Should we have installed an Air Source Heat Pump ?!?

so a little while ago I said this in addition to the fact that it simply can't handle cold Winters and this the system is so inefficient that you need to have much bigger radiators and this and likewise if your water doesn't get hot enough which absolutely won't uncalled a Northeast Winter days and of course as part of our renovation we fitted a gas Combi boiler of course that was before soaring gas prices and the world getting even weirder so did we install the wrong central heating system well in this video I'm gonna tell you exactly how much we would have saved by installing an air source heat pump oh hiya folks and welcome back to the show we've been renovating this very typical 1920s three-bed semi-detached house in the northeast of England for probably best part of two years now and back in 2021 we had a decision to make about the central heating bear in mind there was no central heating at all in this property before we were completely starting from scratch there were a lot of options on the table but we ended up settling for a traditional gas Combi boiler if you're not aware this is probably the most common central heating system in the UK everything is kind of self-contained in this one unit it does all of the central heating for the house and it does all of the hot water as well so it's hot water on demand there's literally nothing more to it there's no hot water cylinder or anything like that you don't need it this does all of our Heating and it provides enough hot water for two simultaneous showers thank you [Music] this entire central heating system including all radiators all pipe work installation everything came in at three and a half thousand pounds that included a brand new 36 kilowatt Combi boiler at a cost of 1300 pounds and the easy control Smart thermostat the decision to install a gas boiler was a little bit contentious since the government were basically saying they were going to ban them and there was a lot of clickbaity just made up nonsense in our wonderful UK media about this as well the truth is from what I can understand in 2023 is that we might not be installing them in new build homes from 2025 but even that's not set in stone yet and there's a vague possibility that from 2035 you'll not be able to buy a gas boiler anymore but as far as I can tell that is literally just a discussion point and nothing more gas boilers aren't being banned that's just made up anyway when we installed this gas boiler back in 2021 gas prices in the UK were around three Pence per kilowatt hour but now they're closer to 10 pence per kilowatt hour so in this video I'm going to attempt to answer knowing what we know now should we have installed an all-electric air source heat pump so first of all while I do still stand by most of what I said back then there were a few things I got wrong and I want to correct those and by the way I do have a Corrections page over on the Gosford handyman website I've made well over 400 videos on this channel and I do occasionally mess up and if I do I'd rather kind of put my hands up and admit to it but you have to understand we're very skeptical about anything that the government or mainstream media push on us because we've lived through too many of their lives I've mentioned it before but I very clearly remember about 10 years ago that diesel cars were considered as being environmentally friendly and there was massive tax incentives and all sorts of things pushing people to buy diesel cars back then of course now we understand that all of the figures that were being given to us by the manufacturers and by governments and various other people who should have known better they're all just made up there were government grants for things like spray foam insulation in your Loft and now we're being told if you've got that your house is unmortgageable even electric cars aren't safe they're now saying that the pollution from the tires is worse than the pollution that comes out of the exhausts of petrol vehicles and the tax advantages of owning electric vehicles so Road tax those are gradually starting to disappear as well they'll come for wood burning stoves next mark my words in fact it's already happening mainstream media are in their death throws and what we're seeing is kind of the death of an industry and the mess it's kind of causing that we're kind of all getting suckered into it's an industry that is pretty much now dominated by online advertising so everything they publish is literal click bait so excuse me if I am a little bit skeptical these days but that's no excuse for me to just make stuff up and as I say if I do get things wrong I'd rather set the record straight so uh self-flagellation time then those air source heat pumps this is where you bolt what looks like a giant air conditioning unit to the back of your property and hope that the temperature differential is sufficient to heat your house over a cold winter which generally it isn't okay so I was completely off the mark on that one obviously heat pumps are used in much colder climates than the northeast of England and they should have no problems whatsoever heating a small house like this in addition to the fact that it simply can't handle cold Winters the system is so inefficient that you need to have much bigger radiators and wider bore pipe work to compensate for everything running at a much lower temperature they're not inefficient obviously they're way more efficient in terms of energy in versus Heat out but it is true that you potentially need bigger radiators and wider bore pipe work to make the most out of the system if it can't cope which it absolutely warned on colder Northeast Winter days it'll cope fine and likewise if your mortar doesn't get hot enough which I absolutely won't called the Northeast Winter days again this apparently isn't a problem you're not going to be stuck with lukewarm water when it's snowing outside and in addition to this you need to put up with the noise of the unit running 24 7 in the middle of winter sorry but I still stand by this issue I know a lot of you maybe live in cities and things and it's less of a problem but I've heard these things first hand and I know there are much much quieter models on the market now and hopefully they'll just become the standard because the ones that I've heard are pretty loud think industrial refrigeration unit running 24 7 and then multiply that across 200 homes having said that to give it the benefit the doubt I suppose on a warm Summer's Day the heat pumps probably not going to be running through the day anyway I'm not sure but I can 100 guarantee you based on my personal experience of hearing them running and these are brand new heat pumps as well I couldn't tell you the model but if your neighbor gets one installed you are going to hear it from your back Garden so if you are looking at getting one do look into the noise output because it does make a big difference I also had a bit of a rant about electric cars and I've done a complete 180 on that subject I genuinely think that the future now and just makes sense and really my mind was changed when we took one for a test drive but having said that I don't think governments should be imposing any bans on Ice vehicles I think electric cars will just naturally take over over time because there are certainly things that need to be addressed in terms of Battery Technology and obviously mining for Rare Minerals and all that sort of stuff needs sorted out but it will be fixed in time but as with everything they're not for everyone the public charging infrastructure is rubbish and we seriously need to lower the price of electricity in the UK but hands up I've got it wrong I do get things wrong every now and then believe it or not if you're a skeptic about them as I was a year or so ago honestly take one for a test drive and then come back to me anyway self-flagellation over take everything I say with a pinch of salt I know nothing about heat pumps now let's take a look at why our gas boiler is better of course I'm joking but there is a serious side to this I personally know people who were told by the heat pump salesperson that the system would pay for itself in five years or ten years or whatever and in my experience that simply isn't true remember everything I'm telling you here is just our experience in our part in the world in our circumstances with this type of property so once again take it all with a pinch of salt but our gas central heating system costs three and a half grand for everything that's the boiler the pipe work the installation the radiators the whole lot it was a brand new installment blank canvas now at the time we were being quoted around fifteen thousand pounds for a heat pump install and that was taken into account the government grants that were available so in other words we're looking at a price difference of 11 and a half Grand now bearing in mind we were living in a rental property at the time that we were doing the main renovation work on the house and that rental property was costing us a thousand pounds a month well the installation of a heat pump at that particular time was going to take at least two months it was going to delay the renovation by two months so we would have had to extend our tenancy by at least two months so that's an extra two grand plus all of the bills and everything else associated with kind of having two properties on the go at the same time because there was literally no option this house was uninhabitable in the state it was in when we bought it and by the way there used to be allowances for things like council tax for if you were renovating a property so that if the property was empty and you literally couldn't live in it but you had work to do to bring it up to scratch like insulation heating systems and all that sort of thing they used to waive the council tax for a couple of months to let you get that work done they don't do that anymore you've got to pay full council tax on a property that literally can't be lived in and in the UK property tax acts for this house about 200 pounds a month bigger houses you could easily be looking at 300 pounds 400 pounds a month why people aren't going berserk about council tax is absolutely Beyond me but well whatever so the Crux of it is is that we would have had an extra at least two and a half grams worth of bills so you might as well see the cost of the heat pump has now gone up to 14 Grand and then you need to consider we've spent a hundred and one thousand pounds renovating this house that was 32 000 for the initial renovation for things like new water supply complete new drainage new Plumbing new electrics new central heating double glazing a lot of insulation and then there was a further 69 000 pounds to build the extension which basically makes the house big enough for a family of four to actually live in it so by adding a heat pump into the equation at the time that would have brought our total costs to a hundred and fifteen thousand pounds it's only a three bed semi in the northeast of England that's like a crazy amount of money and here's the kick we downsized from a new build property so that we could afford to do this renovation because we knew what would be involved we knew it would be a lot of work but it meant we'd have a nice house in a good area the kids could walk to school would have the back Garden which was obviously a massive selling point but at some point we have to stop spending money and the reality is is that for a hundred and fifteen thousand pounds we could have just moved into a completely finished new build that would have been much bigger than this admittedly we wouldn't have the back Garden but the numbers for a renovation like this just wouldn't Stack Up and I've mentioned it before as well but we also have to account for the ceiling price of the street we've had 15 odd years of really low interest rates and Rising house prices but that's going to change in quite a major way which was always entirely inevitable and predictable by the way so trust me now is not the time to be putting yourself in negative equity that's a bad place to be along with the installation costs there were really two other factors that put us off installing a heat pump two years ago one was the lack of local installers and service engineers and the other was taking away our hot water on demand where a family of four with two teenagers and honestly running out of hot water is really a stress that we can do without and on the local installers front by my understanding to qualify for the five thousand pound government grant you have to use a registered MCS installer I might be wrong about that but that's kind of what it says on the government website and stuff now two years ago there were only six in our local area but with the rising demand for heat pumps hopefully that seriously increased over the last two years in fact let's take a quick look so MCS find a contractor what would you like installed air SOS heat pump Newcastle upon town oh we've got one two three four five six seven uh okay so that's not great only one extra installer in two years that really doesn't fill me with confidence for a region with about a hundred thousand houses how can that be serviced by seven Engineers that's crazy am I missing something honestly I don't really understand this please let me know in the comments what you're supposed to do because you have to use an MCS installer from what it says on the government website where are all the new heat pump Engineers anyway we'll kind of bypass that for now let's take a look at how much gas we've actually used since we've installed this thing so I've lovingly manually typed in all of these figures from the Bosch easy control app since the export functions randomly stopped working which is a bit annoying and that also means I can't separate out between hot water and central heating but you get the general idea this is just basically total gas usage of the last kind of 18 months or so if you want to play along at home here's the figures down the left hand side here but I'll just kind of zoom in on this graph so the blue bars is kilowatt hours of gas usage per month and the red line is the average external air temperature so that's temperature on the right hand side here and kilowatt hours on the left hand scale we're running it from August since that's more or less when the boiler was installed or when we've got the First full month it's also worth mentioning that over this kind of period here where we're doing the main building work on the property so pretty much from kind of November until probably June time there were various holes in things while we're doing knock-throughs and obviously the roofing work that had to be done and stuff like that but to balance that out from June onwards the house was effectively 50 percent bigger but if we look at the actual utilization for example for November 21 compared to November 22 room remember at this point it's an 80 square meter house and at this point it's 120 square meter house the average external air temperature is more or less the same a tiny little bit warmer in 2022 but what's interesting is how much less gas we've used so 1 368 kilowatt hours versus 2071. anyway if we simplify that a little bit and just look at the usage from August to February this is how it looked in 2021 and then if we overlay 2022 in red you can see even though the house as I say is 50 bigger we are using considerably less energy and that's even with the really cold December that we had in 2022 I mean yes we used the wood burner but we used the wood burner in 2021 as well so I don't think we can put it all down to using the wood burning stove and even with the various knock throughs and things like that we never had the property literally opened to the elements for any longer than a few days at a time really so I can only really put this down to the increased insulation and all of the work that we've done to try and make the property as cozy as possible and just to illustrate that further on this graph we're looking at just the winter months so December January February in 2021 and December January February in 2022 in 2021 we used 7405 kilowatt hours of gas and it was an average outdoor temperature of 5.8 degrees in 2022 it was colder externally and the house was 50 percent bigger and we used 5775 kilowatts of gas so go figure so as I say I know nothing about heat pumps I know nothing about heat loss calculations I don't even know if these figures are correct so what we'll do is we'll get octopus out to give us a quote and do all the stuff that they need to do and we'll come back to you and we'll kind of keep you updated on our progress down this route but for the moment it's kind of irrelevant anyway because we don't have a spare 10 grand we're not taking the gamble when there's hardly any engineers in our area and we don't want to be in a worse position with our hot water we really like having hot water on demand I mean okay it's probably not a deal breaker there are maybe lifestyle changes and things that we can make have less showers don't all have a shower in the morning but you know that's quite a big sacrifice for a family of four to make that said I'm a lot more open to the idea of heat pumps now and I 100 agree that they are the future I think that is probably the route that we will all end up going down or most of us anyway there's always going to be kind of outlier conditions where it just doesn't work and regardless of the environmental impact I quite like the idea of not having to bring a flammable gas into our property but for the moment until we are in a position to go ahead with a heat pump maybe in a few years time we've put a lot of money into things like insulation and just making our property as cozy as it can possibly be and by the way the climate change argument doesn't even come into it for us because there are much bigger things that need to be addressed and no amount of using plastic drinking straws and heat pumps is going to fix that in the short term and don't even get me started on 15-minute cities anyway back in the real world there's two big problems the electricity infrastructure leading to each property genuinely isn't up to scratch if everyone's got heat pumps and electric cars it can't handle it and I'm taking that from people who actually work in the industry they look after the Telemetry of substations and they've told me that firsthand it is going to get fixed as whole teams of people looking at this to try and address it vehicle to load and feeding energy back into the grid from electric cars that's all going to happen 100 guarantee it at the moment we have no feasible way of storing electricity in any significant amount so when there's Peak demand and it's not sunny and it's not windy there isn't enough it was an inevitable problem and because we haven't built any nuclear power stations which would fix a problem we are where we are and because of that the environmentally friendly electricity that comes out of your socket to power your heat pump last year 42 of that came from burning gas and by the way five percent came from biomass which as I understand it is burning wood pellets so don't come for our wood burning stoves the reality is is that it's probably going to take 20 years plus to build the nuclear power infrastructure that we're going to need to sort out the mess that we're in at the moment you can certainly mitigate some of the problems for yourself by having solar panels and Battery arrays but for example where we are our roof faces the wrong direction for solar panels so it's just not really an option so the Crux of it is is that in our individual situation in this part of the world in this property with all of the work that had to be done on it to make it actually livable a heat pump would have been a bad idea two years ago plus the technology has moved on an enormous amount in the last couple of years so hopefully holding fire has worked in our favor yes we've probably lost 1300 quid on the boiler but I already know someone who will probably take that off our hands and even so would probably save that on the amount that heat pumps have come down in price over the last couple of years hi but we are now totally up for the idea of having a heat pump it just kind of makes sense so probably in maybe two or three years time hopefully by then the whole engineer situation will have caught up on itself a little bit and there'll be more people too the amount of hairs there'll be more people in the area to actually look after the thing so that if there's a disaster in the middle of winter we don't have a freezing cold house we've designed things in such a way that it should be relatively straightforward to add one on later down the line pretty much all of the pipe work is 15 mil there's the odd bit of microboard but that can easily be changed to 15 mil we've got a nice Gap over here somewhere to put the external unit we're going to maintain a space in the utility for a cylinder if we ever need one we don't have underfloor heating which is something that we've gone into the reasons why we didn't do that in previous videos but in all honesty if the radio is that we've got are coping fine with the water trickling through them at 40 degrees from the gas spoiler I don't think that's going to be too much of a problem this place is pretty well insulated now so hopefully it would just be a case of upsizing a couple of the radiators and away we go it's also worth mentioning that modern Combi boilers don't blast the central heating all the time light all the systems do for example at the moment when I'm filming this it's three degrees outside we've got the central heating set to kick in at 20 and a half degrees and it's comfortably maintaining the house at that temperature and the boiler's just ticking over with a water temperature in the radiators of 34 degrees we just leave it on the ECO mode all the time and it seems to kind of just sort itself out I'm sure someone who's much more knowledgeable about Combi boiler than me can explain how all that works but for example it's got loads of features like Optimum start fireplace mode weather dependent control and even with all of those things Switched Off it's not as simple as the heating just being on or off where possible it trickles heat into the radiators at very low temperature just to maintain the house at the desired heat level so I guess if this can comfortably run at 40 degrees and keep the house warm then in the future we should have no problems installing a heat pump fingers crossed and in case you're wondering since we normally work from home we just leave the heating on pretty much all of the time we have a clock program set up for winter and a slightly cooler clock program for summer but the reality is in summer it never even reaches the minimum trigger temperature so it never comes on at all other than for hot water anyway as promised let me tell you exactly how much we would have saved if we'd installed a heat pump two years ago oh and by the way two years ago there was really not very much information on YouTube about heat pumps at all there was only a handful of videos but now there's absolutely loads so there's really no excuse for not doing your own research on this topic and kind of dispelling some of the myths on both sides of the argument one of the best channels I've found is evm or electric vehicle man he's documenting his whole kind of heat pump story over on his channel it's completely unbiased it's not trying to push it he's just basically telling you how things are going from his end he's giving you some really useful stats and facts about how everything works and most importantly he's being very honest about the fact that heat pumps aren't for everyone he's also made some amazing videos about electric cars electrification in general solar panels and as I say it's not coming at you with an agenda it's just kind of his unbiased view of life and I think that's a really good way to go about things link down in the description below to evm so go and check them out at thoroughly top blog so look please take these figures with a pinch of salt because as I say there's so many variables at play here it's very very difficult to draw parallels between two different properties two different families you know different ways that people live what temperature we like to have the heating out all sorts of stuff can affect this but for our last full year which is basically from the 1st of March 22 to the 28th of February 23 we use 12 439 kilowatt hours of gas and at the current tariff we're on we're paying 10.2 Pence per kilowatt hour that works out at 1268 pounds and 78 Pence per year which if you average across a year works out at about 105 pounds and 73 Pence so all I've done I've taken this 12 439 and I've kind of assumed if it takes that amount of energy to heat the house with gas you're going to need pretty much the same amount of energy to heat the house with electric but obviously with a heat pump we're going to have the efficiency of the heat pump which really we don't know what that is so we're gonna have to just take a guess so I've worked it out based on a few different cop figures or I don't know if it would be scop or cop whatever so on a cop of five so that's effectively 500 percent efficient so in other words for every one kilowatt of power that you use to drive the heat pump you get five kilowatts of heat energy back out of it because that's the way heat pumps work five is very optimistic but you know if maybe in a couple of years time that's a thing so all I've done is I've taken that number and I've divided it by five so that means that we'd need 2488 kilowatts of electricity to heat the house over one year at our current tariff that would be 38 and a half Pence per kilowatt hour so that would work out at 957 pounds 80 or 79 pounds 82 per month as I say top five is probably a bit optimistic at Cop 4 would be looking at 3110 kilowatts of electricity needed and cop 3 it would be 4146. so it came to the bad news here for us is that if we took the 14 000 pounds figure which is the figure that I mentioned earlier and we just base it on the amount that we're going to be saving each year then even if the system was running at 500 efficiency which is kind of unlikely it would be a 45 year payback period on our initial kind of investment likewise if we look at a cop of four it looks like we'd only save 71.52 per year that's 195 year payback period And if we only get 300 efficiency which again you know even that might be optimistic I'm not sure we'd actually be kind of making a loss so would never pay back the 14 000 we would be 327 pounds a year worth off than keeping our gas boiler but as I say please take these figures with a pinch of salt I have no idea if I've even worked this out correctly please do let us know in the comments below and the other thing as well is that we wouldn't necessarily be doing this to try and get a payback at all that's not really kind of a normal way of living your life but at the same time when we have just had to dish out best part of a hundred thousand pounds on the renovation this 14 000 pounds does become quite an important figure so folks I hope you found that useful and hopefully I've set the record straight a little bit as our views have evolved over time and we'll certainly make more videos in the future as our views obviously will probably evolve again and who knows at some point on this channel maybe you'll see us ripping this thing out as I say I think electrification in general is a good idea it's probably our best chance for energy Independence because at the end of the day we can't generate our our own gas but we can potentially generate our own electricity like all new technologies there has to be Pioneers in the field who take the plunge as early adopters and I would really like to personally thank everyone who has actually done that because without that there would be no progress think of what things would have been like when petrol cars were first invented or gas boilers were first invented I bet exactly the same arguments were going on back then about how it'll never catch on so yes thank you to all the Pioneers out there we'll toddle along in a couple of years time and catch up because we're dirty fence sitters and ultimately you'll probably have the last laugh because you've already made the investment before inflation turns boilers into a hundred thousand pound Investments anyway folks let me know your thoughts in the comments below the last time I made a video about this there were so many comments I couldn't even reply to them we'll try and improve on that this time round we shall see for now as per usual be nice to one another look after each other and we shall see you next time thank you bye thanks

Channel: Gosforth Handyman

Views: 160,189

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Id: tUeX_M2eUTE

Length: 30min 1sec (1801 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 27 2023