@majordennisbloodnok 

Having a home battery combined with your Heat Pump and possibly some solar to me seems a no brainer.

Yes there is some up front cost, but people need to look past that and consider this is a good investment, not a short term cost.

Battery prices have plummeted, especially if you look to the less fancy off the shelf offerings like Tesla/Sigenergy.

For well under £10,000 we have installed 45kwh of battery storage, upgraded 12 radiators, had a new much more efficient dhw tank that reheats incredibly quickly, had lots of upgrades to our house electrics and pipework and a fancy new very quiet heat pump fitted on our driveway.

Coupled with an overnight tariff our energy costs have plummeted. We also get the benefit of cheap electricity for all the other items such as cooker, washing machine, dishwasher etc.

We will conservatively save £1500 a year as a minimum (over 99% of our input is at off peak rates), more so at the moment whilst our fixed tariff was reduced to 3.2p kWh on April 1st and energy prices have risen.

We have a much warmer and comfortable house to live in and should have little investment needing to the heating system for many many years to come.

Posted by: @bash

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@majordennisbloodnok 

Having a home battery combined with your Heat Pump and possibly some solar to me seems a no brainer.

...

I'd say it's a no brainer if you have the wherewithall to do it; not everyone can, at least all in one go. One of the RHH podcasts recently has covered this pretty well, and I'd generally agree with @editor that the most sensible is to start with solar PV and fit a heat pump later if you can't afford to do all at the same time. However, in the context of this thread, the only thing I'm trying to highlight is that the survey on which the article is based may or may not be comparing like with like and it's not a simple task to work it out.

Posted by: @bash

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We have a much warmer and comfortable house to live in and should have little investment needing to the heating system for many many years to come.

Thats a much overlooked benefit of a (properly installed) heat pump based system.  Basically much greater comfort for the same cost or a bit less.  

I am sitting on a Local Authority Retrofit Accelerator group, of which stimulating the roll out of heat pumps is one aspect.  One focus I want to bring is teaching customers/giving customers the tools to weed out the poor installers.  In the short term, the industry wont*, so we need somehow to are consumers with the information/tools they need to do so.  

* It hasnt in the 3 years I have been on this forum, and then there is the evidence for this is the 2023 NESTA survey.  This showed that satisfaction with heat pumps is broadly similar, albeit a bit more polarised, to satisfaction with boilers.  The dissatisfaction level is roughly 30% dissatisfaction in both cases.  For a boiler people just shrug their shoulders, for a heat pump they blame it on the technology.  The numbers suggest that its just the state of the industry and that isnt likely to change in a hurry!  Two things need to happen IMHO namely (1) we need methodologies that mediocre installers can use to install heat pumps satisfactorily (stop trying to make every installer excellent, instead design things so they don't need to be) and (2) householders need to have simple tools to weed out the dross at quote time.

Ideas welcome.

@bash agree with much of what you say but disagree with your savings plan of running electrical appliances on cheap overnight power. As a property manager running over 65 licensed HMO properties in Scotland we worked closely with the fire services and ensured that all tenants ( plus my family!) did not have any appliances on at night or when out. These appliances inc washing machines and dishwashers - not to mention the dreaded tumble dryer - are a genuine fire risk and at night the danger is raised dramatically - not worth saving a Bob or two. A quick chat with your local fire officer will confirm this

@sapper117 

You miss understand, I don't run them overnight, I don't need to!

Posted by: @sapper117

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@bash agree with much of what you say but disagree with your savings plan of running electrical appliances on cheap overnight power. As a property manager running over 65 licensed HMO properties in Scotland we worked closely with the fire services and ensured that all tenants ( plus my family!) did not have any appliances on at night or when out. These appliances inc washing machines and dishwashers - not to mention the dreaded tumble dryer - are a genuine fire risk and at night the danger is raised dramatically - not worth saving a Bob or two. A quick chat with your local fire officer will confirm this

@sapper117, I may be mistaken, but I took @bash's post to mean making use of the home battery to buy the leccy overnight (cheap rate) but still to run the appliances during the day (using said cheap overnight leccy).

Irrespective, I completely agree about remembering to include safety first in any plan for reducing energy costs. It's a timely reminder.

@bash I didn’t misread I didn’t follow!! My apologies

@sapper117 

No worries, safety first as they say!

@jamespa I wonder if it isn’t also lack of education as to how to use the systems. People I have spoken to seem to try and emulate the gas ch system with the heat pumps. I have no deep knowledge of the tweets and twists nor exact COP etc. I simply look at my kwh usage and my averages over 4 years and try different scheduals. To my surprise I found that setting the whole house for 20.5 day and setback of 20 over the winter period cost me only a few more pounds literally per month but I had a warm house 24/7 - knocking out the step up to fill the heat loss over a large set back ( a hangover from h h) cost just about the same as a tiny set back! 
I try and explain to any contacts that you need to drill down into any installer - they need you not the other way around. How many systems have they installed? ( one who looked good had only installed 1!)

potential users must have a flexible mind re running the new system - as much reading , viewing and podcasts as possible

learn to accept large discrepancies in usage  a cold run of 7 days if converted to monthly Ave can signal a major financial problem to an inexperienced mind. Learn quickly to estimate the full cost and a high week is nearly always followed by a lowering average and over the 12 months it all levels out 

invest in panels and batteries plus export via energy sources like octopus

finally heat pumps work in almost any property 

@majordennisbloodnok 

I know we have discussed this before but with export rates dropping and almost certainly dropping further the numbers to me favour storage over solar.

If you buy a heat pump storage is very important.

In this argument you'd end up having to buy your solar first, then buy a heat pump then almost certainly install a battery, so it's a much bigger investment.

Better to install your battery (with a hybrid inverter) first then the heat pump.

Only then consider solar.

I was convinced on solar and still toy with adding some.

However now that I have lots of storage, I cannot see the value, as I can import all my electricity needs for pennies per kWh.

How many units could I buy with that all solar money? That's what I keep asking myself and it is a lot!

Posted by: @sapper117

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but disagree with your savings plan of running electrical appliances on cheap overnight power. As a property manager running over 65 licensed HMO properties in Scotland we worked closely with the fire services and ensured that all tenants ( plus my family!) did not have any appliances on at night or when out. These appliances inc washing machines and dishwashers - not to mention the dreaded tumble dryer - are a genuine fire risk and at night the danger is raised dramatically - not worth saving a Bob or two. A quick chat with your local fire officer will confirm this

Our tumble drier is rarely running overnight. We never had issues and even if we have a battery, we did not change pour habits of running appliances and EV charging overnight. My bet is not all models are as likely to catch fire..

As for why, 3.5p/kwh overnight feels free. We have no PV but a full battery delivers more when peak time approaches. 

@sapper117 

I have found running the heat pump 24/7 means I can adjust the flow temperature even lower, to just trickle heat into the house, as the fabric of the house retains the heat so well.

When we were away I tested this further.

instead of switching off the heat pump I lowered the flow temp to 30c fixed, even though the temperature outside was fluctuating between 5c - 12c (it's great that you can monitor these things nowadays when high up in the Alps on holiday!).

To my surprise the house never dropped below 20c, especially with some daily solar gain.

The Heat Pump just ticked along at about 350Wh average all day long.

It enabled me to have the confidence to lower the heating curve even further.