Heat Pump from Octopus - Should I get one?

on the path to decarbonization and Beyond getting an EV our next big question is home installation and heating today we take a look at our 1930s house in Suburban Kent it's a partly extended semi-detached like there are hundreds of thousands if not millions in the UK we go through the quote we received from octopus for near Source heat pump which is one of the options we are considering to modernize our home so what are the two issues we are trying to solve for well number one our conventional boiler system is getting along in the tooth it is far from delivering modern Comforts we've had the odd leakage the water flow is poor the shower downstairs is only trickling so not great in fact I remain puzzled by the complexity of all these wooded tanks and all those pipes was just a one house number two so second issue are yearly consumption of energy and therefore the carbon production feels massive we use 16 megawatt hours of gas a year to put that in context this is enough energy to drive the family around for a hundred thousand kilometers in the year I also estimate it's about 3.5 times as much energy as what we needed when we used to live in a flat a modern one sure south facing okay but using electricity and electric radiators for hitting and and that was all year round so it feels really hard to justify such a big gap 3.5 times as much when it comes to deciding our next move in an old property like this it feels like a bit of a jungle insulation is far from straightforwards can be very costly too we certainly can do more by installing new windows for instance but wall or floor installation clear daunting expensive and frankly they could be risky if you end up trapping moisture inside the house on the heating front you can get the full spectrum of recommendation you got the plumbers that love their kumbi boilers you've got those that believe in the future in hydrogen and of course there is our own temptation to go for modern tech like heat pumps and mix energy hot water tanks and tip rails etc etc and that's probably from binging a little bit too much fully charged videos but never mind that let me know in the comments what steps you have taken in your house especially if you have converted from a vented system to a pressurized system for hot water I'd like to know how it worked for you and if you share your experience that'd be wonderful all of this to say that today we are looking at a survey done for a hit dump and it was done by Octopus as a customer I'm quite a fan of octobus they've got great tariffs I'm on octopus school and it's perfect if you've got an EV they give you all the data to monitor which is great for gigs like me but beyond the basics they do seem to be very Innovative and they invest massively in new technology and Partnerships so I would think they would know what they are doing and that they would be training their Engineers properly if they were to undertake a heat pump install so no it's not a sponsored video by the way if you do need a referral link and you are looking to switch Yeah well feel free to use my own referral link but that's how far as it goes so let's take a look at the quote now powers and the engineer did a very diligent job there um look very professional to me but let's see what they came back with and tried to cross check the numbers first things first the cost is going to be 13.5 K doesn't surprise me and you will see there's an awful lot of work and materials for that there's a 5 000 pound Grant which we qualify for that's good and of course it would be MCS certified that's fine all of that no real surprise maybe on the higher side compared to what I would hope for but no major issue there the deposits you pay 10 percent of France again doesn't seem completely outrageous to me um so what what is the cost including well one thing that's quite important is you need to have an EPC that is valid on the loft or cavity wall insulation needs to have been done which is our case that's fine interestingly let's talk about energy costs as the anticipate them to apply to this heat pump uh now I don't have the octopus 12 months fixed April tariff right so that's just an illustration and I'm gonna come back to the actual costs I'm anticipating but one thing that is very important here is that they are using the 4780 kilowatt hours so you can see a ratio of about three times less energy being used and uh by the way you can immediately sense that if you're using three times less energy and yes it might be more costly energy electricity is typically much more costly still the case today than gas well it has to be a bit more eco-friendly isn't it um because because not only you're consuming three times less energy but also some of that energy has been produced through Renewables all right that next one is quite important wheel I still be able to hit my home just as well um of course it has to be the case right so um as we'll see in a second it's dimensioned for the temperature that would be minus three degrees Celsius outside and therefore it has to be the case um what if something goes wrong well to your workmanship warranty five of your manufacturer warranty for the heat pump that's not amazing because one of the key principles is that it's supposed to be lasting longer than a boiler so that's not very long you do have to hope that it works now that's one of the reasons I would be taking an octopus for instance you would hope that they are going to be there in a few years from now this is super interesting now because you get to the details of what makes up the price the first thing is the Daikin heat pump about three thousand pounds not very surprised it's an 11 kilowatt version so it's a probably a slightly more powerful one I think there are some at six around six kilowatts you do get a new hot water system you get radiator upgrades and you'll see the whole page of radiator upgrades it's quite impressive quite massive the upgrade that's needed Plumbing components again not very surprised that there would be a thousand pounds there and then some electrical installation you can see it is a major undertaking and 5 600 pounds end-to-end installation services well it's really hard to judge I assume it's going to be a few days of work but how many people how much you know overhead disc project management whatever I don't know it's hard to tell it does seem like enough lots of money so that must mean there's quite a bit of work but equally this is probably where you see the margin in all of that I don't expect as much of a margin on the the hit bump because if you just Google for that kind of product I don't think you get three thousand pounds so all in all it doesn't seem outrageous given the amount of work that you can sense from all of that but of course it's still a very large sum of money especially if you're going to compare to what a boiler would be a Combi boiler is maybe 3 500 pounds okay so that's pretty much what we get from this particular document and there's a cancellation period and all of that you get your certificates um yeah that's it I think that's that's pretty much it actually there's one more thing that is quite interesting at the end which is the schedule of responsibilities and you can see that if you have to do a supply upgrade in other words something related to the consumer board I expect that would be your responsibility the customer needs to ensure rails are cleared for Access you would expect that and then cosmetic work um that's something to be slightly mindful of you know what kind of mess is left so decoration making good is left to the customer so um the the rest I mean Plumbing work electrical work system commissioning guys isolation all the stuff that matters uh they're doing but again what kind of state does it leave their house in I don't know right it's hard to tell from this right so we now get to the performance estimate a very key document what do we see here we see again the reference of the Daikin supply for the Hair Source heat pump 11 kilowatt as we said 50 degrees Celsius so I think typically for the heat pump systems you try to get of course that colder temperature than what you would do with a normal Combi boiler although I understand legislation will be such that moving forward 55 degrees Celsius is the normal temperature to Dimension your system so this is going down as well even on gas boilers the essential number which is this scop number this kind of magic Factor the if you put one kilowatt hours of energy then you're getting back 3.5 so you can see it is um it is 3.5 which I think is quite classic from what I've heard for the heating and then I suspect the 2.77 lower on the hot water is because it is also using the immersion heater once a week so in other words it's getting a one-to-one ratio sometime during the week when it's it's um essentially uh heating up a bit higher to uh to make sure that the water is still uh it's still uh drinkable so 200 liters hot water cylinder that's what I would have expected as they compare the performance to that of a boiler that would have been 94 to 2007 again sounds about right 87 percent efficiency as the Baseline yep that's my guess as well so um what have we got in terms of the reference for the performance so they've used the EPC numbers for heating and hot water and um as we have seen at the start these are pretty much the numbers we actually incur or at least the those that we didn't incur in the last year um now because of the factor the magic number the one kilowatt hours gives you 3.5 you get these three point uh six kilowatt hours of hitting and then 1.1 of hot water I think for us there is a question of whether we'd be able to offset some of that electricity use and use more the immersion heater at night so that some of it is going to be during the night and that would be another way to save a bit more money um you then get the electricity consumed as a function of the flow temperature so I think the whole game on heat pump is that you're trying to reduce as much this water temperature the lowest the temperature the more efficiency you're gonna get so you might be heating for a longer period of time but you get better efficiency so in other words you are going to be lowering your energy consumed so you get more towards the 3000 rather than than the 4 000 kilowatt hours per year if you manage to run it on a lower flow temperature and and that's the table that we get all the way from 4.5 multiplication Factor the magic number the scope number um at 35 degrees Celsius and only in the three something at 55 degrees one of the key questions here is are we not gonna be cold now we have um done our own estimates as well uh very rough right through two different approaches to try to estimate the losses of the house the first method was simply to say look I know there are brick walls I know there are double glazed Windows some Loft installation so I use the so-called u values for each surface area in the home and then I essentially do the sum of all those losses and that gives me a number that's method number one and Method number two actually looked at how much we consumed last year versus how much 10 temperature difference there was with exterior temperature and very interestingly and that could be very much luck more than science on this occasion I get to a very similar number about 10 to 11 kilowatts would be this consumption of the house when you have a 24 degree Celsius temperature which is how the dimension the system here so I think that's quite interesting right because being able to get a similar number that gives me some confidence that they didn't completely make up the numbers and that it's not going to be either over Dimension or under Dimension especially in a house that as I've said at the start is not well insulated overall and of course I hope we'll get the comments here that will say yeah yeah but installation comes first yes absolutely well where you can right so they there are limits to how much installation can be done I would think now let's take a look at the third document which is almost the the most interesting in many ways because it's the one that tells you how much you are going to be replacing your radiators and they show you on the left hand side what you have and on the right hand side whether they're keeping things or whether they're adding new radiators or replacing now my reading of this is that they are essentially keeping a large number of those radiators but there are dimensioning additional radiators to make sure that there is enough power so you can see this 10.2 kilowatt for the house first of all you can see the 50 degrees Celsius dimension for um minus three degrees Celsius outside and all those radiators they are being added so that well essentially you can have this lower flow temperature in the home now that is very interesting because you can see for instance even on the very first bathroom that has this tiny radiator and it's super cold at the minute and the window needs to be changed but you can see it will be changed by a 1.68 meters radiator versus currently it's 45 centimeters and you can see that you're looking at a nearly times 8 times 10 in terms of the potential power or energy dissipated by the radiator so quite a different scale here I note also that in the launch area we are talking about having four radiators now instead of two that is a lot that is a lot right so overall I think good confidence that they are dimensioning so that the system works what you don't want to do is you don't want to put a heat pump and then find that you've got just your old radiators and then you complain because nothing works that's my understanding of some of the research I've done so far and here at least I've got good confidence that they would be replacing the radiators as needed do I have confidence that the radiators would look good no I don't right and I think if we now come to conclusion I think there were a couple of questions we had going into this survey number one is the house going to be called on the basis of this and this alone and maybe a bit more research I would say I don't think so I think despite insulation being far from perfect in the home I think it's gonna work I think there are Dimension dimensioning the system such that um you get hit in the winter so that's number one that's very important number two there is a question of well is that gonna be ugly and noisy and frankly we're not really answering that question although they didn't mention that because it's 43 DBA I guess um yeah there's going to be a need for permission from the neighbor because you need a 42 or below I think the latest are probably not that noisy but that remains a question and that would be something you you would have to check for yourself and you would need to see in a showroom or something like that the third question was yeah but how much disruption is there and I think on the look of it just looking at this I think it's a lot of disruption yeah I this can't be minimized this is not a like for like replacement this is this is a big deal number four there is the question of is it gonna cost in in my book this would uh come out to be a very similar thing in terms of how much we would be spending essentially you know you you've divided by three or three point five the amount of energy for hitting but you end up paying pretty much three to four times as much on electricity because the unit price of electricity is about three to four times as much even if it's offset slightly by some cheaper Knight Aries but don't expect to use that much of it I mean I don't really care for a hot house during midnight and four in the morning okay so does that cost in yes in terms of running costs but don't expect to pay back The Upfront investment and try to say well it was five thousand pounds more so I'm gonna be saving X on a per month basis and therefore I've got a payback time no I I don't think that would be my calculation for these I think it's more a case of well we are using a more recent technology that is more adapted frankly to um living with the climate that we're in and therefore the thing that it does is it divides by three the energy and especially the amount of gas it's using and and that should be a good thing in itself right so it is more costly uh cost listing that that's my take anyway on on Discord alone and again feel free to disagree or provide comments um and then there's a final thing and that's probably the show stopper for us in many ways on this yes it's a big project but more than that it's one where you end up with four radiators in your living room and with just this quote and maybe it's a case of investigating more I mean I don't think that is something that as a as a family as a group we are going to be willing to uh to accept at this stage anyway and on that basis yes it's going to be hot enough but frankly uh that's probably a bit too many radiators especially in a home where storage is at a bit of a premium right so I think these were a few shots on the headphone quotes maybe we're reading a bit too much maybe there are other things please let me know your experience have you had the quotes have you considered have you gone ahead what did you think of octopus all of that is I think quite interesting you it feels to me that it's still early days of course there's countries where they must have them I've had hand them for years and years now and probably decades but you know heat pumps in this country with this kind of subsidies I think it is still early days in many ways and that's where it's still interesting to hear thoughts from everyone especially real people having done the rim in store so these were the thoughts for today many thanks if you've been watching through and please subscribe please comments and I'll talk to you soon [Music] thank you

Channel: EV Dabbler

Views: 16,901

Keywords: ASHP, ASHP costs, ASHP quote, Air source heat pump, MCS certification, air source heat pump, airsourceheatpump, daikin, electric heating, heat pump, heat pumps, heatpump, hot water tank, octopus energy, octopus referral, octopus referral link, octopusenergy, octopusreferral, payback time ASHP, running costs

Id: qQ2GEqoV9bk

Length: 22min 18sec (1338 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 18 2022