We are starting to learn a lot about Heat Pumps and serious questions need to be asked at this stage.
Comments:
Heat pumps are a great idea but the life span is about 14 months then continually break down, costs about £10.000 and a fortune in repair costs, fitted 400 of them and they all got removed
I worked in the HVAC field for forty years and heat pumps are a maintenance and repair nightmare…This guy is correct…If you do get one get your check book out when it fails..
Had a 2 year battle with my neighbour due to sleepless nights caused by an air source pump. I live in Wales in a national park area and the pump was fitted without planning permission. The neighbour appealed and lost and it had to be removed. The damned thing was pretty much fitted against my boundary fence underneath my bedroom window. Cowboy firms will fit them anywhere and don’t give a damn about how they affect anybody else. When you live in an area where you can hear a pin drop at night, these things will be heard. They hum and whine and will drive you nuts. Be warned.
I never knew that fans could be noisy until the neighbours new unit made some type of low-frequency vibration at 5 am in winter waking me up.
A friend of mine fell for this. It was noisy and was not efficient as the original system. The rads where very large but never got warm enough. Their house was to large and inefficient for this type of system. They got a full refund, a new boiler and new rads. They were luckily.
A few years ago (2008) I went on a course with a very well known heat pump manufacturer The course lecturer ( salesman ) stated that their unit would work at temperatures as low as minus 10c When asked what happens when the temperature drops lower than that the salesman was quick to produce a graph charting past winter temperatures and drew everyone’s attention to the fact that the last time we had temperatures lower than that was in the early 1980s His conclusion was that due to climate change aka global warming cold winters were a thing of the past and we don’t need to worry about it Just fit a heat pump and everything will be fine and dandy We all know what happened in the subsequent winters of 2009, 2010 I fitted a few of these things back then and had nothing but trouble , installation problems, poor performance, unhappy customers, very unhappy customers, angry, irate bloody furious customers Never again I wouldn’t touch these thing with a barge pole It’s just a box ticking exercise, just like all this hydrogen gas blend nonsense ( which produces huge amounts of C02 to make the bloody hydrogen in the first place)
Thanks a bunch Roger. Young plumber was pushing the idea of HP and your video of old school truth and common sense has just saved me an enormous amount of grief. Thank you.
Completely agree we have hundreds installed in our properties and they have been rubbish
My gas costs 3.17p /kwh and electric costs 18.28p / kwh so even with a cop of 3 the running costs are going to double if I switch from gas to heat pump. Also we have a state of the art environmentally designed Club house in our village and we spend more on repairs and running costs for the air source heat pump than if it was on gas. In fact we are thinking of replacing with a gas boiler before it’s too late.
My mate installed one on a new build. From day one he hated it, noisy , poor heat transfer and it grows ice like crazy in the winter, plus it runs continuously. The installers placed it right on his brand new patio , so having a beer with this constant droning is driving him mental! It’s just another government balls up! I want to send him this video put I fear this will cause him to rip the damn thing out!!!
Moved once cause of a neighbor’s heat pump sounded like a three cyl diesel so i could not sleep , now where i live another neighbor installed a heatpump and it is worse. Man…
Instead of upgrading the thermal efficiency of your home to make it suitable for a wimpy heat pump, upgrade the thermal efficiency of your home to make your existing gas boiler have to burn far less fuel to keep it warm.
My next door neighbour is an HMO and they’ve got one of these bloody things half way down the garden. The fan is noisy and it blows into my garden. I’ve installed a fence and bushes to provide a degree of noise insulation but you can still hear. It’s on, it’s off, it’s on, it’s off and does make quiet enjoyment of the back garden a little tough. With luck it’ll be covered in ivy before long 🙂 If everyone had one of these it’d be a bloody nightmare!
I live in Denmark and the very modern heat pumps are huge and stupidly noisy. If everyone has to upgrade to a heat pump the noise on a winters morning is going to be crazy!
Any mechanical engineer that has taken thermodynamics or anyone whose lived in Florida will tell you you can’t run a heat pump below 0c or 32F due to ice build up on the coils unless you live in very arid climates. The real dirty secret is as the outside temp below goes down there is less heat to extract and your efficiency plumments. Rodger touched upon it but did go into depth why. Anyone who tells you heat pumps are th future has no engineering or physics background. I have never seen anyone bet around the physics issue you just can’t over come them
The refrigerants are an interesting problem. Refrigerants such as R290 with low GWP are only just starting to become available in domestic heat pumps. R290 has been used in many small systems such as refrigerators for some time but safety issues on larger systems have been a problem – the leaking R290 from your fridge might blow your house up but a leaking heat pump might blow the street up 8-)=. Older refrigerants such as 410A, common in heat pumps and splits up to now, have a very large GWP and their release, say, from a faulty system or by improper decommissioning has the potential to undo any benefit the system gave from lower CO2 emissions.
Living in Canada, on the Prairie, where we get serious Winters….we know that you can insulate your solid wall house by applying styrofoam or insulation panels on the exterior, then cladding over top….that said, electric heat which was originally sold as more efficient and cheaper is now three times higher than gas. Also, I spent a night at a friend’s farmhouse with geo-thermal heating….coldest night I ever spent inside.
Agree with this video.I installed an air source heat pump in my 1880 house with solid wall construction.Triple glazing/insulating emulsion put on external walls-draft exclusion/loft insulation improved etc etc & the heat pump can not keep me warm in the winter when I need it most.A bad investment
I had a heat pump installed in my tightly insulated New England home, and I quickly came down with quite a bit of buyers remorse. It heated the house just marginally in the winters over here. It was noisy as well next during this season. Lucky, I had not dismantled my large wood pellet stove which was necessary to bring the heat to a comfortable level. Reversing the pump to address the hot summers was very good, but you get serious mold issues that require pulling the room units apart yourself or hiring a specialist to bring a special cleaning unit at great cost to rid your home of the mold. (They forget to tell you this when they sell you the system.) In short, it was a money pit that is no longer in my life. Oh, and my unit was one of the best in the market over here in the States. I should have been more cautious when government makes technical recommendations, as the pandemic has shown us.
Heatpumps were pushed on to most kiwis ( NZ is just like Scotland but hot in summer ) and they just chew power and make noise. your home is always cold in winter and hot in summer waste of money
I installed heat pumps in the highlands of Scotland. They worked well but man o man did they chew electricity. If it wasn’t for my solar system I would have been bankrupted. 🤷🏻♂️
Roger, you are so dam right about all of it. When I was a service engineer I remember trying explain to a very unhappy customer when it was -3 C outside that the 4 heat pumps serving his premises were running flat out although indoors it was only 17.5C. As usual the customer thought it was all my fault. Heat Pumps are definitely Rubbish !!! After that incident the company I worked for refused to install any more heat pumps systems because of the hassle.