[wkat4242]

Yes heat pumps are expensive and you need different radiators and more insulation than with traditional gas central heating. That's why it's an issue in Holland too. Not many people have the investment for all that. It's mainly worth it when you have solar panels but that requires another big investment.

I'm lucky to live in Spain where it's not that cold so I just have one little plug in radiator I use a few months a year lol.

[hexbin010]

Ditto UK.

Gas is relatively cheap, and a replacement boiler is £1,500 to £3,000 and will last ~10 years and there'll be no doubt about whether it can sufficiently heat the home or produce enough hot water etc .

Lucky you living in Spain though lol

[wkat4242]

Yes, it's just a lot of money for a lot of people.

Norway is really a different kind of rich compared to the rest of europe, they have tons of oil rights all over the world (and as such they still contribute a lot to global warming even though they have a lot of money for 'green' tech at home).

PS yeah Spain is good for heating but not for AC though (which I don't have, sadly). But I do enjoy life here a lot more even though I would make much more money in Holland.

[OptionOfT]

As someone who moved from Belgium to Phoenix, I agree. I prefer how dry heat over cold, windy & humid.

[cnewey]

I was recently in a situation where I had to replace my oil-fired heating system’s oil tank (it wasn’t double skinned and no longer safe).

It was £2500 to replace the oil tank, or I could opt for £2250 to install a heat pump with the government grant. This included all plumbing, electrical work, installation, and 6 new radiators all over my house.

Honestly to me it seemed like a no-brainer. It’s a tad more expensive to run, but it works really quite well and is a lot less invasive than a big smelly tank of kerosene. I gained another 90cm of width in my garden, it’s actually quieter than the oil boiler, and it doesn’t stink in the summer- win win.

[OptionOfT]

Did you add extra insulation to your house (or was it already more modern?).

Otherwise the heatpump just can't catch up.

And currently I have the opposite problem. The house is too well insulated for the heater (or the heater is too powerful). The heater only runs for a couple of minutes and huts off.

[cnewey]

Hah, no my house was built in the 1750s or something like that - single glazing on the front and with fairly minimal insulation, plus it has no cavity wall (a mixture of wattle and daub and brick). It is a mid-terrace though so I benefit from neighbours being either side.

There have been a few cold snaps here where the weather has been down to -2 some days, but it’s been fine. I had a couple of minor installation issues (eg 3 way valve set incorrectly) but once those were fixed my house hasn’t dropped below 19C.

[supersparrow]

A boiler should actually be lasting more like 20 years. I recently replaced my 20 year old one purely because if anything went wrong, it’d become an expensive/long job to fix as parts were hard to find, otherwise it was still running perfectly at its manufacture specified efficiency. Running them for 20 years isn’t uncommon.

I had a quote for a heat pump - £20k, plus the cost to replace 13 radiators, plus cost to replace pipework to support heat pump rads.

Pretty sure the government ‘incentive’ was £3k at the time. Doesn’t come remotely close!

[pjc50]

I managed £15k minus £7k of Scottish government incentives, and I managed to avoid replacing all my radiators by .. getting a "hybrid" system which also includes a boiler for HW :/

Far from ideal solution, but it is mostly green, somewhat offset by the solar panels, and actually more comfortable than the old system because of the more even heating. Set to 20C and forget about it for the season. I'm hoping that it will last until the actual gas phaseout when a solution compatible with 8mm piping will exist.

This is why they need to be mandated on new houses, because it's so much better than trying to retrofit it.

[hexbin010]

£15k included the solar?

[pjc50]

Sadly no, that was a £5k => 3.8kW installation ten years previously. That has long since paid for itself in feed in tariffs.

[hexbin010]

Was your old boiler a non-combi?

Modern condensing combis I think are designed to be more complex and not last as long. I'm not sure all the complexity and fancy modulation etc is really worth it myself. I'd rather have a boiler that lasts 20 years and that any half-competent gas engineer can fix with a spanner and some spare parts.

£20k, jesus!

[zzbn00]

Condensing boilers became mandatory in UK just over 20 years ago

[rsynnott]

Whatever about a combi, you probably don't want a non-condensing boiler these days, not with gas the price that it is.

[hexbin010]

What's the cost savings? Also factoring more expensive purchase, repairs, replacements etc

[rsynnott]

Ye olde non-condensing boiler is usually about 70% efficient (that is, 70% of the heat from burning the gas goes into your house vs out the exhaust), sometimes worse (60% wouldn't be that out there for old ones). A condensing boiler, _if set up correctly_, will do 90% (95% for the newest models, allegedly). Now, the catch is that it'll only hit 90% if the return water is within a fairly narrow temperature range, so some system balancing is required, and in practice a lot of them end up more like 80%. But given how expensive gas is these days (at least in Europe) that 10-20% saving will handily pay for the cost of the boiler.

[supersparrow]

Old and new both condensing and both non-combi.

[mrmlz]

UK houses are really interesting.. Single-glass windows, poor insulation etc. And plumbing on the OUTSIDE(!) :)

Are the boilers typically connected to water-radiators?.. I assume so based on the word "boiler".

There are heatpumps that are used to heat water so it would be a slot in replacement..

[pjc50]

Not many people left with single glazing unless they've been trapped by historic building rules. "Outdoor plumbing" is not a thing.

The pump is a drop in replacement unless you have 8mm "microbore" piping, at which point the lower temperature times restricted flow rate becomes a problem in terms of getting enough heat through.

[wkat4242]

Not sure about the UK. I've seen a lot of outdoor plumbing in Ireland. I lived in a place that had that. They were literally running on the outside. Our maintenance guy said they did that to make maintenance easier, but it also makes wear & tear a lot easier obiously (not to mention frost). And chipboard floors that would crack with heavy furniture. It was terrible quality. These houses were built in the mid 80s.

And a dirty tank of water in the attic to act as a "in-house water tower" because only one tap may be connected directly to the mains. Really archaic.

[mrmlz]

Yeah i feel like the other answers tries to gaslight me and downvoting to hide the ugly truth! :)

Would you say modern (i.e. <10 years) are properly insulated and built or are there still... shortcuts?

[PaulDavisThe1st]

My parents' house in Bath is not "trapped by historic building rules" but there is no way in hell they are ever going to replace 3-4 stories of single pane glass double hungs ...

and that house still has the sewage stacks on the outside of the house, as do almost all homes in Bath and environs.

[rsynnott]

By 'outdoor plumbing' they probably mean pipes running up the outside of buildings (not, like, outhouses). This is somewhat common for waste pipes.

[mrmlz]

Yes! I was told "its easier to replace when it freezes" :) Obviously older houses.

[asplake]

Brit here. Your first pragraph describes older housing stock, not anything built in decades. Not that the quality of our quality of our stock couldn't be improved, or that our (very real) energy standards for new builds couldn't be stricter, but things aren't quite as grim everywhere as the picture you paint.

[supersparrow]

I’ve lived in the UK for 35 years and lived in various properties built in every decade from 70s-10s. Some much older and less loved ones did have single pane windows but have never seen plumbing on the outside. Maybe on much older houses? Certainly not on anything remotely new. A lot of new builds here have solar, heat pumps and insulation has been excellent for at least 20 years.

[pm215]

You do relatively commonly see wastewater piping on the outside of a house in the UK, especially older stock (soil stack from the toilet, waste pipe from sink or bath running into it). This is fine in the UK climate where a normally empty pipe doesn't need insulation. I hear that it won't work in places that get extreme low winter temperatures, but the UK doesn't have winters that cold.

You don't see them on new builds, I think, probably because the pipe going from inside to outside would reduce insulation effectiveness.

[Scoundreller]

Yeah it makes sense for buildings where plumbing was retrofitted.

Otherwise people try to retrofit narrow drain pipes in the walls which are prone to clogging or give you poor flushing performance. Or outside big enough pipes outside interior walls where you get to hear every flush/shower unless you build a box around that. Easier to just run it outside if you can configure your bathrooms that way.

[wolvesechoes]

> more insulation

Nothing to do with a heat source.

[jaapz]

In the netherlands we were used to really cheap gas (groningen gas field). This meant that, instead of adding more insulation, it was cheaper to just install a bigger gas powered heater to heat our homes.

This means that people now really need to improve insulation of their homes big time, before even being able to consider switching to a heat pump.

My house has a 30kW gas heater. When I switched to a heat pump, first I had to replace the entire roof with PIR insulation. It was previously just uninsulated wood. Now I can easily heat my home with a 7kW heat pump (which most of the time doesn't even need to produce 7kW of heat).

I was lucky, my house already had insulated walls and floors, and used floor heating (low temperature heating). Most homes here use high temperature radiators, which become way less efficient when used with low temperatures produced by heat pumps.

So for many people here, it is cost prohibitive to switch to a heat pump, as they first need to improve isolation and replace their radiators for a heat pump to even work.

[brandhout]

You can switch to a heatpump before insulating your house; you just need a bigger one. Which isn't really great thanks to our struggeling energy grid but its still cheaper than a gas heater.

[jaapz]

It really isn't. A gas heater costs 1500-2500 euro with installation. Especially when just switching the previous one with a new one, it can be done really quickly and cheaply.

Switching to a heat pump can be anywhere from 10-25k depending on the existing plumbing, size of heat pump etc.

[sokoloff]

Not directly with the heat source, but with the output flow temperature that the heat source can create.

In that regard, an air-to-water heat pump is much lower temperature than a gas or oil boiler can efficiently produce.

That can cause a need for larger radiators to compensate and sometimes for insulation if the radiators can’t be further increased in size. (Or if the heat loss at design temp is too high for available or sensible sized equipment.)

[brandhout]

It isn't more interesting with solar panels because they won't generate nearly enough electricity in the winter. You should see both as entirely separate energy saving investments, not dependent on one another. (I'm however very happy with "free" cooling in summer)

You might need other radiators if your current radiators are very small. But you also might not in a recent house, or in a recently renovated house (e.g. the radiator are still sized on single-glazing-glass when having double glazing installed).

You can also choose in-foor heating with the next renovation, a lot of homes already have in-floor heating and it's very comfortable. You can probably also boost existing radiators with small fans on the bottom or choose an electronic back-up module which boost the temperature a bit on the coldest days.

Tldr: it really isn't that hard. The focus on hybrid systems in NL is purely thanks to a lobby from gas-boiler installers and manufacturers. Air/water heatpumps are a drop-in replacement in a lot of cases.

[euroderf]

> more insulation

Why is this ? (Sorry if it's a stupid question.)

[brandhout]

A misunderstanding. A lot of people (at least here in the Netherlands) believe that heat-pumps just actively refuse to heat a home when it's not up to spec, isolation wise. That of course isn't true, you'll just need a bigger heatpump.