Air Source Heat Pump Owner's Experience 5 Years On

Brilliant craic......i am sending this vid to all my prospective customers

I've just watched this video after watching the second follow up video. It's a sad story and I feel sorry for anyone one in this position. But why am I paying my taxes for these insane grants for people that can clearly afford such systems that currently don't work? The green agenda born from some form of socialist insanity to make us all poorer must end.

All this talk about Finland! Let's remember that Finland has very cheap hydro/ nuclear electricity, and as we are reminded in this video, heat pumps are actually just clever electric heating!
UK electricity is expensive, so we are starting from a very low base....

Respect to the owner for sharing but classic case in my view of poor planning and a poor initial installation by the companies that were not skilled enough.

Absolutely not the owners fault. Same as any new tech where installers make a mess of peoples houses.

The icing up issue is complete madness! Can totally understand why this chap gave up!

What your talking about is a heat pump as back ground heating.
Which we saw with gas central heating .
Installers to fit cheaper heating reduced the critia so radiators of lower out put where used with smaller boiler size there by reducing the overall costs of the system.

People didnt complain until snap minus winter temperatures where the boiler was unable to heat the system correctly.

A guy who was a senior shop fitting employee for Santander was in discussion with me over a property in land in Spain where he was trying to store heat in the summer with in cellerage and a hot water storage system to allow heating in the winter.

Different climate but the storage would be large and require huge insulation over many months.

What energy crisis Algoa has been saying this for 20 years now he’s a multi billionaire and nothing has changed

thank you!

When they stop cutting trees down like corn and when India, China, etc, etc even think about global whatever I might think about saving the planet.
Milankovitch cycles. Just research this for a few minutes, and you will realise how you are being taken for a ride.

Hi Roger.. I really enjoyed your conversation with John. I actually watched it in reverse to the followup one when The Heat Geek (Adam) was on site. You guys really nailed it and I am now sooooooo happy I never went with a heat pump underfloor heating system. I am living in rural South Australia in an offgrid situation (power/water etc) pretty much like a modern Earthship. When I designed the house I was really concious about power consumption especially heating in the colder months. I have a 20Kw LIPO with 14Kw solar panels system and it is balanced and works really well. But relating to the heat pump, I wanted the most energy efficient heating device for the underfloor heating system (circulated water/hydronic) possible. That includes the system cost. I simply went with hot water storage just like a normal domestic HWS. I heat the foor all day with solar excess power and consume the tank during the night. I get 24 hours of slab heat from one session of energy transfer. So it is good until the next day when the tank is hot again. In really cold situations I boost the HWS with a water jacket on the wood stove. I guess my real comment is that you work you ideas so well. I am a subscriber now but originally came to your channel for info about rendering and concrete work. Keep up the good work mate. Cheers from down under where it is Summer. Keep warm. Regards, Gary

My ground source heat pump is heated by geothermal heat. It goes down 200m. My house is toasty warm all the time. I can control the temperature individually for each room. The hot water is an air source heat pump. I have no fan. Nothing to ice up.
The real scandal is that British House builders are still putting gas Boilers in poorly insulated new built homes. If you had decent insulation and decent windows you would not have all these issues. New builds should have a central ground source heat pump for a group of houses. The technology exists today. British House builders focus on cheap cheap cheap. We accept it too. It needs more new build regulation to stop the builders installing cheap and nasty solutions. The CoP of my heat pump is 6. Beat that.

My tuppence worth, get insulation first .
That alone will reduce heating costs and then take it from there.

I work in commercial/industrial HVAC. Started this career on the install side, and it is obvious that the original installation was quite flawed. HVAC 101: the system you install must NEVER exceed 80% of the rated power circuit it is on. Proper placement of the sensing bulb is first semester, 2nd week stuff.
Research your installer exhaustively: talk to customers who have had your exact equipment for a couple years. Too many Git ‘er dun types out there. Don’t take the cheapest bid without spending a lot of time making sure they’ll do it right!

In nearly every problem installation that I've come across, the faults have been down to the installation. On retrofit installation, Triple Panel Radiators are almost always required in the non-Bedroom spaces in place of Doubles. Underfloor Heating should be installed at 100mm spacing where possible. The Pipe sizing of the system should be able to deliver the litres per minute at the given flow temperature. If all followed correctly they will perform as per the MCS Tested SCOPs. If rules of Thumb and guessing are used too often, as is the case when Gas and Oil Boilers are installed, then problems are invited. I installed a Heat Pump from the same brand as Galaxy Phones in 2012 which is still working. The UFH Pipework was laid at 100mm spacing in the screed since then I've installed about 30x Units, only two with a Buffer Vessel. They do perform as well as, and on the right tariff work out cheaper than a Gas.or Oil Boiler. Yes the initial outlay is higher, they are not for everyone if one dislikes what they don't understand or dislikes change. But when installed wrong they are like anything else. Octopus Energy are the UK Heat Pump offering that stands out to me. Installing Korean made Heat Pumps in the UK was my only gripe, would much rather installed a UK Brand. Sadly only recently have they been able to compete

A realistic efficiency for a heat pump is about 250% (despite what they claim) but electricity is 400% more expensive than gas. Heating bills MUST therefore go up.

Hi Roger. Happy to help with a good heat pump installation. Would be pleased for you to visit. Panasonic Aquarea 5kW, installed 2022. Based in Suffolk UK. House set to 20C, COP between 4 & 6.

If the buffer is well insulated so as to minimize thermal losses the use of a secondary pump to distribute the "hot" water to the heat emitters will add a power consumption element into the equation. However if looked at realistically the consumption of a secondary pump is a few tens of watts - similar to a light bulb. More confusion is added into the situation by obsession with COP numbers, some calculate this by taking the output energy and dividing by the input energy which to me is exactly how it should be. However some take the output energy ADD the input energy and then divide by the input. Sorry but to me that's crazy. If my ashp uses 10kWh to produce 25kWh I consider it to be 2.5 COP. Using the second method ie 25 + 10 =35 then divide by 10 and magically it's quoted as a COP of 3.5. I guess somewhere a marketing executive got a bonus for thinking that one up.

I'll stick to my Peat fired stanley errigal range 350euros a year to run heating and hot water and cooking boils the kettle too,oil boiler outside as back up.

Daikin Altherma is the hybrid solution, it has gas boiler integrated in the heat pump so it runs on gas when it's more efficient than electricity

He has much, much more patience and tolerance than I could have.

only a fool gets heat pumps always looking to save money heat pumps for the poor fool's

Climate change net zero is all bollocks

Basically we're guinea pigs. Also in UK we generate electricity with coal and gas and nuclear, that's a bit ironic isn't it

My understanding is that Sweden has used heat pumps in a big way for 20 years. A video talking to a group of h.p. users in Sweden might be illuminating.

New Buildings; HP yes, property designed around it. Existing maybe, be aware of the limitations.

What's the point if you need a backup

Total waste of money. Cost a fortune...and will never pay for themselves.

Would be very interested for Patrick Harvey to view this video and comment on it!

Hmmm... since heat pumps work by producing constant heat, I wonder if it's actually more suitable as a under-floor system rather than the radiator system. More surface area, more material mass to warm up, which will take longer to warm initially but once it's at temp, the heat pump shouldn't have a problem maintaining....

If your heating is on a thermostat then the boiler will turn itself on and off to maintain the preset temperature. The thermostat must be positioned correctly - either in the hall or the room most used. Radiator thermostatic valves help control room temperature as well. It really should be set and forget

Hi Roger, I’m really glad you interview people with real experience rather than theoretical discussions. I’m also a similar age (probably a bit older) than you. I have a reasonably well insulated house and a 7 year old super efficient boiler Ideal Vogue 40HE, running on opentherm with an Evohome zoned setup. I’ve looked at solar panels and heat pumps and concluded I’d be long dead before any remote chance of payback. I’ll save more money buy running my current heating for the next 20 years if I’m lucky enough to last that long. I wish the government came clean about this, especially with older people, the investment in heat pump technology is not worth it. Why are they not investing in alternative low cost heating which suits the British weather? I believe Worcester Bosch did a successful conversion to Hydrogen where the cost of converting boilers was a fraction of the cost of heat pumps. They should s-end their effort on researching lower cost alternatives which are a lot less complex.

i live in NZ and have had two properties with heat pumps. Log burner was our best heat source. You would need an expensive full blown system if you wanted comfortable heat. The house needs to be heavily insulated too, not a cheap way to heat your house

What a fiasco....just run a simple, easy to use boiler....

I moved in last year to an old house it has no cavity walls let alone insulation, I ran the air pump for about two weeks according to my smart meter I was consuming 0.90 pence an hr and it wasn’t that hot, I’m a pensioner living off state pension I really can’t afford that, my housing manager told me I’d be breaching my contract if I didn’t have the heating on, I now get by with an oil radiator on half power at .30 pence an hr I huddle up in my sleeping bag and a fleece to keep warm at night, air pump heating is noisy, I also figure that it’s using the immersion heater to top up in the winter, not very economical in my opinion .

Interesting, I bought an 18th century farm in Sweden last year, the main house currently has a wood fired system, it works really well, heating the house beautifully with 70 0dd degree water, but, I need to be at home and load it three or four times a day when it´s cold which as you can imagine can be a bit of a pain, we have a guesthouse on a seperate system that is heated by burning grain, similar to a pellet or wood chip burner but converted for water damaged grain that I then dry with fans, this system is a bit more automated but I still have to service the burning unit once a week during winter and have to fill up the grain bunker as and when required so I am looking to install heat pumps within a hybrid system just to take care of that base heat level and boost when required. Being a Brit living in Sweden I found it hard to get the information I wanted but watching this video has made me confident I am thinking along the right path. Thanks mate! If you have any opinions on my setup I would love to hear them

Most of the comments here seem to be from people who already have heat pumps. For those who don't, the video suggests heat pumps frequently are (if owners were honest) a disaster vs existing gas boilers i.e. on the comparators of installation and servicing costs, stress and lack of knowledgeable and available service providers. Throwing more taxpayer eco grants in this direction doesn't seem like a very good idea until there's an industry infrastructure available to support it.

NEWS FLASH. Shoddy design and shoddy installation results in an unsatisfactory system.

I had a heat pump hot water system and a multipsplit heat pump with five inside units fitted six years ago. The only problem that I had was that I didn't realise that the light on one of the inside units had been turned off by the remote. A service call under warranty solved the problem. Proper design and proper installation results in a well working system.

And underlying this, electricity is 3 times the price of gas per kWh! Heating oil price has been dropping this month and I filled my tank in the summer at a price almost the same as gas (ca. 10 kWh/litre).

Just picking up on a comment Roger made about gas boiler servicing. I took out a service contract with Worcester Bosch 7 years ago to look after my boiler. All was well for the first few years when they sent out WB technicians who seemed to do a proper job of the servicing. More recently I have been getting white-van plumbers who just stick a probe in the flue and put the cover back on. Each year the cost of this "service" has been increasing at more than the rate of inflation so this year I cancelled the contract. I feel like I have been taken for a ride.

Well done to Roger for continuing to have an open mind. A big well done to John for leading the way and doing what you've done. Hopefully you get sorted.
And in the words of Roy Keane, Adam is doing his job.

As a roads engineer dealing with winter road maintenance, I have always said that the UK temperature fluctuating above and below freezing point daily, make coping worse than in Scandinavia.

Midwinter is often -2 overnight and +5 daytime, so we slightly freeze overnight, then partially thaw during the day - after thawing by sun or salt this surface water may run to drains, but if any salt used is diluted and brine is still lying as drains are blocked with slush, or unsalted water does not evaporate, it can ice up again at night, even if no more precipitation.

They should also give you a bunch of earplugs for you and your neighbours especially at night.
Does the external Air Source Heat Pump ice up when still above air freezing, because its body is intrinsically colder due to heat transfer to the house inside (exact opposite to the warm rear of a fridge) ? Can southern placements or wind-break louvred cupboards not help ?

We had the exact same experience with our heat pump when we moved into our new house. In the end it failed so many times in the winter, we ripped it out and we replaced it with a LPG boiler as it was half the price of replacing the heat pump with a new one! Bonkers. The heat pump needs to become smart and connected to the weather service so it can adjust to meet the coming weather demands.

So sorry mate, this should not have happened, when they installed my heatpump, hot water only, installation was i thought good, outside tank and pump. A few days later I thought I will check to see if there was any heat loss in tank, pump and hoses. The only loss i found were the connections to tank, some 27, 38, and one 57.6 degrees. So i put extra insulation on hoses and joins, will check heat loss when i finished.

A couple of comments...

First, you should not be using spare solar energy for domestic hot water. It doesn't make economic or environmental sense. Solar is 'high grade' energy. It's better to sell it back to the grid & use gas to do your hot water. I'm on Octopus Flux. My gas costs 7p/kWh. I sell my spare solar export typically for 22p/kWh. That export displaces gas burning at the power station level.

Second, this guy is spot on when he says we should refer to ASHPs as ELECTRIC ASHPs. Yesterday was really cold & it didn't go above 2°C. We used 36 kWh of gas to heat the house which cost 36 x 0.07 = £2.52. Assuming an COP of 3.0, an ASHP would need to consume 12kWh of power to replace the gas we used. This would have cost me 12 x 0.275 = £3.30. To my mind ASHPs are knackered right from the outset because the economic fundamentals don't work...and this is BEFORE you've shelled out £10k to have it installed!

At about 11.55 you showed a picture of the pipes, shouldn't they be more insulated than that, if no, please explain this to me, thanks

Just got a heatpump, im in Australia, well?