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Heat pumps are starting to look like a conspiracy against the public
British Gas has just thrown a large spanner into a policy that seems increasingly unworkable, costly and embarrassing for the Government
www.telegraph.co.uk
I realise not many have a sub to Telegraph (neither do I) but this is the article in full. As for the statement by BG, I haven't corroborated it but it seems an odd one as their domestic ASHP assessments should be based on science and maths rather than a hunch or hoodoo. Saying that, I suppose the money back offer is the Victar Kiam of marketing and been made to placate an uncertain public.
So, you want to do your bit for the environment, and you took the Government at its word when it told you that ditching your perfectly well-functioning gas boiler for a heat pump is the way to go. But what do you do if you can’t find an engineer prepared to install one of the devices in your home because, in all honesty, they know it wouldn’t actually keep you warm?
British Gas has come out this week and stated what has doubtless been obvious for a long time to some homeowners who did take the plunge: that a standard heat pump runs at water temperatures which are too low to heat many properties. From now on, says the company, it will only agree to install a heat pump if it is convinced that it will succeed in getting the property up to a target temperature on the coldest days. If any of the heat pumps it installs fail this test, it says it will refund the money.
Fair enough, but that will mean millions of homes cannot have a heat pump installed by British Gas. There are eight million homes in Britain which have solid walls and which, as a result, are hard to bring up to required insulation standards at a reasonable cost. If other companies follow British Gas’ example, the Government will have no hope of achieving its target of retro-fitting 600,000 homes a year with a heat pump by the end of this decade. British Gas has just thrown a very large spanner into the Government’s net zero ambitions.
I don’t want to sound negative. I would much rather heat my house with an electric heat pump than its existing, smelly oil-fired boiler, and I would have made the switch years ago if I could be convinced it would keep the property warm. But to judge by the experience of many people, the air-source heat pumps being marketed en masse at the moment simply aren’t up to the job. They are an effective way of raising the temperature in your home when you don’t really need it to be heated, but if you live in an old property, and you have no other form of heating, you are likely to find yourself shivering on the coldest days.
There isn’t a lot of heat to extract from the air when it is minus 10C outside. There is more heat to be found underground, but to tap into that requires a far more expensive and space-consuming ground source heat pump. To spend £10,000 on a heat pump which turns out only to be effective as background heating seems a poor deal when you can buy a gas boiler which will do the whole job for a fifth of the price.
True, experiences vary, as indeed do people’s assessment of the work achieved by their heat pump – one of the biggest enthusiasts for heat pumps that I know also has a great oil-fired Aga in his home. But it seems to me that if heat pumps really are going to heat our homes in future the technology still has some way to develop. It is possible, even now, to buy a heat pump which chucks out water at similar temperatures to a gas boiler – but there is a big price to pay in terms of cost and efficiency. Maybe the technology will improve and costs will fall, but British Gas’ intervention this week should sound a warning to the Government – it is never a good idea to set targets before you are sure that technology is sufficiently advanced to allow them to be met.
Pump it up: UK householders on ditching their gas central heating
Climate crisis and high fossil fuel prices motivated some to invest in heat pumps – how did their first winter go?
www.theguardian.com