Heat pumps are they a waste of money?

[Northern_Brewer]

I do not have anywhere to put a water cylinder.

You can now get mini, high-efficiency water cylinders for heat pumps - see this video. Or you can use some kind of hybrid system.

My radiators and pipes are donkeys years old they use very narrow pipe (think 10mm) i imagine that would need replacing throughout the whole house including buried in the concrete floor in the kitchen and downstairs bathroom.

Microbore is a pain, but it doesn't stop you from getting a heat pump. "High temperature" heat pumps produce water at the same temperature as a gas boiler, so should look the same to your pipe/radiator network. Only catch is they're a bit more expensive (10% I think?) and are a bit less efficient when in high-temperature mode, but in the real world they rarely have to work in that mode.

 

[Druss]

I'm with OVO and every time I go on their website to check the current balance there's a barrage of ads and such offering this that and the other if I switch to their green energy or get one of their special boilers...all result in me paying them a great deal more with no obvious/tangible benefit.

The idea of renewable energy certainly appeals to me, but I'm very sceptical about the true agenda, always makes me think of this old meme:

 

[Northern_Brewer]

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/b.../?ICID=continue_without_subscribing_reg_first

Completely predictable that it's the Telegraph- the Telegraph's coverage of heatpumps is so ludicrously biased it can only be described as propaganda.

For the most part, he says the heat pump performed as expected. The machine’s coefficient of performance (COP, the measure of a heat pump’s efficiency) averaged at 2.2. A typical gas boiler, by contrast, has a much lower average COP of between 0.7 and 0.8....“During the last couple of weeks with freezing temperatures, the COP fell to 1.7,”

No - that is not a heat pump performing as expected. A COP of 2.2 is terrible - the minimum to qualify for the Boiler Upgrade Scheme is 2.8, and installers like Heat Geek are averaging 4.4. There's even some air-source pumps in the UK going over 5.0.

So this system was installed by cowboys who didn't know what they were doing. It shouldn't be dropping off that much in cold weather either.

But of course it fits the story that the Telegraph wants to push. No doubt if they were doing a feature on whether you should buy a car, they would use this as their example of a modern car :

 

[Rodcx500z]

I'm with OVO and every time I go on their website to check the current balance there's a barrage of ads and such offering this that and the other if I switch to their green energy or get one of their special boilers...all result in me paying them a great deal more with no obvious/tangible benefit.

The idea of renewable energy certainly appeals to me, but I'm very sceptical about the true agenda, always makes me think of this old meme:

View attachment 109289

Spot on they are all coining it in on the fears they promote, they the government just stoke the fire, unfortunatly some believe them

 

[JockyBrewer]

Thats me all over, enjoy your time here on planet earth, nothing you say or do will make not 1 iota bit of difference to the green dream

So how is Ed Milliband siphoning off money from the electricity wholesale pricing?

 

[jof]

Spot on they are all coining it in on the fears they promote, they the government just stoke the fire, unfortunatly some believe them

Yep.
If you are all electric storage heaters, they are only pushing warm water heat pumps at £25k by the time you add in radiator installation. (May also apply if you have low water pressure too)

You can get a basic air con type system fitted for a fraction of that, but they don't tell you about them & you won't get any grants towards it.

So in my opinion here, the scam is the heat pump price is inflated by the government grant.
And I bet you get scammed if you are leasehold trying to get permission to site the external inverter part.

 

[Rodcx500z]

So how is Ed Milliband siphoning off money from the electricity wholesale pricing?

to pay for all the turbines and panels, you surly don't think the government are paying

 

[Northern_Brewer]

The idea of renewable energy certainly appeals to me, but I'm very sceptical about the true agenda, always makes me think of this old meme:

View attachment 109289

Except none of them resulted in more taxes for you - and arguably fears about oil supply led to exploration in daft places like the North Sea which have massively reduced your taxes over the years.

And acid rain and the ozone layer are actually pretty good examples of a complicated Bad Thing happening at a regional/global scale where we recognised a problem, invested in alternatives, and fixed it. Isn't that a pretty good example for how to deal with climate change?

 

[Northern_Brewer]

to pay for all the turbines and panels, you surly don't think the government are paying

So Rod - how exactly do you plan to make electricity in the UK?

Power stations get old and need replacing, so we'll need to pay for some kind of electricity generation kit.

But we're no longer in the 20th century where we had cheap and abundant North Sea gas - we had found pretty much all the gas in the North Sea by the end of the 1990s, production has been declining since then. As I said on the politics thread, we've spent £140bn on gas in the last three years, with a majority of that going to other countries.

If we're going to have to build new power generation anyway as kit gets old, if we're running out of gas, and if our current dependence on gas is making us poorer to the tune of £10bn's per year - why wouldn't we try and generate more electricity from domestic solar and wind? Even better - it's cheaper than gas or nuclear.

You worry a lot about people lying to you, but you should worry about the people who are lying when they say that you can continue to do things the same way that we did in the 1990s, or that tell you it's a good idea to depend on basics like energy from countries like Qatar. Germany persuaded itself that it was a good idea to become dependent on Russian gas 20 years ago, and we know how that ended up.

So Rod - how do you think we should generate our electricity?

 

[Stu]

As an aside, the Torygraph has turned into a GB News mouthpiece. I'd not use it as a suitable reference.

I can only speak for my folks who bought into Heat Pumps early on. I'll not lie, it was very expensive because they weren't common and there weren't the incentives there are today. They were updating their house and they needed to replace their old-fashioned radiators which were fed by an oil burner (they don't have gas). Oil is not like Electricity and Gas - it's the wild, wild west!

However, in terms of "does it work?" Absolutely it does. They do have solar panels, but honestly, their house is like a furnace (that's how they like it) and despite having a house 3x the size of mine, their overall bills are less. They're retired.


Will definitely consider it if and when my system needs replacing. I don't think it'll be anytime soon - we have a modern Worcester Bosch backed up with solar heating and heat exchanger which has just been updated.

 

[Druss]

Except none of them resulted in more taxes for you

I wasn't really purporting the meme as hard science, more of an example of scaremongering by the powers that be in order to get extra cash from the easily led masses.

The whole 'green agenda' nonsense appears to be much of the same, I'm not declaring any absolutes, just voicing my scepticism in the matter.