Heat Pumps ~ Get Your Facts Straight!

New chalk board pens please!

Great explanation.

I think the biggest problem will be the rising cost of electricity used to run the heat pumps, say in 10 years do you think the electricity cost is going to go up or down, with all the extra load of EV's and such i think the price will rise more unless some miracle happens with power generation or battery storage.

Be nice if you had a heat pump to work alongside a normal gas boiler so you can have the best of both worlds. I would have thought it was possible although i think the heat pumps run at a much lower temp.

Will be interesting to see how it all works out over the next 10 or so years.

I always wonder how a heat pump manages in comparison to a gas fired boiler heating system and what happens when the air outside is considerably colder than you need indoors or even below freezing temperatures. Surely an air heat pump cannot warm a house from freezing outside air.

Hi Roger! Please help. We are renovating a big neglected damp house in the far north Highlands of Scotland which is 100+ year old solid wall house. It has 4 bedrooms upstairs and an old shop downstairs. We have no decent insulation at present - just the air gap behind the drywall. We have no gas provision and no heating system except plug in electric heaters. I am contemplating accepting the free insulation and heat pump, but i've been told that it doesn't work for solid wall houses; only very well insulated houses. Do you think that if we accepted the internal insulation to 2/3 of the home there is a chance that the heat pump would be worthwhile accepting? On the one hand I think they might be a con; on the other hand we're desperate for an affordable way to get our house warm. (My electricity bill for the last 2 years is over £5000) . Thank you 🙏

Some people in the village who had Air source heat pumps installed are complaining about the noise of the fans👍👍

Some people are so evangelical about sustainability that they refuse to listen to the facts.

How is this going to work in Scotland ? Cold, wet and windswept most of the year and short summers. The planet might be warming up but Scotland definitely isn’t ❄️🌧💨☔️ 😠

Electricity is over 4x the cost of gas per kWh, so the electric heat pump is going to have to be massively more effective than gas CH for it not to cost a lot more than conventional gas heating.

He is right about people calling them Geothermal instead of Ground Source. I don't know about the UK but I do know in the USA the Ground Source heat pumps are even marketed as "Geothermal" and it really bugs me. The Biden administration is even getting ready to force taxpayers to pay subsidies to manufacturers of heat pumps. This is something the market should decide. It makes more and more people really vulnerable to extended power outages. In Northern Minnesota and Wisconsin it is not uncommon for a power outage of over a week. With gas, wood or heating oil it is no problem. Making people believe they can now "trade in" or get rid of their gas or wood furnaces will cause people to freeze to death.

you are starting to sound like you have been told to promote heat pumps.

My best friend is high up in the HVAC industry and 15 years go they put ground source head pumps into 5 terrace new build houses.
All was fine in the summer, but in winter the middle house's "numbers" were way off, they surveyed the ground and found the garden in the middle house had turned to perma-frost!
The ground never thawed during the winter and the pump could not extract any heat!
Trial was cancelled!

Interesting thoughts on a ground source heat pump freezing the ground around and thus losing effectiveness. It's gone now, but the old Southamton Ice Rink was built cheaply with the ice pad directly on the ground. This created "permafrost", which over the seasons, jacked the centre if the ice upwards, like a crown bowling green. Eventually the entire thing had to be dug up and rebuilt.

I have to pick you up one one of the inaccuracies in this video. Heat Pump aircond (HPAC) is far more efficient for space heating, is simpler and cheaper to install and is far more flexible to use than air to water HP. Heat is supplied almost instantaneously where and when you want it. It's scandalous and very wasteful that the Gov uses the pathetic excuse that HPACs can be used for cooling to exclude them from grants. Our HPACs run on solar on the few summer days when we might need cooling so there is no effect on the environment. The only drawback of our HPAcs is that, for now, we have to rely on useless gas heating for shower water.

Of course the ground stays at a constant temperature all year round...if you go deep enough. The surprising thing is that depending on geology of your ground that could be as little as 12 ft below surface.

Interestingly wet, clay or sandy soils are probably best for heat conductivity.

So for a lot of places, preferably close to a river (so lots of river silt soil) going down 40-50m is probably sufficient

Sounds like one big scam. My gaff is so well insulated I have to run a dehumidifier all night when the temperature gets a bit parky just to stop us drowning. So where's the savings and how many penguins have I saved? This hasn't been really thought out has it? If I decided to chuck out my reliable and cost effective gas boiler and have one of these great noisy lumps installed where would it go? The only place is the side alley from the drive to the back garden. That'll mean no access down the side of the house as the poxy thing will completely fill the footpath! Then there's the neighbours to consider regarding the noise.
As I said, hasn't been really thought out has it?

They make your house look a lot nicer from the outside, nobody ever said.

Air heat pumps need to have an ambient temperature at least 5-8 degrees higher than we have in the UK to be any good, plus they are noisy and expensive to run! Ground source need to be in a trench over a meter deep so they can be below the frost level. The piping needs to be longer than recommended due to the lack of heat in the ground in the UK! Both are very expensive and not worth having stick to the Gas boiler & two fingers to the governments rules! Ask the question How many MP's have installed heat pumps to their homes? Remember we the tax payers will be hit with the bills! Either from grants or on their expenses!

Two thirds of houses in Norway use heat pumps and that's in temperatures of -25 degC. Good clear video, thanks Roger.

Large noisy fan and coil system which is not fit for purpose further no mention of dead zones in garden plenty of BS on Climate propaganda (Rip off price even with free grant money - looks an eyesore and noise pollution hazard).

Frozen ground kills earthworms and other beneficial organisms. Very "save the planet". Great video Roger, very simple and straightforward to understand.

Proper insulation done like in other countries ! Only external wall insulation , floors ( water floor heating is most efficient), changing windows for some good quality made (maybe from import Gealan -Veka? ), normal good quality doors.

Don’t know the background to this. I can’t imagine frozen ground being a problem in the same way when I put the heating on, outside doesn’t boil.

Gas based heating is cleaner & cheaper.

Geothermal means geo-earth thermal-heat so you can call a ground sourced heat pump a geothermal system and be correct.

I'm pleasantly surprised with this video. I took a lot of issues with your previous anti heat pump videos.

This one however seems to be more on the right track at least. One thing that I've noticed however is that heat pumps still work if you don't have much insulation and what seems to matter most is the size of your pipes BUT insulation means you don't need massive pipes unless they're microbore pipes like my own perhaps.

This being said, additional insulation (and ventilation) means you reduce your overall heat demand which means you don't need to consume as much energy in the first place. That in itself reduces your emissions.

For me, I'll be upgrading all my piping first and super insulating. Super insulating perhaps isn't a necessity but I figure that I should reduce my overall heat demand first.

It also means I can stage my heat pump installation somewhat too

timely, I had door to door sales kids asking to setup a free consultation for a heat pump here in Canada. Something about a gov rebate. My parents had one in the late 80s, pretty large cylindrical fan unit in the backyard annoying our summer parties. Winter temps get down to -10 celsius and summer up to 30. I have no evidence but i would think insulation, better windows and doors are better investments.

The whole business is a cluster f*****k of misinformation. Most people even in the business don't have fricking clue, 99% of the installers can't even set up the systems correctly. Having just had an ECO4 granted system installed, now having to take a court action against with the so called qualified, certificated and worst still award winning 💩state company.. HTF is ridiculous ....

So you're telling me that, when it's, say 5 degrees centigrade outside, an air to air unit will extract enough heat from the air to warm the inside to say 20 degrees centigrade. I have to say, I'm a bit dubious

The ground temperature can be pretty constant depending on the depth and location. Ground near the sea has different temperatures than ground way inland as the temperature of the sea greatly affects the adjacent land. As heat is extracted the ground around the heat pump's borehole pipes will get cooler. The sun wil re-heat the ground but mainly by the convection of the surrounding warmer ground. If you extract too much heat the ground can become tundra.

This tundra will be reheated by the surrounding ground during summer. Some buildings in the USA use this tundra to cool the building in summer, reheating the ground.

Some systems use two boreholes, say one at the front and one at the rear of the house. By alternating you can allow the ground to reheat one borehole while extracting heat from the other.

Far more efficient than air sourced.

In very simple turns if you ever feel pipes on the back of your fridge or freezer they are warm due to the heat exchanger principle.However I cant get my head around heating a whole house with heat extracted that way without using alot of sparks to drive a big exchanger and I certainly cant see how it can heat water up more than a few degrees.

Great video. You’re pronouncing nuclear correctly. It’s not NEW-CLEAR and it’s not NEW-KLEEH-UH. It’s just NEW-KLEE-YER.

If nothing else your entertaining. So drill the bore hole which is couple of hundred feet deep, start drawing heat from the surrounding ground and this ground at one hundred feet and more down starts to freeze. What a load of old tosh. The heat from the bore hole comes from the earth's core. Any other misleading facts in your toolbox.

Well explained Roger

The most important FACT, Insulate!! Whatever your heating system.

Well, you can argue that every source of energy on hearth is solar based. Still, we don't call oil solar energy.

Thanks. I was amongst the people calling a ground based system geothermal so I learned something today.

im using LPG from the petrol station i use about 23-25L of lpg AT 84p L i dont use any eletric at all everything run from solar and when i move my motorhome plus i use a dirty diesel heater the chinesse type 5KW for £100 that uses about 10L a week ish i dont live in a house so how would a heat pump work for me

Honestly Roger, that was not one of your best.

Another excellent video I think Roger needs to be on the carbon committee to explain to the government where they are losing the track over climate change

GSHP is probably best combined with solar thermal so you use the borehole for interseasonal heat storage.

I have it on good authority for the last 5 years someone has installed / run a ground source heat pump with the source being a solar hot water panel,. Apparently runs like a dream.

When I had my combi boiler installed three years ago the fitter told me heat pumps are virtually useless in homes like mine built in 60s. A neighbour has one but has stripped all walls of plaster and relined with insulation board, not sure I could be arsed with that, I doubt I'd live long enough to recoup the cost.

Tut tut. You need to get your facts straight. At 2.30 the process is THERMAL conductance or THERMAL conductivity. You can't just refer to it as conductivity

Mini splits for me!

How much ...?

Thanks Roger another great video.
So I worked out the following: Based of fuels and 8 euro cost of fuel as base line to output kwh.
6mm Pellets with approx 5 kwh per 1kg 15 kg bag 8.00 euro x 15kg = 75 kwh output
Coal with approx 8 kwh per 1 kg stove used (40kg bag 24 euro) 8.00 euro x 13kg = 104 kwh output
Kerosene approx 10kwh per 1 L. 1L = 1.35 euro. 8 euro 6 L fuel = 60Kwh output. Can 3x this by mixing in burnt oil (free) after filter mix etc 180Kwh (Chinese heater)
Mitsubishi heat pump Air to water 3.2 COP to 4.8 COP (2016) 1 kwh at 0.31c. 8 euro = 25 kw COP3 = 75kwh output.

As we can work out the calorific value for fuels... or at least approx due to efficiencies of stove, pellet burner and fuel heater... How do I confirm the COP output of the Heat Pump?
Had a look on line to see if could buy a plug in play device. Electric used, measure of water heat out and in including flow speed? I would think thats whats needed. If I had a COP 1, how would I know as without the COP value confirmed its really the most expensive here to run maybe... Its the not knowing. Another video coming....

Thinking of a water source heat pump. Can you use a ground source system fof that?

I'm an old-school kind of Brit and I'm skint. My 2-bedroom terraced house [1913, West Yorkshire] has no heating whatsoever. I can't afford to spend a penny on heating. Apart from an electric kettle for a daily cup of tea, I have no hot water, either. No fridge. No washing machine. No vacuum cleaner. No TV.

My total electricity consumption for 2022 was 108kWh. [One-hundred and eight.]

I wear light clothes in summer and lots of clothes and a woolly hat in winter. I've just knitted myself a new one - total cost £0.38. I think people have been seduced by TV into thinking that they have a right to live like Aussies in shirt-sleeves all year round, but Britain's never going to be Sydney, so we might as well get used to it. Dress for the season, people. It's cheaper than buying loads of techno-trash and is probably really, really good for your carbon emissions (or whatever; personally, I couldn't give a toss about them).

Of course, rich people have always been able to buy their way out of reality - wealthy Brits used to spend our nasty summers and horrible winters abroad - but nowadays the vogue is to bring 'abroad' home. At vast expense.

I'm largely living the life of a 14th century peasant, cooking my meals in the back garden on a tiny grill powered by firewood collected locally. Bad for the planet, you say? Cobblers to the planet, I reply.

Britain's homes don't need air-conditioning. Nor do its cars. Some of its people just need a damn good slapping. We're being sold a luxurious lifestyle that's completely alien to us.

Well, some of us aren't buying it.

I used to live in East Africa [Kenya - my late dad was with the Flying Doctor Service in the '70s and early '80s]. Temperatures at noon on the equator could exceed 130°F, but nobody complained. Nobody had air-con either at home or in their cars. They just got on with life.

Rather than mucking about with expensive, wasteful heating and cooling tech, I think the world in general would be a lot better off if people just... got on with life.

What about,how air source efficiency is affected in cold temp?

Great video. Explaining and de-bunking a topic which has generated so much hot air and confusing nonsense recently. Thanks!