Hello everyone,

I'm Sarah Strachan, Head of Property Management at Umega Lettings & Estate Agents.

I'm pleased to join this forum and look forward to sharing my experience in property management, lettings, landlord support, tenant relations, and property maintenance. I hope to provide helpful advice and contribute to discussions within the community.

Looking forward to connecting with you all! 

Welcome, Sarah.

As you've obviously rightly guessed, the whole issue of renewable heating is very under represented in the context of landlords and tenants, so it'll be very helpful to get your perspective.

@majordennisbloodnok And should make for very interesting reading indeed! Regards, Toodles.

I hope so, @toodles. It's not often that we see a situation where the decision maker on renewables installation is not the consumer, so it's important to explore how what the user wants and what is cost effective can work together better. Personally, I don't see it's a difficult sell to demonstrate the heat pump/solar PV/battery combination as being very good at keeping running costs low but there's still always that barrier of upfront installation costs, especially since landlords won't get a BUS grant (as far as I'm aware).

Hello all, been lurking for a few months and now contributing.

Semi 2 bed bungalow south central, off gas grid so originally oil burning with a log burner. Moved in 5 years ago and needed to update kitchen so oil burner needed to go, and rather than a new one my plumber son in law got hold of a second hand combi that he converted to Calor and I ran for a couple of years on 47kg bottles. The novelty of hauling them about wore off quite quickly and the cost encouraged me to have A2A for the shoulder months and cooling (2 years ago, fortuitous now).

Because of the A2A I overcame my original disbelief in heat pumps and went to Octopus for a Cosy6 finally installed in April after ‘issues’ and am now a happy bunny.

Thanks to mods for this site.

Edit : forgot solar & GivEnergy batteries installed 3 years ago!

Welcome in, @watcher, and thanks for the great intro; it’s a wonderful story. My wife and I jumped straight from oil to heat pump, so we’ve missed out on several of your learned experiences. Good to have someone who can fill in the gaps.

@majordennisbloodnok has welcomed you, may I second that? We went straight from mains gas to heat pump some three years or so back. Had solar panels and battery the year before and it was a memorable day that we had the gas supply capped and disconnected; an all electric household we have been ever since. No AC here but can’t bear to think about the disruption involved if a pukker system were to be installed! Regards, Toodles. 

@toodles 

AC was relatively painless, installer drilled a couple of holes in the lounge wall screwed the interior blower inside and hung the HP up high outside to match, gas up, wire up the wall to loft for leccy and hoover up.

I was really torn between A2W or putting another aircon at the other end of the house and running them as main heat source but decided to take the MCS grant route for winter comfort…..or rather ‘she’ did!

@toodles 

AC was relatively painless, installer drilled a couple of holes in the lounge wall screwed the interior blower inside and hung the HP up high outside to match, gas up, wire up the wall to loft for leccy and hoover up.

I was really torn between A2W or putting another aircon at the other end of the house and running them as main heat source but decided to take the MCS grant route for winter comfort…..or rather ‘she’ did!

@watcher Encouraging except that a bungalow is probably an easier and less disruptive installation than a ground and first floor job. Regards, Toodles.

Posted by: @toodles

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@watcher Encouraging except that a bungalow is probably an easier and less disruptive installation than a ground and first floor job. Regards, Toodles.

It really depends on the building and what you want to aircon. Trying to aircon an entire house if you already have an air/water heating system is probably overkill.

One big item when doing a bigger install is the loft. If you've got a loft that's just a loft not rooms then it's hugely easier to do the upper floor as you can do it from the loft space with ceiling units and the like.

@etchedpixels Ours is a little more involved as one room upstairs is outside the original ‘envelope’ as it is a flat roof extension. The ground floor would presumably require disturbing the floorspace upstairs to provide pipe work to various rooms. I am not sure we are quite ready for this yet! Toodles.