Electric heating only?
 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-57149059

With domestic electricity costs running around 5 times that of gas, and many countries close to the limit on domestic electricity consumption, will the future be cold with brownouts and blackouts?

And that's even before the power required to charge all the electric vehicles that will be replacing petrol and diesel ones.

Re: Electric heating only?
 

I think there may be a caveat in that recommendation for boilers that can burn hydrogen, or a hydrogen methane mix. If we do have to go all electric then it will be via heat pumps, which can produce a 25kW heat requirement from 8-12 kW of electricity.

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We'll be back to burning logs, peat and coal soon enough, everything goes in cycles . . . including the conclusive facts and evidence put forward by the experts in such matters.

Back to the stone ages once we run out of the rare materials to make these brilliant new energy devices :p:

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We'd better get our boiler replaced soon then. I can't see heat pumps working as you can't just turn them on if the temperature drops suddenly.



Whatever you say about gas boilers they are efficient. And surely it's better to burn gas to heat water locally than burn gas to make electricity, step up, transfer, step down, transfer, step down and use that to heat water with some loss at each stage?

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According to this air heat pump guide an electric air heat pump costs about the same per delivered KWh as a gas boiler. There are caveats though including high up-front costs but grants are available under the Renewable Heat Incentive payments.

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What do you mean by "be back to":confused:

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I meant the rest of the Country papa, we've always been refined over this way and know which side of our toast is burnt buttered :)

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But your neighbours don't seem to be so refined

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I'm on the clean side to the West ;)

anyway, that dirty lot there are slowly succumbing to the clean environment idea . . . or will be when it's mothballed

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Good supply of logs ;)

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Heat pumps do work. My next door neighbour has one. The only thing stopping me getting one is that our house is exceptionally poorly insulated and rather draughty. They work most effectively at a lower output temperature than a gas boiler which means decent home insulation is a must. At present we have a biomass boiler but in the long run biomass is a less environmentally friendly solution than renewable electricity so before the boiler is life-expired, the insulation work will have to be done in order to allow for a heat pump to replace it.

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It was not too long ago that HMG was going-on about home gas boilers being used to generate electricity.

There were surveys done in several local gardens in out area with probes placed at various depths in the soil. The outcome was a definite NO to heat pumps being a good idea around here. The survey was done by a consortium of heat pump manufacturers and installers.

And one family got told to remove the windmill they erected in their back garden. And only after a few weeks. No-one I talked to ever heard any noise at all. But the complaints were found to come from bird lovers.

The local housing associations have been very good at fitting solar panels, but all the output is sold to the grid. The council thought about them, then after paying a fortune for consultants, the idea was dropped (as has their plan to change all street lights to LED).

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There will be a lot of gas engineers out of a job if this happens unless their skills can be used on the new setup.

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There is as much of a chance of meeting that target as Accrington Stanley have of winning the 2022 FA Cup

( someone say it come on hehehehe )

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Lots of work for them in disconnecting the current boilers even if they choose not to re-train in the new set-up. ;)

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Nobody’s talking about ground source heat pumps any more - air source pumps are as efficient now as ground source ones were a decade ago, and they have the advantage of not destroying your garden or needing a 100 metre deep borehole under your patio.

There’s nothing remotely controversial about the technology - they are to all intents and purposes the same as the air-con units you see mounted on the back of every office and large shop in the country. A big fan and a compressor, designed to collect heat from one environment and shunt it to another.

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How about cost? I doubt there will be millions in the kitty for grants. Are they likely to be similar to just buying a boiler or how I expect is astronomically higher in cost

A quick google says £6 to 8K

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The heat pumps use refrigerant, an air source heat pump costs more than a new gas or oil-fired central heating system. The typical air source heat pump cost ranges from £4,000-8,000, depending on the pump brand and its heat output.

Re: Electric heating only?
 

Sometimes you got to be grateful for living in a council house

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That’s entirely down to economies of scale though. If every house in the country had one they’d be no more expensive than a gas boiler.

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How long will they last?
What's the service cost every year?
Does the electricity useage increase by a large amount?
Do they work better in Summer or Winter - does extreme air temperature affect performance?

My 20+ year old gas boiler is still going, it'll probably outlast me ;) :D

Re: Electric heating only?
 

That assumes that the majority of the cost is the heat pump system itself.
The costs involved with installing won't change. Having to rip out existing central heating systems won't come cheap.

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not everyone can put their hands on 8K easily. Plus I have never met anyone pay 2.5K a year on gas. Unless you do in your mansion or castle hehehehe

---------- Post added at 21:43 ---------- Previous post was at 21:42 ----------

plus it is going to make a mess of the property. So 8K for heat pump assuming that is all in they what another 2K for redecorating. That is a hefty bill

Re: Electric heating only?
 

Yes, they have to work harder the colder the outdoor air is - there’s less energy in the colder air so the pump has to use more energy and drive more air through itself in order to achieve the target temperature indoors. If he house is poorly insulated and prone to losing heat easily then the problem is all the more acute. The UK’s particular problem is that we have been spoiled by cheap energy (abundant coal, then natural gas) so we have had no particular incentive to spend on energy efficient homes. So before you install a heat pump you have to make sure the house is well insulated.

Service and spares are hard to quantify in any meaningful way because those costs come down with economies of scale just as the installation cost does. But the machinery is not fundamentally difficult. How often does your fridge/freezer break down? It’s the same principle on a smaller scale.

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These are not small sums but presumably money can be borrowed over a long period of time to finance them. And the cost of dealing with extreme weather due to global warming doesn't come cheap either, even if the UK is less affected at the moment than some other countries.

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so the large sum becomes an even larger sum due to interest?

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Depends how it's handled. Interest rates are very low at the moment so the government may decide to underwrite such heating investment and make loans interest free.

The alternative is higher taxes to pay for the impacts of global warming so it's more of a necessity than a luxury.

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You Sir must live in a different world to me posting like a 10K debt is easily managed

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Another bunch of egg heads with no sense of reality.

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Peat is one of the worst things we can burn, peat bogs contain so much carbon that otherwise would never get released into the atmosphere, so much so in the future I wouldn't be shocked to see their carbon capturing abilities used in the fight against climate change

---------- Post added at 03:35 ---------- Previous post was at 03:33 ----------

I'd say mine is less than £200 per year and that includes the poxy standing charge

Re: Electric heating only?
 

Hmm yes, this glorious fight against climate change that keeps rearing it's head when people want me to spend more money.

I'm expected to spend 'up to' £8k on a new heating system that may, or may not, be as good as the one I currently have.
My washing machine is 'eco friendly' and only has a cold fill water inlet, which means it has to heat up the water instead of using the hot water already available in a tank upstairs . . . and takes over 2 hours to do a decent wash/rinse cycle.
A house full of 'low energy' light bulbs that probably use more energy to make than I save by using them.

In the meantime, 5 miles away is a steelworks pumping out more crap in an hour than I could make in 6 months, served by a road network full of vehicles adding to the problem, and a large new 'new village' build underway on a designated flood plain.

. . and that's just local, in a Country that actually has (and tries to hit) emission targets instead of burning their forests down.

Well that's my mid week moan out of the way, I guess I should now look around on which destination I should fly to for a nice 2 week holiday in the sun :p:

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was discussing this with my father and he was telling me it is all well and good in a new property but older houses that obviously are not designed for it the costs will be be far greater and the inconvenience and disruption as your home gets ripped apart adds to that

The largest polluters in the world are not doing much so end of the day we are just getting our shoes wet

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Some good points in your rant about joined-up thinking.

On forests, we burnt ours down a long time ago but that doesn't make us much better. We need to start replanting them, which I think is what we're doing on a small scale.

Re: Electric heating only?
 

Boilers also heat hot water. We have a combi so no water storage. Gas is cheaper per kWh than lekky.



And really don't want anything noisier than radiator system. I hate fan noise and switch off A/C when abroad at night, use it to cool the room when lights are on. Then close curtains, open windows, A/C off, lights off overnight.



Also people dry things on radiators or near radiators. And lean against them for comfort. Just something nice about a nice hot radiator.

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The heat pump fan is outdoors. It doesn’t even have to be right outside - it can go at the bottom of the garden. Once the heat is collected it is passed through a heat exchanger to either underfloor pipes or radiators in order to heat the room. It isn’t a fan heater system. Provided you install a radiator rather than an underfloor system your heat pump will also have a flow temperature in excess of 55c and will also provide hot water.

It also outputs around 2-3 kW of heat for every 1 kW of electricity it uses, while a modern gas boiler puts around 0.9 kW of heat into your home for every 1 kW of energy in the gas supply. Yes, electricity is more expensive than gas, but there’s no direct comparison between a gas boiler and a heat pump, such as you might expect to make between a gas boiler and an electrically heated radiator.

It sounds very much to me as if you’re objecting to something you actually don’t know anything about. These things really do work - I’m looking at one out of my window right now, and it’s been very happily heating my next door neighbour’s house all through the last season.

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You'll still need to up radiator sizes and improve insulation but at least the "boiler" costs may be reasonable.

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When the Govt. and Eco groups give me a 75% reduction on price and fitting I'll consider it.

Until then, the aging gas boiler will stay :D

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I'm sure uptake will be like other things - early adopters who pay through the nose. Most people who pay once prices have come down once electric heating becomes mainstream. Late-converters who will hold out until the tax on gas makes it unviable to continue with their present set-up.

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i look forward to the blackouts when the infrastructure can't cope with demand.

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Chuck a solar panel and wind turbine on the boat and you'll be covered whatever the weather. ;)

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Already have 2 panels 200w, only really effective June -august low sun = low volts/amps.

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Sail nearer to the Equator ;)

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We use solar thermal panels alongside our biomass boiler. In summer, one sunny day provides us with 2-3 days of hot water. Even in mid-winter a sunny day lifts the cylinder temperature to around 30c so we burn less wood heating it the rest of the way.

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Get the wind turbine and sail close to the wind. ;)

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I remember when we changed over from "town" (coal) gas to natural gas. If you didn't get your boiler, gas fire and cooker adapted (free) you had your gas cut off until you did.

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I should think so too as there was an explosion risk.