Another big fail.

[Workingman]

No, not HS2, the garden bridge, the estuary airport nor the road bridge to Northern Ireland. It is heat pumps.

We need a minimum of 600,000 installations by 2028 for them to have any effect, so says the government, that's 120,000 every year from now on. In 2020 the UK installed 37,000 and they came with a £5,000 bribe. Current uptake is 3.7 per 10,000 households.

People are just not convinced by them, the disruption, the new radiators and pipework, the redecoration nor the pay-back costs and time it takes. Most of us live in larger towns and cities and the overwhelming majority of their housing is not suitable for heat pumps. The take-up there is only 1.7 per 10,000.

A far better scheme would have been to install solar panels connected to a well lagged hot water tank with any extra electricity routed to a storage battery. Millions of households could have taken part, and in a short time.

[Suff]

Heat pumps become mandatory for new builds from 2025.

There are circa 200,000 new builds a year in the UK.

Seems to match around 2028.

[cruiser2]

A property company want to build over 300 new homes on a greenfield site. I don'tknowm if they will have heat pumps.
But there is a lot of opposition to the schemm as it is near a junction of the M60 which is already very busy, there are not enough schools
and doctors surgeries.
Be interesting to see if anyone has mentionerd heat pumps.

[cromwell]

A big problem with the heat pumps is the lack of skilled people to install them.

It's all very well politicians making grandiose promises about this, that and the other - that's the easy bit.
Actually getting it done is the hard part.

Cruiser, near us there are plans to build 1,500 - 2,000 houses in south Featherstone. Once those houses are built, where are they going to go for schools, doctors etc?

I know it's a touchy subject, but we let people into the country to help with "economic growth" without any thought to the needed increase in infrastructure and public services.

[Workingman]

Heat pumps become mandatory for new builds from 2025..

Heat pumps are NOT mandated. What is mandated is something loosely called 'low-carbon homes' and they can come in many forms, from heat pumps to solar to electric combi boilers to some passivhaus applications.

However, there are about 28 million homes in the UK, many of them poorly insulated. Sorting them out would go a long way to reducing heating carbon emissions. Heat pumps for all: no chance.

We need to stop this "throwing all our eggs in the one basket" method of problem solving we seem to be stuck in.

[Suff]

Heat pumps may not be mandated but as a 1:1 replacement for a gas boiler they are the closest in terms of running costs and flexibility. Therefore, to me, they are mandated as the alternatives are going to be prohibitive.

Having watched one of those build your home in the country programs there was a home where they could not get gas in and electricity was going to be prohibitive. They chose a heat pump in the end having never considered one before. They were amazed at how good it was.

This is the problem. Tons and tons of bad press written by people who just want to give the government a hard time. Instead of engaging and promoting the things where they are a good option.

200k homes a year. 2m homes over a decade. All well insulated and heated by low power draw heat pumps. This will have an impact. Existing homes which are not insulated? The fastest way to get them insulated is if they will cost more to heat uninsulated than the cost of insulating. Everyone can work out that calculation.

[Workingman]

...they are mandated as the alternatives are going to be prohibitive.good option..

Did they compare it with all other alternatives such as solar / wind? One new build, as per your example, is not the country. Millions of us find heat pumps prohibitive because of where we live. Terraced housing, flats, Get real.

So why not give a £5,000 bribe to all those millions of uninsulated homes from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries? A couple of hundred quid each would do more than all the heat pump bribes.

Oh, I get it. That's not "big ticket" or "sexy" enough for politicians and 'spurts. It would help poorer people, not the one-offs who can afford a new build in the country or those who have the space for a heat pump in their gardens, so it will not be done.

[Suff]

Actually you started out saying it was a big fail because we would not have the requisite 600k heat pumps. I showed that just on new builds alone it will not be a fail.

Also with wind and solar the best thing you can do is use a heat pump because you get a 3x to 5x leverage of your energy over radiant heat.

If you are building new and do not need to refit existing systems then heat pumps are an a scale with gas. Except you will never be able to invest in producing your own gas.

200k per year, 2m per decade, it is a solid move on which you can bring heat pumps to mass market and reduce prices.

The apartment I was in back in December had an air source heat pump. The outside equipment would easily fit on a high rise wall and the bonus is it gives you cooling in the summer. No radiators required.

There is this entire myth based FUD building up around heat pumps but the reality is that the vendors of gas want you to believe that you can insulate your way out of this climate crisis. Because that way they get to keep selling you gas and they survive and you keep killing the liveable biosphere of the planet.

With heat pumps it is like EV. Running them on gas powered grid electric is more efficient and uses less power. But running gas central heating means that even when the entire grid is clean we would need to spend another 30 years moving to heat pumps before we get 1/3 of our emissions gone.

This is child maths, even I can see it. Insulation is an enabler, smart and clean heating is the solution.

All this stuff about radiator replacement, etc, it is a smoke screen. Radiators don't last forever and pretty soon the only radiators on sale will be sized for heat pumps. Because they are fine for gas, you just turn them down.

The whole argument about "doing something" always reverts to Kubler Ross and the fossil fuel vendors Love Kubler Ross.

80% of smaller UK homes and apartments could benefit massively from air air heat pumps but there are vested interests in Proving to you that they are useless.

Then there is inertia. My parents had cavity wall insulation put in their home in the 1970's. So why do we have homes which are so uninsulated? We have known for more than. 50 years. If people have known for so long and still won't do anything then a viable option is to refuse them the easy option. Ban all new gas boilers and make loans to replace with heat pumps zero interest and government backed!

The UK wss the #6 emitter of CO2 in the world when i was first interested in climate change. It is now #16. Action Works.

Stopping action works to destroy our liveable biosphere.

[Workingman]

Actually it was the government's own figures that showed the target of 600,000 heat pumps to new and existing homes by 2028 would be missed, and your claim that new builds will meet the target is fiction because it presupposes that all of them will have heat pumps: they will not.

Now you are claiming that heat pumps can be fitted to all high-rise flats. Well, yes, if each block has its own deep well district heating GSHP installation. Not all can, and it would be ultra expensive to do even just a few. Retro fitting ASHP to each individual flat with multiple rooms is nonsense.

You have a nice sales pitch but it is sadly flawed. We are never going to go 1/3 of homes running heat pumps, never mind in 30 years. Many existing homes are simply not suitable. That's a fact and is a world away from the claim, never made, that heat pumps are "useless".

[Suff]

Air source heat pumps bolt to the wall, require no pools of anything and they work, they are efficient and for very small apartments, perfect.

When heat pumps become as easy to get as a gas boiler, perceptions and intentions will change.