@majordennisbloodnok I must say that I was impressed when my installers started their work, at the huge trays of very shiny copper bends and other fittings that were there in front of them to use to make the best and neatest connections to all the elements of the system - all using the joints that are sealed with those motorised ‘jointing machine’ thingies. (Technical term there)😉 I dare say that there was no ‘put a few more joins in that pipe to make it impressive’ work going on but I can easily see why the ‘sundries’ costs are high! Regards, Toodles.

Posted by: @toodles

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@majordennisbloodnok I must say that I was impressed when my installers started their work, at the huge trays of very shiny copper bends and other fittings that were there in front of them to use to make the best and neatest connections to all the elements of the system - all using the joints that are sealed with those motorised ‘jointing machine’ thingies. (Technical term there)😉 I dare say that there was no ‘put a few more joins in that pipe to make it impressive’ work going on but I can easily see why the ‘sundries’ costs are high! Regards, Toodles.

Exactly. I don't have a problem with "sundries" being a big proportion; I would just want to know why and have evidence the scale was justified.

The point at which a quote lands with the customer, the business relationship is still only in its early stages. The customer has met the installer and got a feel for the installer's attitude but that's still a long way from being prepared to trust them. The quote is not only a list of items and a cost; it's also a document that helps the customer decide whether to believe in the installer or not. It's also the last point at which the customer can reasonably walk away if they're not satisfied, so it's no wonder the quote will be picked over in some detail.

Posted by: @toodles

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all using the joints that are sealed with those motorised ‘jointing machine’ thingies. (Technical term there)

Have you seen the price of those pieces of kit!  

@jamespa I think I can imagine, along with MCS fees, I suspect they are a major component in the overall running costs to installers.

@majordennisbloodnok Yes, that ‘Early days of a business relationship’ is very important. For this reason I have approached my ASHP installer about installing AC for us. I think that from the various quotes we received ‘last time round’, they are not going to be the cheapest - but I know them well now and I know the quality of their craftmanship and their support. These qualities are well worth paying for in my opinion! Regards, Toodles.

Posted by: @toodles

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@majordennisbloodnok I must say that I was impressed when my installers started their work, at the huge trays of very shiny copper bends and other fittings that were there in front of them to use to make the best and neatest connections to all the elements of the system - all using the joints that are sealed with those motorised ‘jointing machine’ thingies. (Technical term there)😉 I dare say that there was no ‘put a few more joins in that pipe to make it impressive’ work going on but I can easily see why the ‘sundries’ costs are high! Regards, Toodles.

Indeed. My installers were old school plumbers with flux, solder and blow torches.

I guess the point I was trying to make was that I was surprised by the level of sundries involved when I started to add everything up. Heck, it cost me a few hundred pounds in sundries when I moved my heat pump closer to the boundary now the silly 1m (3m in Wales) rule was dropped. I have no clue what lengths of copper pipe cost, but straight couplers and elbow bends were a fiver a piece, and I bet those fancy compression fittings are even more, so it soon adds up.

I should add that my own installation was an ECO4 install, so I have no idea what it cost. I did try to price up the component parts but gave up at the level of estimating every last component part of the installation, but I did figure the overall parts and materials were in the order of £10k and I think I estimated 11 man days of time were involved for surveys, system design, MCS/ECO4 admin and installation. Then you want the company to make a profit so they will still be around in two years to deal with any warranty issues, so a cost heading towards £20k doesn't start to look unreasonable? Mine was a complete retofit / replumb with 12 new radiators.

A great discussion, clearly a wide range of additional costs for a heatpump install vs gas boilers: from Building, Design, Electrical/Controls, Equipment, Payments management, Plumbing, Reg/methodology, Sales, Scaling, Technology, with many skillsets needed. 

I wonder which org represents who would most benefit from a smoother/cheaper heatpump install process? 

While heat pump installs remain expensive (before BUS grant) compared to gas boilers, how can we ever get to the take up needed to transition the majority of homes?

While early adopters with serious money can pay the price of a new car to decarbonise, some got a heat pump fitted at no cost to them via an ECO scheme, and others an install done with a £7500 BUS grant, none of this is really scalable.

A subsidy paid for out of everyone's energy bills can't pay for everyone a heat pump.

What is required for a heat pump to work as a drop in replacement for a gas boiler without multiple thousands of pounds of extra work? And is this ever going to happen?

Advertising no radiator changes needed and existing hot water tank retained, with no mention of other work makes it sound like a simple swap, but the quoted prices and discussion here suggest otherwise. 

@rob-of-york I think this gets right to the heart of the problem, because I’m increasingly unconvinced that the answer is simply "make the grant bigger and install more heat pumps".

A gas boiler looks like a cheap drop-in replacement largely because the rest of the heating system is already built around one. The pipework, radiators, cylinder arrangements and controls have spent decades evolving around extremely forgiving high temperature heat. A heat pump is being asked to slot into that same infrastructure while generally working best at lower temperatures and with rather different hydraulic requirements. Sometimes the existing house happens to be a good fit and the job can be remarkably straightforward... sometimes it plainly isn’t. I don’t think technology is going to make that fundamental issue disappear completely, and I don't think high temp heat pumps are the solution either.

Where the industry has to change is in making the straightforward jobs genuinely straightforward. We cannot realistically build a mass market where every installation requires bespoke engineering, several days of design work, wholesale radiator replacement, major plumbing changes and a £15,000-£20,000 invoice. I think Octopus have, by all accounts, done a decent job here. Equally, pretending every heat pump can simply be plumbed into where the boiler was and everything else left untouched is not the answer either. Somewhere between those two extremes is the scalable market.

For me that means much better upfront triage. Work out quickly which houses are already close to heat pump ready (again Octopus Energy have done this quite well), which need modest changes and which genuinely require substantial remedial work. Standardise far more of the design and installation process where it makes sense, separate specialist design from straightforward installation where appropriate, improve installer productivity and competence, and stop treating every property as either a bespoke engineering masterpiece or a boiler swap with a fan attached. Easy right? 😆 

I agree with you on subsidy. BUS can stimulate a market and make the economics work for individual households, but it cannot be the entire long-term business model for electrifying millions of homes. At some point the underlying installation has to become cheaper, faster and more repeatable in its own right. Otherwise we are simply using public money to disguise a cost problem rather than solving it.

The other part that gets overlooked is quality. As I said in another thread, I would rather the industry spent the next few years figuring out how to deliver a consistently good £8-£10k installation than celebrate enormous deployment numbers where too many homeowners end up with mediocre systems. Scaling poor practice just gives you poor practice at scale and I fear that's the industry is heading.

Agreed. 

There´s another aspect that could eventually provide an incentive. The ratio of electricity to gas prices. If this is reduced, then we could have more cases where the reduction in the energy costs helps to recover some of the additional investment. And give more ability to sacrifice SCOP and run the pump more like a boiler. 

At the moment, and specially if the home is already on an EV tariff, batteries are key to the financials..

Posted by: @batpred 

There´s another aspect that could eventually provide an incentive. The ratio of electricity to gas prices.

We hear a lot about gas setting the price of electricity, due to gas-fired power stations effectively being the provider of last resort when there isn't enough power available and accessible from renewables and nuclear. In practice this is a difficult problem to solve. The  price of electricity from these gas-fired power stations will continue to increase as they are used less and less since they still have to cover fixed overheads when asked to provide electricity only 30% or 20% or less of the time. And it is really difficult to provide the cover needed by other means. (Batteries cannot currently do the job for a "dunkelflaute" dull and windless week in winter).

The wholesale price of gas only affects about 40% of the price of domestic electricity. The rest is due to other costs that don't vary with the gas price. These fixed costs include a massive investment to upgrade the grid to cater for intermittent renewable power sources. We used to need a 60GW grid to support 45GW demand when supply was from always on gas and coal fired power stations. To decarbonise, we need roughly 120GW grid infrastructure to support 40GW demand. Simply because where the power is generated shifts around. Further a lot of the generation (wind farms) in the north are a long way from the demand in the south.

The unfortunate and inadvertent consequence is to keep the "spark gap" ratio of electricity to gas prices high beyond the end of this decade, which undermines the economic argument for heat pumps.

A good solution would be for Govt to pay for the grid upgrades needed out of general taxation rather than electricity bills. That would address the biggest issue with the spark gap. As well as making that taxation far more progressive. Sadly, I think the chances of that happening are close to zero, since the media headline would just be another tax rise.

I confess to becoming a little triggered by mention of dunkelflaute. It's not as worrying as it at first seems. This is explained a lot better then I could on the YouTube channel of Prof Gio here The Genius Trap of "What if the wind doesn't blow". And he is a professor, of control engineering at Imperial College.

Frankly I still don't understand why our electricity is so expensive. Still, that fact that other European countries don't have such a big difference between gas and electricity suggests it's down to policy and not engineering constraints.