The Telegraph has published a fatuous article purporting to show how the owner of a 15th century listed cottage has made a heat pump work.
The premise of the article is that ignorance and incompetence on the part of installers, and flawed perceptions on the part of those rejecting the idea of heat pumps, are to blame for the belief that they don’t work in older houses.
Readers are introduced to 67 year-old Tim Adams, a software expert, whose house is classified as Grade II. He’s pictured proudly standing next to his heat pump, an installation big enough to pass muster with an American air conditioning system outside a motel in the Arizona desert. Not only does it partly cover one of his windows but also restricts access to part of a shed:
With its thatched roof and thick stone walls, rather than modern cavity wall insulation, it’s the sort of home you’d assume is wholly unsuitable for a heat pump.
While heat pumps can work in older properties, homeowners must often first pay for expensive retrofits, with larger radiators and added layers of insulation.
This is a huge problem for the Labour Government, which is desperate for homeowners to install the technology in Britain’s old homes. It faces little confidence that the technology works properly. In 2023, Vonjy Rajakoba, former Managing Director of Bosch UK, told the Telegraph heat pumps did not make sense in Britain’s “fleet of Victorian houses”. And it’s even harder to make them work in draughty and protected listed homes.
Despite these problems, it seems that Mr Adams has pulled off the seemingly impossible:
But Adams, 67, has persevered, and after two years of tinkering he has managed to get it to work decently well in his house in Wincanton, Somerset. “I was used to spending £1,000 a year on heating oil, but now my air-source heat pump costs me £720 for heating and hot water a year,” he says. “In a big old house that’s pretty good by anyone’s standards.”
The paragraph is loaded with points that need pursuing but aren’t. The heat pump apparently works “decently well”. What does that mean? Evidently not ‘very well’ or else it would say so.
“Two years of persevering”? What does that mean? Spending all day, every day fiddling about? We’ll see what it means in a moment.
A saving of £280 per annum (£5.38 a week)? £2,800 over a decade? £11,200 over 40 years? Indeed, since £280 is very close to the winter fuel payment taken off pensioners by the current Government in its not-mentioned-in-the-manifesto money-saving measure, why on earth don’t all pensioners simply install heat pumps in their ancient Victorian houses?
Given the costs of installing a heat pump (despite the grants), to say nothing of the concomitant costs of other necessary features such as upping central heating pipes to 22mm and installing larger radiators, all of which go unspecified apart from acknowledging these retrofits can be “very costly and onerous” in this classically useless piece of eco-journalism, it’s hard to see how any heat pump could ever pay for itself in an older building.
Exactly how much Mr Adams had to spend on getting his house heat-pump ready or precisely what he had to do are conveniently omitted from the article, leaving readers none the wiser about how this coup was pulled off, or the real costs, to say nothing of the disruption and inconvenience.
As far as your correspondent can see and at a bare minimum rough estimate, Mr Adams might possibly have recovered the costs by the time he is 107 years old, but very possibly he might have to hang on until he is 147 or older. By then his heat pump will long since have gone to join that vast rusting pile of decaying relics of early 21st century eco insanity. Indeed, it will probably have been expensively replaced several times by then.
Apparently, the solution to making a heat pump work is simple:
“It’s simply wrong to say they won’t work in old buildings,” says Adams. “You have to understand a less insulated house needs more heat pushed into it. Whether it’s an air-source heat pump or anything else. The key is to understand how much heat you need to push in and do that as efficiently as possible.”
In other words, you just apparently need more heat while at the same time as making the heat pump run at as low a temperature as possible. What could be easier? Actually, hanging on to your oil or gas boiler would be easier, but back to the secret of the magic heat pump:
“Understanding and using weather compensation has been vital to getting the best efficiency,” Adams says.
For the uninitiated, a heat pump weather compensation curve is the function that allows the system to adjust its flow temperature based on the temperature outside. The flow temperature is the temperature your boiler heats water to before sending it to radiators.
“Because you always want the heat pump to be running at the lowest possible temperature to get you to 21°C, you want the flow temperature in the radiators to be as low as possible,” explains Bean Beanland, of the Heat Pump Federation.
Quite how running a heat pump at as low a temperature as possible while at the same time compensating for fluctuating weather conditions especially in freezing conditions and thus keeping a leaky old house warm can all be achieved goes totally unexplained.
Incompetent installers seem to be the issue:
Adams spent the best part of two years fine-tuning his heat pump’s settings to work with his home, but he says many installers simply aren’t up to the task. “One of the vital things is the heat loss calculations for the property. Typically that’s done very badly by installers,” he says.
“They’ll do it by finger in the air. They’ll pluck a number from nowhere and it’s not a proper calculation. You can see why they’re not keen to necessarily spend a lot of time on it, but I think that’s something the MCS (the installers’ trade body) and the Government need to think about.”
So, now we know. That’s all you need to do. Find a heat pump installer with a degree in mathematics or a homeowner interested in spending two years tweaking the system and you’ll end up with a heat pump that works “decently well” in an old house.
Since even finding heat pump installers who are prepared to service these devices is hard enough, tracking down one with the qualifications, time and interest in trying to adjust something with the complexity of an 18th century chronometer might prove a little challenging.
But if you succeed you can enjoy the princely savings of £5.38 a week. You could spend the first tranche on a tin whistle and blow down it while Labour hopes for 600,000 heat pumps to be installed annually by 2028 and 1.6 million by 2035.
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Can someone answer this question: just how stupid do they think we all are?
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Presume those monstrosities are exempt from the normal regulations about what you can do to listed buildings.
LG heat pumps are made in South Korea. Worcester Bosch boilers are made in the UK. Britain is a clean energy superpower!
It’s not clear whether it heats his home and hot water to exactly the same standard as a boiler.
Also the cost calculations need to take into account that heat pumps cost a lot more to buy and install than gas boilers – though of course prats like this man think it’s the same because us gas boiler using taxpayers are subsidising his virtue signalling.
It’s very easy to make huge assumptions, along the lines that someone who lives in a Grade II listed building may well have the ready cash available to invest (undisclosed) thousands of pounds in a vanity project, without really caring if or when they’d break even. It also looks as though this particular property is on a sheltered plot in a part of the country with a relatively mild climate, so there many not be many winter evenings where the pump struggles to extract any heat out of the air. I wonder how well it would work if the cottage were halfway up a hillside in the Yorkshire Dales, let alone the Scottish Highlands.
I’ve mentioned this in previous posts – & another person said that there is a new type of refrigerant that works much better without the need to replace pipes/radiators. But – my experience in a semi detached cottage was one of cold, damp, very high electricity bills & difficult to find engineers.
I wouldn’t put one in even if they paid me. Oh wait – no absolutely & simply no under any circumstances.
I understand the heat transfer medium from the heater to the rads is still water, however a large volume of lower temp water is needed to transfer the lower heat to them, hence often a requirement for microbore and other small piping to be replaced. Your typical gas boiler can generate 70-80 degree water without really breaking a sweat, so a smaller volume and flow of piping hot water works fine with small pipes etc
There is a new generation of heat pumps available which use a different refrigerant that can produce 70 plus degrees and will thus work with an existing 15mm CH installation. Propane is the most common high temperature refrigerant but it has to be installed carefully because of the potential for leaking propane to catch fire. A safer alternative hydrofluorocarbon.
The power consumed by a heat pump must be proportional to the temperature difference between the source (the air in this case) and the destination (the radiators). Hence the rule that most heat pumps work with radiators at 40 C. Using a different refigerant doesn’t change tje laws of thermodynamics; the heat pumo will burn more electricity to supply radiators at 70 C
Was going to say the same thing – the laws of thermodynamics are not going to bend just because Ed asked…
I agree using propane is better but there are big safety risks in using this in or near houses and itcprobably uses much more electricity.
Propane is heavier than air and if there is a leak will gather incellars where it can explode. Anyone smoking nearby is a hazard.
Furthermore, installers would have to be qualified LPG gas safe engineers and there are very fewxof thise around.
It is interesting to know if this is the only source of heat for the property. A very brief search of the name and location will find a person, connected to the software industry, registered as living in a quaint little cottage (offering bed and breakfast) that seems to have an active chimney on Google Street View, so is this a fireplace, log burner or good old fashioned Aga providing supplemental heat and how many other solid fuel heat providers are there that are not visible from the view?
Click on the photo to see the full size picture and in the bottom left hand corner you will see what appears to be a 47kg Calor gas LPG bottle. Not the sort of thing you would use for the patio heater or family BBQ. Very handy for the gas fire if you’re not on the mains though.
“my air-source heat pump costs me £720 for heating and hot water a year”…..
……and I only spend £750 on Calor gas!
Hahaha! What a joke. I have an old house, and I’m sticking with my gas boiler thanks.
And in winter I’ll just chuck another Miliband on the fire at night to keep the dog warm
I had an old French, stone-built farmhouse underfloor heating (tiled), wide-bore pipework fed by an oil boiler. Piped gas was not available.
I had a heat pump about the size of the one illustrated (Toshiba) with an installed cost about 12 years ago of about 12 000€ (£10K). No additional work to change rads or insulation. It was recommended to me to keep oil boiler for the hot water to avoid need to have a copper cylinder and immersion heater installed and cheaper to run.
It was a high rated unit, three-phase supply, on an indoor thermostat, running continuously to give an indoor temp of 20C minimum down to -7C outdoors.
The unit had a maximum output temp of 55C, and was controlled by a return thermostat – the underfloor heating worked at 40C – so the HP ran at around 55C until the return temp was 40C, then it just stopped. If the return subsequently fell to 38C the unit started up again.
I don’t know what: “For the uninitiated, a heat pump weather compensation curve is the function that allows the system to adjust its flow temperature based on the temperature outside.” – means because the unit – in my case – was controlled by indoor temperature and was either ON or OFF. It is not therefore a continuous, varying temperature outflow.
Outdoor air temp and humidity (the heat exchanger ices up and has to stop and de-ice every so often) obviously determine how hard the unit has to work to produce its 55C – and blow -7C it will progressively fail to reach this temperature.
Those big fans are noisy, particularly when the unit is working hard, and produce vibration noticeable indoors. They produce a powerful airflow and anything within two to three yards will be very, very cold.
Oil and LNG were expensive, EDF (nuclear) electricity was not – between 8 eurocents and 12 eurocents (6p to 10p) per kWh depending on offpeak/peak.
My unit during winter months used between 9 000kWh and 11 000kWh.
It reduced my heating bills by about 50% compared with oil.
The thing about the heat pump debate is not a lot of truth is being told. Never mind insulation – it doesn’t produce heat – what is important is the size and output of the unit which will be determined by volume of indoor space to heat/size of property and what ambient temperature you want. This affects installation site, noise and power consumption as well as cost.
Yes they are energy efficient, but this efficiency decreases with outside temp and humidity. But compared to natural gas, they are not cost efficient to run, and expensive to install.
In summary: yes they work and can work well in the UK if you get one big enough!
Interesting; thanks for the info. My home is fairly well insulated 200 square metres of living space, so the internet tells me I need an 8KW heat pump. Those seem to be a good deal larger than my gas boiler and a lot more expensive.
Toshiba heat pumps are apparently made in Japan, Thailand, and Poland. My gas boiler was made in the West Midlands. Britain is a clean energy superpower!
Of course French electricity is cheaper as they don’t rely on stupid windmills.
The UK has the most expensive electricity in the developed world and it is steadily rising. The payback date will be forever moving further into the future.
It’s great to have a well-balanced contribution from someone who has experience of heat pumps in this kind of property. From my reading on the subject, underfloor heating seems to be the best type to run off a heat pump, as flow temperatures can generally be lower than with radiators, so you were in an advantageous position in that respect.
I will stick to the log burner, it was fantastic in the snow. at least before I burned through the best dry Oak & Willow logs. Ordering by the tone is better.
Cutting your own wind-blown stuff and stacking it in the shed is even better.
Buying your own woodland is even better.
Both of you are locally carbon neutral with regards to some heating then – Ed may have a small medal for you… except you are burning stuff… naughty and it doesn’t count (for no good reason)
I think anyone with a moderately functioning brain will be asking those very unanswered questions.
2/10 for the propaganda effort.
Some people claim that the outside units are very quiet. The almost new car I bought 5 years ago was very quiet for a while, it was hard to tell if the engine was running, now it rattles and clunks like most cars do.
Gates’ money means the DT will never come clean on the greenist scam.
Just as it was bought and paid for by government (taxpayer) funded advertising during Covid.
That’s why, after more than 25yrs subscription I gave it the chop.
5 yrs ago I completely restructured my info sources and can confidently claim to be at least 3 years ahead of MSM.
I recommend my fellow blogees do likewise, but guess most of you have already.
Jeez, he even looks like loony Corbyn.
I know of people in this area who have been refused permission to install a heat pump because the local electric supply cannot handle heat pumps. In many urban areas, if all the gas boilers suddenly went over to heat pumps, could the electric supply cope? most likely it could not. As far as I can see the Net-zero dream (nightmare) of electrify everything does not add up, we cannot all have electric cars and heat pumps, there just is not the electric needed to achieve this.
Even in a modern house, I would be very wary of installing expensive green tech. A family member who bought a ten year old house with rainwater harvesting and solar thermal just can’t find people locally who are able to service or repair them. And so many companies in the green subsidy-harvesting sector are untrustworthy in the first place, so there is no guarantee of installation quality.
Heat pumps, wind turbines, and solar panels can not perform as well as fossil fuels because they attempt to make medium grade energy (warm heat) from low grade energy (wind, sunlight, cold air). Burning fossil fuels converts the energy in the fuel into high grade heat instantly.
There is no comparison
Who would think that a technology that first appeared around the 4th Century and was a great idea until the intermittent nature of it became too much of a problem following the invention of the steam engine. Then along came electricity and diesel engines to replace steam power.
The UK suffers from a much higher level of humidity than countries that are colder which is a problem for heat pumps. We don’t get dry cold in the same way we don’t get dry heat.
We’ve got a new air to air heat pump (aka air conditioning) in our property. It’s actually OK, not bad at all.
Qualifications to this statement:
1. We live in the south of France (warm climate, even in January).
2. We live in a pretty well-insulated and relatively modern barn conversion.
3. The previous owners (who had the house for about 5 years) installed the heat pump system.
4. From what we can gather, their costs incurred from installing the heat pump system (after any grants) meant their sale of the house to us caused them to lose money.
It really is an ill wind if it blows no-one any good.
So yeah, we’re OK, but only because someone else lost money installing it for us, it was done well, and in a suitably converted property which is located in a suitable climate.
How any of this is supposed to translate successfully to the UK, and with air to liquid heat pumps, I have absolutely no blinking idea.
Ed Milibrain needs to check in to rehab.
Off-T
A very interesting assessment by Dr Mike Yeadon which puts a slightly different take on my repeated statement that destruction of this country by the traitors in charge is the aim.
The Dollar Is Not Going to Collapse, What Is Going to Collapse Is Global Trade
Solari Report Money & Markets: January 23, 2025 with Catherine Austin Fitts & John Titus
Full Report: https://home.solari.com/money-markets-report-january-23-2025/
…
“I think Catherine Austin Fitts is right.
She argues that it’s not sovereign currencies that are going to collapse (at least, not the US dollar) but global trade is going to collapse.
Now, I don’t have the economic background to make predictions.
What I have is the realisation that we’re in WW3 in which the aggressors are our own governments, wherever we live.
Once you run that thought experiment, a very large number of dots almost join themselves.
Why has U.K. spent several decades moving manufacturing offshore? Altered the food supply chain so that virtually nothing is grown locally to where it’s consumed?
I am concerned that U.K. is particularly vulnerable, being an island, to an insidious form of total blackmail.
We’re almost wholly reliant for everything, from electricity to petrol, from food to the simplest manufactured goods, on containerisation. Containerisation is brilliant providing the container ships continue to come.
It’s not a happy thought, realising that whether through purely economic factors (which affords politicians plausible deniability), or warfare or any other reason why imports at some point reduce, that we’ve no alternative ways to get by.
I think, when Catherine refers to deglobalisation and inflation, the factors above could so easily combine restricted supply and soaring prices, as a strategy to impoverish almost everyone, rendering us desperate for an alternative, such as CBDC (and digital ID) as a matter of necessity.
I’m literally thinking out loud here. I’m also reminding readers that I’m not an economist. This could all be fevered dreams rather than a sober minded take.”
Best wishes
Mike
Interesting take on things – being self sufficient to a degree as a country is a very sensible idea, however not really compatible with our ‘plan a month ahead at best’ style of government. Say what you like about the Chinese and others, they think long term, not short term
He is Jeremy Corbyn, and I claim my £5 prize.
Friends of mine in Devon bought a house recently which has a heat pump. They don’t like it and don’t think it warms up their 3-bed bungalow enough. He also knows someone there who paid to have a heat pump installed in the last few months, and who now regrets getting it.
He’s obviously a man that doesn’t mind the cold. He says he used to spend £1000 on heating oil. Having lived in a 4 bedroom modern house ,for 40 years, which had double glazing cavity wall insulation and loft insulation I would have been delighted to run the oil powered boiler for £1000. More like £2500.
What amazes us is that it is often older people who have fallen for the climate change agenda, despite living through the weather of earlier periods to see that things have not changed. How much would he be spending on heating had he done the same insulation with his existing system.
Exactly. Insulate the home first and then use that as the baseline for a comparison between a gas/oil boiler and a heat pump. The annual gas bill for our relatively new, well insulated, 4 bed detached house is about £600. That’s for heating and water. We pay 4x as much per kWh of electricity as we do for gas. The only way that a heat pump installation would be cost effective for us would be if i) there are massive government subsidies paying pretty much all the installation cost and ii) the price of gas soared and the electricity price fell. [ Watch out for more environmental levies being put onto domestic gas supply in the future to achieve this ].
I wonder if they see the ‘free’ money and feel they want to claim it?
So here we are once again with a technology that our own governments, who we voted for are coercing us into using in order to reduce our use of fossil fuels and therefore prosperity because they want to comply with UN Agenda 2030. ——This is what happens when we vote for Political Parties that do not work for us. When asked if he prefers Westminster to Davos, Starmer replied “Davos” and the reason is that these people feel superior to ordinary voters and along will other elites who want to govern the whole world think they know what is good for us all, how much energy we will be allowed, how much meat we can eat etc, because in the western world our consumption of everything is too high and “unsustainable”——–How many people here on Daily Sceptic voted to have “less of everything”? ——–I ask everyone who comments on this website to answer here if they voted for that.
Wait till the servicing and repair bills start coming in!
Out of curiosity I arranged for some quotes to instal a heat pump in my relatively new, 20 year old, already well-insulated house, when my gas boiler stopped working. The heat pump itself – helped by a £7500 government subsidy (thank you tax-payers one and all) would bring the cost to only double that of a new gas boiler. . However, all the pipes to the 18 radiators over 3 floors, running under floors and in walls, would need to be replaced due the current pipe diameter being too narrow for a heat pump. The cost of that tripled the overall cost resulting in the payback taking around 15 years. Not to mention the total disruption in my house as all the current pipes are ripped out and replaced. Needless to say, I bought a new Worcester boiler for less than £3000 and looking forward to another 20 years of reliable heat.
Good luck getting 5+ years out of a Worcester Bosch unit these days… they’ve been value-engineered (business term for cheaper materials and parts, lower quality) in recent years and are not what they once were
Why would daily sceptic give this product an inch of space?? This week we have some important US gov’t nominations coming up. The UK’s covid inquiry continues to be a wash over the truth, and the UK gov’t incompetence continues. Tommy Robinson remains in prison, Ed Milliband continues he net zero scam. On and on and on. Heat pumps?? No, a waste of daily sceptic space.
Next Telegraph news column, states that the moon is made of cheese. Ignore
I live in an 16th century house with solid granite walls. The heating engineer I use,refuses to install heat pumps in old buildings as they don’t work. This article also fails mention the space needed externally, as seen in the picture, and internally for a hot water storage system and sometimes even a plant room, something many old houses don’t have. Combi boilers did away with the need for a hot water cylinder, a heat pump will need at least one.
Our last boiler has a 10 year warranty, is serviced once a year and with few moving parts there is little to go wrong. A heat pump warranty is, I believe, typically 3 years and they have many moving parts that have the potential and to be noisy for wear. They also need to run 24/7 to me effective. Imagine the noise from these if every house in a terrace had one.
And heat pumps are supposed to have an annual check to ensure the gas is not leaking.
This may well be a stupid question but … if the Government wishes us to ditch gas boilers, why don’t they do more to promote electric ones? Much cheaper than heat pumps, no costly radiator replacements, no outside installation required (it will fit in the space of your old gas boiler). And yet it is intent on herding us down the heat pump route. Why?
Maybe one reason is they’d use even MORE electricity, and we don’t have enough capacity for a heat pump based future, let alone that
I’m at the outset of build a new home and my architect built his 8 years ago he fitted an air source heat pump. He’s glad that he also has a log burner, because on the coldest of days the house doesn’t get warm at all.
I think I will construct a huge I fireplace in the lounge for a roaring fire