I can confirm that out of the next 14 booked installs we already have 2 customers that are having their oil boilers replaced in the next 3 weeks and they will be credited the full £1500 if we receive it in June, now to get this we, AAC Group must reapply for the grant in June and carry the cost until then. Both the grants are already certificated and both project will be complete before the Grant is confirmed. Now, I am not sure how many companies would be willing to complete projects 1-2 months ahead of the grant uplift availability but we are going to, so not only will we not be pocketing the difference, we will be enduring the short term costs to wait for the uplift. 

Also worth noting, unless the suppliers or manufacturers up their prices and pocket the difference before they sell the kit to us, we will be keeping the same pricing structure, this way we should win a lot of work if other installers do raise their prices just for the top up on oil systems, we would then be a clear £1500 cheaper in most installs as we will not be raising the costs just to soak the up the top up. 

If installers know what is good for them they would do everything they can to pass this grant top up on because if it increases the uptake of oil boiler changes by an (example 300%) the government would have the clear proof they need to show that topping the £7500 up even to £8000 would give a meaningful nudge towards the scale they need on all ASHP take up in this short term. ASHP installations are not cheap, just the unit and materials come out to around or more than the grant, without electrics, BWIC, labour or profit.

Inflation materials and OH costs are up 45% in the last 4 years its ridiculous to even plan for less than a 7% increase next year due to raw materials and compliance, this is just the relentless years of pandemic, slow growth, wars and typical red tape (endless paperwork in our bit) I know this applies to every industry but something needs to give and it looks like the Government just did give, if only for one area, a little bit for a short while!

So for once I hope none will take advantage of it and enjoy the win (for the oil boiler owner) 

Which has prompted a slightly less glamorous, but very real question… what do you actually do with an old heat pump when it’s come to the end of its life and died?

Ours has been sat there for nearly seven years, and while all the focus is usually on spec, performance and installation, nobody really talks about the exit strategy. Disposal, recycling, strip-out… who handles it, what it costs, what can be salvaged and what just gets scrapped.

So I thought it was worth opening this up as a thread.

If you’ve had a unit removed:

• Who dealt with it — installer, manufacturer, or third party?
• Was it recycled, scrapped, or refurbished?
• Any costs or surprises?
• Anything you’d do differently?

We’re working through our own plan now and I’ll share exactly what we end up doing once it’s sorted, but it’d be useful to gather some real-world experiences in the meantime to help others in similar situations.

£9k grant to move from oil to heat pump on boiler upgrade scheme! 

It’s been really interesting to watch the reaction to this announcement. Critics and naysayers are saying installers will simply pocket the excess grant cash and still charge homeowners that amount thereby making a tidier profit, prompting Heat Geek to go on the defensive saying this won’t be the case. 

But getting it running got me thinking about the power outage scenario, specifically what happens when the Indevolt islands and starts feeding the house. Two questions.

1. During daylight hours in an outage, would the Indevolt’s island output be sufficient to bring the Solaredge PV inverter back online, effectively allowing it to keep recharging the battery from solar while the grid is down?

2. The more interesting one: if you have a larger battery (say 20kWh) with no gateway and no islanding capability of its own, could the Indevolt technically act as the grid reference to bring that system back to life? Essentially powering the larger battery’s inverter so it can recharge via PV simultaneously powering the house, with the Indevolt holding the whole thing together?

Thoughts?

There's been news articles where journalists have exposed that there's a growing problem of fraud, where virgin palm oil is being passed off as used-cooking oil and sold into the HVO market, to claim the product is sustainable, but when it's actually coming from palm plantations created from rain forest clearance.

What a surprise!  If there is an opportunity to defraud another human, someone will exploit it!

I was not expecting product labelling in the ASHP industry to be so obfuscated. Are these products not meant to have been assessed specifically on energy efficiency (for consumer awareness) and MCS "best practice" fitting? 

Unfortunately its a function of the physics.  Max heat pump output naturally changes with OAT and FT, that is unavoidable.  Some manufacturers, most notably Mitsubishi, deal with this by limiting the output in firmware, others allow the machine to do what it naturally does.  Design OAT and FT varies so its impossible, unless you limit in firmware (and why would you do this?) to give a number that is applicable in all situations.

EU regulations specify particular conditions under which the actual output must be quoted, but don't specify how the heat pump must be branded. Anyway we left the EU so, even if such regulations existed, they wouldn't necessarily apply to us.  Our market isn't big enough to support our own standards.

So the better manufacturers publish output curves showing how they perform under a range of conditions, which your designer can match to your circumstance.  Some manufacturers unfortunately obfuscate this data.

Thats how it is, blame the physics and the fact that the climate is not constant over a sufficient area to encompass a population large enough to justify specifications specific to that location.

Hi, I am new joiner to the forum. I am thinking of getting a heat pump for my house.

It's a three storey townhouse 90m2 built 2010 in Derbyshire 

I have been given a quote of 4k

Heat loss of 4kW

Replace the hot water cylinder 

And changes to some of radiators for water flow temp of 45

Does it seem right?

In a word yes, based on what you have told us.

You wont find many heat pumps with an output less than 5kW, and unless your house is very badly built its <<4kW

However you need to check

• No buffer tank, LLH, PHE (volumiser, connected to either flow or return but not both is OK)
• No third party controls, run on weather compensation not thermostats (so 45 max, decreasing as OAT increases)

You will also need to check workmanship as they go along

The mock-up run will clarify if the pipework is fit for a heat pump, but not which nominal power output you will need. If you put gas consumption figures to the flow and outdoor temperatures tracking, you will get nice statistics helping you to design the system. This is something no professional can obtain without producing a quite crazy bill.

In principle you are almost certainly right, but in practice its going to need a lot of measurement and interpretation unless its a slam-dunk case which sods law says it wont be.  The experiment and its interpretation needs careful thought with reference to the physics.  Im not saying it shouldn't be done, but interpreting it meaningfully if it turns out to be marginal is non-trivial. 

My advice is think through the experimental method, interpretation and possible outcomes first otherwise you will miss some vital measurement.  I, for one, don't immediately know how to interpret several possible outcomes without measurements you are unlikely to make unless planned in advance, and I have a degree in physics

Right, JamesPa, they don't, but me being nosy .... wanted to see if there's a chance of getting away without radiator swaps .... optimistically assuming that the microbores will do.

Maybe, but a separate question. 

I find it helps to thing of heating systems in 4 stages:

(a) Heat demand (set by the fabric, desired room temperature and OAT),

(b) Heat output (set by average surface temperature of the emitters relative to the desired room temperature and their effective surface area).  

(c) heat transport (set by the mass flow rate in the pipework and deltaT across the emitters - individually and collectively) and 

(d) heat production (set by the boiler/heat pump capacity at the design OAT and FT). 

For satisfactory operation the specifications for b-d must be capable of being at least as much as a.  All four will, in operation, end up in balance one way or another, possibly averaged over time if the heat source is forced to cycle because it cant modulate far enough down to match the demand.

If you divide the problem this way you can partition it so that each stage can be individually assessed.

For most efficient operation and greatest comfort you want the lowest FT possible.  This leads to large emitters and low DT to satisfy (b).  This in turn leads to high flow rate to satisfy (c).  This in turn is why pipe diameter matters, because the mass flow rate is limited, in principle by pump capacity, but in practice in most cases by the maximum velocity of the water in the pipes before erosion and/or noise becomes a problem