As someone who recently moved to the UK, how at they so expensive? The price for the unit isn’t that bad, but I assume duct works to all rooms would be?
Maybe I’m just not understanding apples to apples coming from the US.
Heat pumps in UK are mostly air to water and integrate into your central heating They do not offer cooling, so no need in ducting to every room.
UK problems are around retrofitting housing stock never designed with an idea of a unit outside. For example the logical place for me to place a heatpump is roughly more than 8m away from where the water tank would be. So you would have to run ducting outside of the house.
And thats after i took out a door and walled that in (with eventual upgrade to heatpump) to leave the space specifically for the heatpump.
So alot of the extra cost would be working around ducting it to the place where it integrates into existing heating system.
We tend not to have air-conditioning either, housing stock can suffer from condensation and mould easily here. As its old and never designed for modern standards. Mine is about 130 years old or so.
The main problem with heat pumps is that it usually don’t generate as much heat as burning something(gas, wood…) So if houses are not well insulated you will spend much more time and a lot of electricity heating it and maybe won’t have the same comfort
Yeah that’s a worry for me, I do want to switch to heatpump in the future, I can benefit from having solars on the shed (have a nice ~25m2 shed), and a few panels on the house, so it may offset the running costs. But ofc thats some time in the magical future where I have money for all that.
And I have yet not done any surveys about how effective it would be
There are calculators online where you can enter your house/room details and get an estimate if any upgrades would be needed to make it reliably comfortable with a heat pump. I don’t know any for the UK specifically tho. Maybe those estimates are too climate/building code sensitive
In the UK we have A LOT of safety regulations for these sorts of things. They were mostly EU rules that we kept after Brexit (not necessarily a bad thing), getting something approved takes time, development and money.
Another issue is we have many MANY small terraced (lots of houses joined together in a row) houses that would struggle to fit a large heat pump and many of these houses are old, like 100 years + making modifications expensive. Until they’re smaller and cheaper with better incentives I unfortunately just don’t see us taking them up.
I don’t understand why any of these factors, none of which seems specific for the UK but instead applicable to the entire EU, would make heat pumps more expensive in the UK compared to the EU.
Out of interest, just how expensive are they? I can get a minisplit heat pump installed on our house for about a 1000€ (higher end models are obviously more expensive) here in Finland. It requires a small-ish hole trough the wall for pipes/wires, but otherwise the installation is pretty easy.
We have one in the house and another in garage and both have already paid for themselves since I don’t need to run electric radiators anymore. Newer models would be even more efficient, but as the current ones still work they’re not the first thing on the long list of house maintenance.
That’s pretty crazy, specially considering that UK doesn’t require as arctic-proof pumps as we do here. The absolutely cheapest pump I can find right now is 199€ (without installation obviously). I wouldn’t really recommend that, it’s the cheapest piece of shit you can get. I have previous “cheap” model from that particular store in garage and efficiency on that drops dramatically when it’s below -20C, but it does function even after several years.
Cheaper bosh/samsung/panasonic are around 900€ for the unit and full installation is around 500, but if you put some elbow grease there yourself it’ll be around half of that.
What are we talking about here? The machine itself + installation? How many square meters are we talking about? I’ve checked recently and two splits for 30m^2 each (so 60m^2 total) would cost me about 1.5k and that’s with the top, most efficient model.
Single unit for only 30m² sounds a bit excessive. At the house we have one split unit and it has ~170m² in two floors. On top of that we have electric heating in the wet spaces (shower, sauna, laundry room) and couple of radiators in the bedrooms (which are rarely used). Those alone would are just fine most of the year, but we also have a pretty big wood oven and a wood stove and while we could use only the heat pump+radiators it’s a lot cheaper to use wood during winter. Also warmth from the oven feels better, but only for heat it’s not strictly necessary until temperature drops below -25C.
In Spain people tend to install separate units for each room instead of one big unit for the whole apartment. Central units that let you control each room separately are quite expensive. It’s cheaper to install few small units and just turn on the ones you need: usually the one in salon during the day and the one in bedroom for the night. But that’s for AC because you can just let empty rooms to sit at 30 degree without issues. With heating it’s different, you can’t just let parts of your house to freeze. In southern Spain we don’t have freezing temperatures and I don’t know what people in other parts of Spain do for heating.
Actually you shouldn’t (if you can avoid it and I understand it’s expensive) let room just sit in 30C heat if you plan on air conditioning them later. When you are cooling a room, it’s just the air: the furniture, walls, everything has become a heat sink in 30 degree weather.
So you are better off keeping the room somewhat cool before you use it and go full cool.
In my experience you can keep the rooms somewhat cool just but closing the curtains. If they are shaded they don’t collect that much heat. The AC only has to run for couple minutes for them to be nicely cool. If the room gets really hot (I once ranted an attic that was like an oven during the summer) it’s hard to keep it a bit cool. Either the AC is running constantly or it gets really hot.
We just got a air to water heat pump installed. It was a “drop-in” replacement for our gas furnace, so it produces hot water to radiators and under floor heating, and hot water for the taps. Total price with installation was around 18,000 euros. Will save us around 2,000 euros per year compared to gas, but as we also have solar cells, that will probably be more like 2,500-3,000 euros. We need to see a full season of usage to know how much the solar cells can help over winter but at the moment the little heating we need + hot water does not cost us any electricity.
That sounds similar to what you’d need to pay here. In-laws did the same few years ago and it was ~20k, but there was quite a lot of additional work to fit the pump next to wood furnace.
I’ve been looking for a water-to-air unit for us to replace electric under floor heating and water boiler, but as we don’t have any plumbing ready that’ll quickly add up to the cost since we’d need to rip out tiles, grind channels for pipes, re-level and re-tile the floor and so on. With that we might get 1000-1500 savings per year, but it’d take 15 years (give or take) for the investment to pay itself assuming nothing breaks during that time so at least for it doesn’t really make sense.
I feel this is an almost dilberate choice by the government at this point. The credit you get for them is a really poor scheme and every government seems determined to avoid doing anything to assist retrofitting existing homes. Probably because trying to improve things sounds too much like communism to them.
I get that, but in the UK they’re so expensive for homeowners. The uptake isn’t quick enough.
As someone who recently moved to the UK, how at they so expensive? The price for the unit isn’t that bad, but I assume duct works to all rooms would be? Maybe I’m just not understanding apples to apples coming from the US.
Heat pumps in UK are mostly air to water and integrate into your central heating They do not offer cooling, so no need in ducting to every room.
UK problems are around retrofitting housing stock never designed with an idea of a unit outside. For example the logical place for me to place a heatpump is roughly more than 8m away from where the water tank would be. So you would have to run ducting outside of the house.
And thats after i took out a door and walled that in (with eventual upgrade to heatpump) to leave the space specifically for the heatpump.
So alot of the extra cost would be working around ducting it to the place where it integrates into existing heating system.
We tend not to have air-conditioning either, housing stock can suffer from condensation and mould easily here. As its old and never designed for modern standards. Mine is about 130 years old or so.
So all in all, its a right pain to do.
The main problem with heat pumps is that it usually don’t generate as much heat as burning something(gas, wood…) So if houses are not well insulated you will spend much more time and a lot of electricity heating it and maybe won’t have the same comfort
Yeah that’s a worry for me, I do want to switch to heatpump in the future, I can benefit from having solars on the shed (have a nice ~25m2 shed), and a few panels on the house, so it may offset the running costs. But ofc thats some time in the magical future where I have money for all that.
And I have yet not done any surveys about how effective it would be
There are calculators online where you can enter your house/room details and get an estimate if any upgrades would be needed to make it reliably comfortable with a heat pump. I don’t know any for the UK specifically tho. Maybe those estimates are too climate/building code sensitive
In the UK we have A LOT of safety regulations for these sorts of things. They were mostly EU rules that we kept after Brexit (not necessarily a bad thing), getting something approved takes time, development and money. Another issue is we have many MANY small terraced (lots of houses joined together in a row) houses that would struggle to fit a large heat pump and many of these houses are old, like 100 years + making modifications expensive. Until they’re smaller and cheaper with better incentives I unfortunately just don’t see us taking them up.
I don’t understand why any of these factors, none of which seems specific for the UK but instead applicable to the entire EU, would make heat pumps more expensive in the UK compared to the EU.
AFAIK they’re really expensive in Germany because of how they’re subsidised.
Aka… they’re purposely overpriced because “free government money” brings the price back to what it would be, theoretically. Ain’t capitalism grand?
You’d think all new builds would have to have heat pumps and solar panels, thereby reducing demand.
Sadly, that’s probably like 1% of housing stock.
Out of interest, just how expensive are they? I can get a minisplit heat pump installed on our house for about a 1000€ (higher end models are obviously more expensive) here in Finland. It requires a small-ish hole trough the wall for pipes/wires, but otherwise the installation is pretty easy.
We have one in the house and another in garage and both have already paid for themselves since I don’t need to run electric radiators anymore. Newer models would be even more efficient, but as the current ones still work they’re not the first thing on the long list of house maintenance.
Its around 3 to 5 thousand pounds and thats after a government grant.
That’s pretty crazy, specially considering that UK doesn’t require as arctic-proof pumps as we do here. The absolutely cheapest pump I can find right now is 199€ (without installation obviously). I wouldn’t really recommend that, it’s the cheapest piece of shit you can get. I have previous “cheap” model from that particular store in garage and efficiency on that drops dramatically when it’s below -20C, but it does function even after several years.
Cheaper bosh/samsung/panasonic are around 900€ for the unit and full installation is around 500, but if you put some elbow grease there yourself it’ll be around half of that.
What are we talking about here? The machine itself + installation? How many square meters are we talking about? I’ve checked recently and two splits for 30m^2 each (so 60m^2 total) would cost me about 1.5k and that’s with the top, most efficient model.
Single unit for only 30m² sounds a bit excessive. At the house we have one split unit and it has ~170m² in two floors. On top of that we have electric heating in the wet spaces (shower, sauna, laundry room) and couple of radiators in the bedrooms (which are rarely used). Those alone would are just fine most of the year, but we also have a pretty big wood oven and a wood stove and while we could use only the heat pump+radiators it’s a lot cheaper to use wood during winter. Also warmth from the oven feels better, but only for heat it’s not strictly necessary until temperature drops below -25C.
In Spain people tend to install separate units for each room instead of one big unit for the whole apartment. Central units that let you control each room separately are quite expensive. It’s cheaper to install few small units and just turn on the ones you need: usually the one in salon during the day and the one in bedroom for the night. But that’s for AC because you can just let empty rooms to sit at 30 degree without issues. With heating it’s different, you can’t just let parts of your house to freeze. In southern Spain we don’t have freezing temperatures and I don’t know what people in other parts of Spain do for heating.
Actually you shouldn’t (if you can avoid it and I understand it’s expensive) let room just sit in 30C heat if you plan on air conditioning them later. When you are cooling a room, it’s just the air: the furniture, walls, everything has become a heat sink in 30 degree weather.
So you are better off keeping the room somewhat cool before you use it and go full cool.
In my experience you can keep the rooms somewhat cool just but closing the curtains. If they are shaded they don’t collect that much heat. The AC only has to run for couple minutes for them to be nicely cool. If the room gets really hot (I once ranted an attic that was like an oven during the summer) it’s hard to keep it a bit cool. Either the AC is running constantly or it gets really hot.
We just got a air to water heat pump installed. It was a “drop-in” replacement for our gas furnace, so it produces hot water to radiators and under floor heating, and hot water for the taps. Total price with installation was around 18,000 euros. Will save us around 2,000 euros per year compared to gas, but as we also have solar cells, that will probably be more like 2,500-3,000 euros. We need to see a full season of usage to know how much the solar cells can help over winter but at the moment the little heating we need + hot water does not cost us any electricity.
That sounds similar to what you’d need to pay here. In-laws did the same few years ago and it was ~20k, but there was quite a lot of additional work to fit the pump next to wood furnace.
I’ve been looking for a water-to-air unit for us to replace electric under floor heating and water boiler, but as we don’t have any plumbing ready that’ll quickly add up to the cost since we’d need to rip out tiles, grind channels for pipes, re-level and re-tile the floor and so on. With that we might get 1000-1500 savings per year, but it’d take 15 years (give or take) for the investment to pay itself assuming nothing breaks during that time so at least for it doesn’t really make sense.
I feel this is an almost dilberate choice by the government at this point. The credit you get for them is a really poor scheme and every government seems determined to avoid doing anything to assist retrofitting existing homes. Probably because trying to improve things sounds too much like communism to them.