design.

If you have a load of wet underfloor heating, then “probably quite well” is the answer. If you have conventional radiators, then you will need to make these a lot bigger for it to work. Heat pumps are good at delivery large amounts of low grade heat over long periods - water at (say) 25 C is easily generated with low outside temperatures. They are absolutely useless (potentially even less efficient than burning gas) at delivering properly hot water that conventional (small) radiators require.

[Earthdweller]

No gas boilers .. jeez I still using oil and solid fuels

I suppose that means they won’t be piping gas to my place then

[Biker 1]

So what will happen to SGN's pipe network eventually? Are shareholders offloading their stock?
More to the point, is National Grid doubling (or more???) their generating capacity? Will we need a roll out of additional pylons/wires to blight the countryside? If so, what price will the land owners accept?
Even if all the infrastructure is adapted to suit, what of individual homes, with say, a 60 amp fuse & traditional consumer unit? ASHPs would surely need new dedicated supplies, involving digging up pretty much every street in Britain.... None of this is impossible to achieve, but given our utterly incompetent 'government', I do wonder about the practicalities of all this.

[Digga]

Evanivitch said:

Digga said:

I'm out in the sticks, so will carry on using our wood burner. It's not very efficient, especially when there's a large dog in pole position, blocking much of the heat, but the fuel is, seemingly, infinitely renewable.

And they're great in the sticks, but a pollution nightmare in the suburbs with people burning unseasoned, scavenged and treated softwood.

I burn the people who burn the unseasoned, scavenged and treated softwood. So it's win win.

Carbon negative.

[davejones]

rxe said:

PeteinSQ said:

How effective would an air source heat pump be at heating a large georgian house in a rural area?

Currently we're on LPG which is delivered into a large communal tank. We only got the new condensing boiler a few years ago but eventually it will break down and I'm curious what we'd use to replace it.

I know one of our neighbours had a ground source heat pump installed at great expense, but we don't have a large enough garden I don't think.

Depends entirely on your current CH design.

If you have a load of wet underfloor heating, then “probably quite well” is the answer. If you have conventional radiators, then you will need to make these a lot bigger for it to work. Heat pumps are good at delivery large amounts of low grade heat over long periods - water at (say) 25 C is easily generated with low outside temperatures. They are absolutely useless (potentially even less efficient than burning gas) at delivering properly hot water that conventional (small) radiators require.

Totally agree with the above comments re UFH and Radiators - as to having a large enough garden - for an established house and garden I would consider a borehole rather than a matrix set up - we went the matrix route because we were doing a new build and landscaping the gardens but if the geology allows a borehole is less intrusive....

[rxe]

Biker 1 said:

So what will happen to SGN's pipe network eventually? Are shareholders offloading their stock?
More to the point, is National Grid doubling (or more???) their generating capacity? Will we need a roll out of additional pylons/wires to blight the countryside? If so, what price will the land owners accept?
Even if all the infrastructure is adapted to suit, what of individual homes, with say, a 60 amp fuse & traditional consumer unit? ASHPs would surely need new dedicated supplies, involving digging up pretty much every street in Britain.... None of this is impossible to achieve, but given our utterly incompetent 'government', I do wonder about the practicalities of all this.

Well yes, its taken them 15 years to not really roll out smart meters, which to be honest are simply a mobile phone SIM bolted to a meter.

Apparently in the next 5 minutes we’re going to get enough capacity to charge electric cars, run heating electrically and do clever load sharing with car batteries. I doubt the load sharing standards will be complete in less than a decade....

[p1esk]

ChocolateFrog said:

Madness.

Gas is clean, efficient and cheap, all the hardwork re infrastructure is already in place.

It will make new houses even less appealing than they are today.

The only thing that would appeal to me about a new house would be the much greater thermal efficiency compared with older houses. I want my home to be as I want it - having due regard to safety, reliability of systems, low maintenance costs, low energy consumption etc. - but the building regulations intrude too much in terms of telling me what I can or can't have, and how things must or must not be done: it's all too prescriptive by my reckoning.

[Terminator X]

Evanivitch said:

Terminator X said:

Heat pumps? Absolute ste and bloody expensive!

TX.

Care to show your maths?

I believe I asked first

TX.

[gareth h]

The first stop for government should have been minimum standards of insulation and air tightness, if you don’t lose the heat you don’t need to generate it (by either gas or electricity), unfortunately this is much too difficult to legislate for in our old building stock, but it should be everybody’s starting point rather than looking at new(ish) tech to generate heat.

[Knock_knock]

PeteinSQ said:

How effective would an air source heat pump be at heating a large georgian house in a rural area?

Currently we're on LPG which is delivered into a large communal tank. We only got the new condensing boiler a few years ago but eventually it will break down and I'm curious what we'd use to replace it.

I know one of our neighbours had a ground source heat pump installed at great expense, but we don't have a large enough garden I don't think.

We have a Georgian house in a rural area. It's not massive, but a respectable size in the way of these things. We have no gas supply, so the boiler was oil and was costing about £1,500 a year to keep the house not very warm and cozy.

Boiler was dying and needed replacing. As did the oil tank as it was an older single skin type. Plus most of the radiators weren't sized up properly anyway - the dining room was nearly 50% under-spec for the existing system.

Went for a nice ASHP - Ecodan. Replaced the radiators anyway as they needed doing, and put a decent size open vented hot water tank in.

For the first time, probably since it was built, the house is now lovely and warm day-in day-out. Keeps to a nice constant 20'C by using temperature compensation. Plus effectively unlimited hot water.

Reckon it's about halved our heating bill, despite the house being so much warmer and having all the hot water we want

Up front costs were steep; probably about £6k more than replacing with another oil boiler, but the 7 year grant more than takes care of that, plus the bills are less as mentioned.

Oh, and it's not noisy really. When it was -4'C outside the ASHP generates a whooshing noise that would be intrusive if you had the window open - and it's about 2m away from the window at 90' to it. But who opens the window wide in the middle of winter like that. Under more normal temperatures it's nearly silent.

There's some right piffle talked on this thread about these things. Glad I didn't read it before making the decision - it might have put me off.

[caziques]

Terminator X said:

Evanivitch said:

Terminator X said:

Heat pumps? Absolute ste and bloody expensive!

TX.

Care to show your maths?

I believe I asked first

TX.

Heat pumps don't have to be expensive, calling them ste shows your lack of knowledge.

I've done over 500 underfloor heating systems - only with air sourced hot water heat pumps.

However, this is NZ and daytime temperatures are warmer than the UK - but the principal still applies.

Heat pumps runs for say 10 hours, using 3kW (30kWhr in total), putting 12kW (120kWhr) into the house...stored in a 100mm concrete floor.

Cost? A fully finished system with a 150sqm pipe lay is around 9,000 pounds - which includes everything.

The heat pump is about a third of that cost.

Building standards in NZ are woeful, build a good house and a heat pump can be smaller and cheaper.

[Terminator X]

It seems that the only people that don't think they are ste are the people supplying and / or installing them

TX.

[Kawasicki]

I had an air source heat pump in the last house I rented. We moved in and the plaster still wasn’t fully dry, so the house was quite new. The heating system was the only source of hassle with the house. I would say I phoned the landlord once every 3 months on average, and he would send out someone and they would reset it (which I had already tried), the next day they would come back again.. this time trying to figure out why the reset didn’t work... they would order some valves or sensors and swap them...getting it working for another three months or so. Three years later the landlord had to replace the heat pump unit in the garden. I saw the bill, 8000€ including labour. Wtf.

My friend lives in that house now, and I haven’t heard him complain, so maybe it’s fine now.

[rxe]

Terminator X said:

It seems that the only people that don't think they are ste are the people supplying and / or installing them

TX.

To be fair, heat pumps done properly with UFH are fine. This country has been blighted by the usual issue of subsidies attracting the unscrupulous who have sold heat pumps to people with conventional heating systems. If you try and drive a heat pump to act like a normal boiler, your expensive setup will use more energy than gas.

[Uggers]

Knock_knock said:

Plus most of the radiators weren't sized up properly anyway - the dining room was nearly 50% under-spec for the existing system.

Went for a nice ASHP - Ecodan. Replaced the radiators anyway as they needed doing

This was your issue.

You had an out of date gas boiler trying to get undersized radiators to a point they were glowing.

I'm in a big old Georgian building that had under-specced radiators connected to a modern boiler.
I changed the radiators which don't have to glow to heat the place and now the house is nice and warm and my bills are reduced considerably.

Also I'm no stranger to ASHP, I use one to heat the hot tub, but I'm under no illusions that even though its just a 10kw rated system (real electric use of 2kw) it can still generate fearsome electric bills over time.

[Knock_knock]

Uggers said:

Knock_knock said:

Plus most of the radiators weren't sized up properly anyway - the dining room was nearly 50% under-spec for the existing system.

Went for a nice ASHP - Ecodan. Replaced the radiators anyway as they needed doing

This was your issue.

You had an out of date gas boiler trying to get undersized radiators to a point they were glowing.

I'm in a big old Georgian building that had under-specced radiators connected to a modern boiler.
I changed the radiators which don't have to glow to heat the place and now the house is nice and warm and my bills are reduced considerably.

Also I'm no stranger to ASHP, I use one to heat the hot tub, but I'm under no illusions that even though its just a 10kw rated system (real electric use of 2kw) it can still generate fearsome electric bills over time.

My issue was that the oil boiler needed replacing.

My choice was to go for an ASHP and it's producing a nicer environment for less money than just replacing with another oil boiler.

The point about the radiators was that they needed replacing as well, along with the oil tank, so the cost differential was less signficant.