octopus heat pump deal / investment.

[Mr Gus]

https://octopus.energy/blog/heat-pump-revolution/

Came into my phone feed this morning, but source said 2 grand not 3.

Elsewhere (stowmarket, suffolk) councl is pissed at its "preference" for 250 new builds were meant to have ashp, but instead gas mains are being fitted.
Builder says yes but we have planned to fit some solar

Homeowners will have to go electric out of their own pockets (ie pay twice) in around 10 years time is the councils argument, ..nice they are on the ball, less so to have left space for this to have happened & leeway in build permissions.

[ahas]

I was click baited by Octopus with that blog. I had Octopus out last week to price my property.

£6,200 for a heatpump for my 1947 property with £5,000 BUS.
8 new rads, largest size HP, flow temp 50 degrees, heating SCOP 3.56. Hot water SCOP 2.771.
Supply and fitting of everything including 300l water cylinder.

A little more than I was expecting... And I have to replace 3 pipe runs to rads running microbore with 15mm as a precondition.

If you have a mortgage with Lloyds/Halifax you get £1k cashback. I mortgage with Virgin Money so wouldn't get that.

I mentioned I don't have the capital outlay and have been offered a 12 month interest free payment plan.

Given how thorough and pedantic octopus were with the survey, kit, and detail I don't think I'd want anyone else to install a HP. It would be done properly I feel.

Anyone had Octopus install a heat pump?

[Oldgreybeard]

I installed a 6kW air source heat pump here myself in 2014. The total cost (heat pump and all required parts to connect it to existing underfloor heating) was about £2,000. The bare heat pump, delivered on a pallet, was £1,700. I had never installed one before, but had previously installed a wood burning stove with a built in boiler, and had replaced radiators and water tanks in the past, so had a fair idea of what was involved.

It took me around a day, working on my own, to install and plumb in the heat pump, fill and leak test the system and get it to fire up. I spent around another day finding out how to optimise the settings and get it programmed, but that was largely ignorance on my part, plus a manual that was far from clear as to how the thing worked.

I'm at a loss to understand why the prices being charged for installed heat pumps are so high, TBH. There really is nothing at all difficult to do, if anything they are simpler than installing a boiler, and not a lot more expensive to purchase. I suspect there is a significant amount of profiteering going on, just because few people know the true cost of these things.

[ALAN/ALAN D]

Built in 1947. Is the wall / floor / loft insulation installed to better than current standards. ?

8 new radiators. Is this 8 new radiators plus replacing all the existing radiators.
Are all the new radiators much bigger.

With the water temperature at 50 Deg. C the size of the radiators needs to be considerably bigger.

[ahas]

I installed a 6kW air source heat pump here myself in 2014. The total cost (heat pump and all required parts to connect it to existing underfloor heating) was about £2,000. The bare heat pump, delivered on a pallet, was £1,700. I had never installed one before, but had previously installed a wood burning stove with a built in boiler, and had replaced radiators and water tanks in the past, so had a fair idea of what was involved.

It took me around a day, working on my own, to install and plumb in the heat pump, fill and leak test the system and get it to fire up. I spent around another day finding out how to optimise the settings and get it programmed, but that was largely ignorance on my part, plus a manual that was far from clear as to how the thing worked.

I'm at a loss to understand why the prices being charged for installed heat pumps are so high, TBH. There really is nothing at all difficult to do, if anything they are simpler than installing a boiler, and not a lot more expensive to purchase. I suspect there is a significant amount of profiteering going on, just because few people know the true cost of these things.

Yep I agree an element of profiteering, I'm a keen DIY'er doing my own house foundations, joinery, kitchen, and many other things. But DIY the heating system in ours might throw the Mrs over the edge!

Built in 1947. Is the wall / floor / loft insulation installed to better than current standards. ?

8 new radiators. Is this 8 new radiators plus replacing all the existing radiators.
Are all the new radiators much bigger.

With the water temperature at 50 Deg. C the size of the radiators needs to be considerably bigger.

New extension side all insulated to latest building regs. Old side has decent loft and cavity insulation. But some of the old side of the house getting bigger radiators.

8 new rads, 3 new rads in rooms that don't have radiators (side of the extension house where only pipes have been ran).
5 existing radiators replaced. 2 are the rubbish vertical ones. Look nice but give as much heat as a child's fart.
3 are increased in size to larger units.

According to heat loss that's all that is required....

[Oldgreybeard]

One problem is that the current building regulations requirements are still not at all good in terms of insulation and airtightness, so even new homes are leaking heat like sieves. Our house is now 8 years old, and has insulation and airtightness levels that are way better than even the new 2021 building regs require.

The current requirements in Part L (the latest ones) only require outside walls to have a U value of 0.18W/m².K, our 8 year old walls have a U value of 0.1W/m².K, so lose 45% less heat.

Current regs require windows to have a U value of 1.2W/m²K, our 8 year old windows have a U value of 0.55W/m².K, so lose about 54% less heat.

Current regs don't mandate heat recovery ventilation, and allow airtightness to be as bad as 5m³/h.m² at 50Pa, our airtightness level was 1.1m³/h.m² at 50Pa in 2014, and we have heat recovery ventilation that reduces the ventilation heat loss to about 20% of what it would be without it on top of that.

There's no excuse for UK building regs being so poor, other countries have managed to tighten theirs and very significantly reduced their heating requirements and therefore running costs and emissions, not to mention their energy needs. We should have brought our regs up to the Passivhaus standard decades ago, but the pressure from developers (who objected to the changes in the way they build houses this would mean) blocked it, by lobbying/bribing the government.

[Swwils]

Current regs don't require that since you can make up for it "elsewhere". Those are just the notional values. Hence why so many homes have miracle 0.09 W/(m^2K) roofs.

If your going to use limiting factors those exist but are less well known... Walls are 0.3 W/(m^2K).

The excuse is we are just not capable of building such homes. We can barely do the current new builds. Noone on price will stop because they have run out of insulation, you'd be lucky to be told at the end of the day after walls gone up.

[Oldgreybeard]

The excuse is we are just not capable of building such homes. We can barely do the current new builds. Noone on price will stop because they have run out of insulation, you'd be lucky to be told at the end of the day after walls gone up.

We are perfectly capable of building passive houses at around the same cost to build as the much poorer performing homes being put up by developers today. I did exactly this in 2014, bought what was effectively an "off the shelf" house, built in a factory and erected here. I designed it, but the building system is one that is modular and allows any shape or size of house to be built, and had already been used to build hundreds of houses, many of them social housing, when we selected the builder.

It wasn't much more costly, either. Our total build cost was high, about £320k, but the insulated and airtight house and foundations only made up about 20% of that total cost, the biggest single cost was the land, next biggest was ground works (levelling the land mostly and getting rid of hundreds of tonnes of soil) with the cost of the foundations and house coming a very close third. I worked out afterwards that we could have saved around 1.5% of the total build cost by opting to just build a standard house to the current building regs at that time. 1.5%% is an extremely tiny premium to pay, and we recovered that 1.5% within the first few years of living here, just from the very low running cost. We could have also saved that 1.5% just by spending a bit less on the kitchen and bathrooms.

[Swwils]

Great one house. Simply cannot be done at scale in the UK. Where is the work force?

[Oldgreybeard]

Great one house. Simply cannot be done at scale in the UK. Where is the work force?

The company that built our house had just built an estate of social housing in Devon. We went to see that estate being built before we signed the contract with them. As for the workforce, our foundations and UFH piping were done in four days, by two people, plus a concrete truck. A couple of weeks later three people (plus a crane driver for two days) erected the house, put in all the insulation, made it weather and airtight (testing it and giving us a test certificate) over the space of another 11 days.

On the estate we went to see being built they estimated that each house took about 45 man days to build and finish. Not sure how that compares to normal house building, but it seemed to me to be pretty quick. On top of that there was the time to build the frames in the factory, but when we looked around there they told us that our frame would only take them about a day to build, with two people working the machines that cut and nail plated the frames together (bit like the way roof trusses are made).