Environmental concerns and the move towards Heat Pumps

We have a heat pump which was installed, with underfloor heating, when the house was built. We are pleased with it. However, you can’t just stick one on an outside wall of just any property and connect it to an existing radiator system. Larger pipes and radiators may well be needed and that means a huge amount of upheaval. And of course the National Grid has to be able to cope with the extra demand.

Not only that, but I have no idea where heat pumps would be placed on some properties, for instance small terraced houses with just a back yard. They might not be permitted at all on some listed buildings.

The government isn’t remotely interested in whether people can afford to have a heat pump installed and pay for all the consequent making good, even with a grant. Milliband is just on a headlong rush to achieve net zero, come what may. It’s a disaster, just like the penalties imposed on car manufacturers if they don’t produce a given number of EVs each year, and having to stop selling new petrol and diesel cars in 2030. I despair.

My sister had it installed with a government grant and a year on her house is still in a mess there was so much upheaval with the whole place neede redecoration which her son and her are trying to do slowly. I dont think id want to tackle it myself.

My son has one with his home renovation and it is making massive savings. It is however not for small properties as it needs a bit of space and can be noisier than I’d expected.

I will not be having a Heat Pump, they are no use in Scotland as it gets so cold here and the size of them and the noise! I have good relationships with my neighbours and want to keep it that way. Why are they being forced upon us, when our own Houses of Parliament refused them? Due to the noise I may add. Someone is getting very rich and my guess is Elon Musk because if the Heat Pump is made by Tesla, it's his company.

We will need to change our boiler sooner rather than later. It is 25 years old, and although it's working well just now, it won't live forever. The plan is to hang on for as long as we can, and see what the situation is when we take the plunge. Maybe something new will have been developed? If not, we'll get a gas one, as we've recently decorated throughout and renovated some rooms, so I am very reluctant to do anything that involves mess. I'm hoping for a simple replacement.

We had a heatpump in a house we rented and were unable to use it as it was so noisy and placed right outside our bedroom window. It was also the size of a sideboard in a tiny garden and made such a draught that you couldn't grow plants in front of it.

The headlines yesterday were really galling with an article calling for homes to install heat pumps placed right alongside the news that BP are dropping green initiatives because of shareholder pressure to make greater profits.

Our heat pump isn’t anything like the size of a sideboard and it doesn’t make a lot of noise. They are ugly things but ours is in a place where we can screen it with shrubs, which have grown very well. I really wouldn’t want one in a prominent position.

Ours was made by Mitsubishi - I haven’t heard of Tesla making them! This is purely down to the wretched Milliband.

I thought about it but recently had a new gas boiler installed... it was much cheaper and is more efficient than the old one.

Barleyfields ours was huge. I've been trying to find garden pictures to post but can't find any with it in. I must have angled my camera to avoid the monstrosity. Plants were scorched by the draught from it.

It was in 2013 so perhaps they've got better and smaller since my experience.

Oh, and it was a small garden so everywhere was a prominent position. I think in smaller houses where they are hugger mugger it would be a real problem.

We had been considering this, but then there was an explosion locally linked to a borehole drilled for a heat pump tapping into a pocket of gas underground so have rather gone off the idea!
I think we’ll be looking harder at solar panels contributing to an immersion heater.

This worries me slightly as we’ve just had a replacement gas boiler this year which im hoping will see us out! Let’s hope we are not forced into a heat pump.

I replaced my old boiler with a modern one and it is super efficient.. Living in a terraced victorian house with a small garden it is the only option really

Barleyfields, in your response, you described my property. Small terraced house. I don't know where we could put the actual Air Pump. Our houses are back to front, compared to the normal way of building. Our livingroom is at the back. The width of the (sort of) solid wall, not a door or glass, is 2' on either side of the window, that window being clear at the top and clouded below to ground level. It is end of terrace but the outside wall is the boundary. The pump cannot go on next-doors land. Theoretically the pump could, perhaps, go under the kitchen window at the front but it faces north, is also shaded to the West and in the Winter the ground is sometimes frozen solid for days at a time as it sees any sun for only a few minutes in the early morning. No heat pump works well below freezing.

And as for the associated gubbins that goes inside the house, double sized radiators, huge water tank and so on - no way is there room. Can't do underfloor heating, either. The house sits on a concrete "raft" (built on sand and clay).

We were given a quote by a respectable company of about £30,000 for a heat pump plus insulation plus new radiators, etc, We put in a new gas boiler for about £2,000. End of problem.

Aely You've pretty much described the house we had a heat pump on. The heat pump was under the sitting room window (at the south facing back of the house). If we had the sitting room window or our bedroom window above it open we could hear the machine above all else.

Our gas boiler is 5 years old. Hope it lasts for a few more years, then will replace with another one before they’re extinct, if we are still here.

As for cars, hope we have packed up driving before that is another concern.

People we know who have heat pumps are either delighted with them or others claim there’s are always going wrong. I guess like everything it depends on the brand.

Grantanow

We were given a quote by a respectable company of about £30,000 for a heat pump plus insulation plus new radiators, etc, We put in a new gas boiler for about £2,000. End of problem.

We had a similar quote a couple of years ago - told them we would think about it but still they phoned us up with the hard sell night after night and were quite rude when we decided to not bother in the end.

Homestead62

I will not be having a Heat Pump, they are no use in Scotland as it gets so cold here and the size of them and the noise! I have good relationships with my neighbours and want to keep it that way. Why are they being forced upon us, when our own Houses of Parliament refused them? Due to the noise I may add. Someone is getting very rich and my guess is Elon Musk because if the Heat Pump is made by Tesla, it's his company.

Most, if not all, new builds and many older houses have been retrofit with heat pumps in Canada. So saying it gets too cold in Scotland seems a little shortsighted.

There are many different companies that make heat pumps. Samsung and Mitsubishi seem to be some of the most common.

We had a replacement gas boiler recently.
Where is all the money going to come to ensure that 80% of the population has heat pumps?
The lady in the recent advert said she only saves so much money because she has a battery which charges up for use.

I know two people who have heat pumps. One is in a 150yo Victorian stone built house which had inadequate heating before. They have a big garden so it’s complemented with solar panels too. It’s warmer now than previously and they have more hot water, however, it is quite noisy.

The other is in a one-off new-build property. I believe it works ok but it’s loud and you can sometimes hear it through my DD’s house’s granite walls, some 15 yards away. In a terrace, if everyone had one, I think the noise would get on one’s nerves.

The whole thing is cloud cuckoo land, where Milliband lives.

I think we need to be clear that the phasing out of gas boilers is not something dreamed up by this government, it’s been on the cards for a long time, because the gas is going to run out. It was initially planned to ban the installation of gas boilers in new builds by 2025, and ban the sale of gas boilers to existing homes by 2030, but when he was PM Sunak amended this decision in September 2023, so that the government aim was to phase out 80% of the UK's gas boilers by 2035.

It’s not going to be optional, it may not be that exact timescale, but the gas will be switched off altogether at some point, so there is no choice but for householders to find alternatives. It doesn’t have to be a ground source heat pump though.