All new gas appliances to be banned in UK.

So does it heat the rooms by blowing warm air (*) through vents in the room? My parents had gas-fired hot-air heating in their house (installed at new build in 1972) and said "never again": the house was always cold, especially if you were in the draught of the floor vent, even with the thermostat set high, and a lot of dust settled on everything despite frequent cleaning of the air filter in the boiler. It cost a fortune to run, even after we had cavity wall insulation; however I don't think the house had double-glazing.

It was by far the worst CH I've ever experienced - even compared with a single storage heater in my first house.

I would say that wet radiators (heated by whatever fuel is acceptable) are the only realistic way of heating a house. How ever you do it, it needs to be able to achieve the temperature that is required, and to be able to heat a cold house (after a holiday) within a few hours. Otherwise we'll all have to invest in Hive and other control systems which allows the CH to be turned on remotely several hours ahead of arriving home. Even our wet system, with a bloody big oil boiler (a box about 4x3x3 feet outside), took about 3 hours to heat the house from 12 to 20 degrees in winter if we went away over Christmas.

I get the distinct impression that the government are banning existing CH systems (as with ways of generating electricity) before they have got a replacement that is at least as good. Replacing with something worse is worthy of the strongest possible contempt.

I suppose modern houses can at least be insulated better than existing houses are.

(*) I presume it does, since you say that it replaces your wet system.

No. Is your Google broken?

Tim

In message snipped-for-privacy@brightview.co.uk>, NY snipped-for-privacy@privacy.net writes

Have a look at the suppliers sites for detail. A friend installed one in a Suffolk newbuild (there was a Harry payment:-). Piped underfloor because you don't get a very high output temperature. Array of fans at the side of the house. I think there are location restrictions because of noise/neighbours. I don't know how the DHW works. Perhaps a second stage heat pump. She seems happy with it but the house is now on the market:-)

No, it was to replace our existing boiler and couple up to our existing wet rad system. Problem is we would need a 16kW output system at high temperature. To get high temperature (up to 80C) out of a air source system you need a two stage system, one outside air heat exchanger plus a further heat pump indoors to raise the temperture further. The outside unit is quite a large two fan unit. We were not convinced it would be quiet enough. Plus it needs a firm concrete base to stand on. All things considered a very expensive install.

The most efficient system is a ground source heat pump but this is just too cost prohibitive for a retrofit system. I guess it would be more suitable for new builds.

All things considered it was a toss up between a high cost install and cheap running, or a low cost install but more expensive to run. The electric boiler won hands down purely on replacement cost, low maintenace, low noise and a unit smaller than a gas boiler.

Something like..

"It's not lower powered, it's more efficient."

Is it really 90% or is that based on the same thing as Volkswagen figures?

No

Oh dear. Heat pump produces warm water,. Needs massive rads or underfloor pipes and LOTS of insulation.

DHW uses heatpump as preheater then immersion.

Two heat pumps in series can produce 80C down to -7C outside temp. LG, Daikin and Panasonic already produce such systems which can use existing rads.

Air source heat pumps are not an attractive proposition for the very many Victorian terraces, even if the fans were put at the bottom of (often short) gardens and a practicable way found to insulate their solid walls without all the unintended consequences.

I blame the Luftwaffe's incompetence.

So you have to heat a cylinder of water in advance, rather than having the heat-on-demand of a combi boiler. Yet another nail in the coffin for the system as far as I am concerned. Having to plan ahead when you are going to have a bath (or keep the cylinder permanently hot) is a real retrograde step.

They really are.

That makes them about twice as efficient as a gas power power station (ours are around 40%, and most of the 'dash for gas' ones were lower), so it makes no sense unless we aren't running any gas power stations by then.

That's almost as bad as the low-powered vacuum cleaners which don't produce enough suction so you have to keep going over the same bit of carpet, or lower-powered kettles which take longer to heat the water... but the legislators can't see further than "it uses less power".

The kettle thing is particularly short-sighted because it takes a fixed amount of energy to heat a fixed amount of water: it is irrelevant whether it's 3 kW for 2 minutes or 1.5 kW for 4 minutes - the amount of energy used is the same.

When has common sense ever affected any environmental kneejerk decision. We have closed many of our coal-fired power stations (Ferrybridge and Didcot, for certain), leaving us with barely enough generation capacity. It may or may not be a good idea to get rid of coal-fired, but NOT until you've got equivalent generating capacity from other sources (gas, nuclear, wind, solar cells). We need one of those huge solar arrays like they've got in Spain (*) - it could look quite majestic in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (I'm being ironic), though we might struggle to get the same amount of sunlight as Spain...

(*) As seen on the James May "Big Ideas" programme that was repeated the other day. It uses steerable mirrors to focus the sunlight onto a heat exchanger to boil water to make steam for running the generators.

Is that including the losses in the electricity distribution network?

So, what do you want to do this evening?

- Pay surge pricing to have your heating on at peak rate

- Pay surge pricing to charge your electric car so you can go to work tomorrow (you can't choose both, the smart meter is going to limit your max demand)

- Sit in the cold and dark like it's 1935

Owain

but you might get more radiation losses with the longer time?

Or it could be worse as it's loosing heat all the time so the longer time to boil the more heat lost.

Cheers, T i m

Ed Davey MP told our 2018 Green Libdem conference: "In government we were experimenting with electrified heating, heat pumps, experimenting with biomass, and district heating. But at relatively low volumes. There's a reason for that. That is that there's a real challenge if you use those technologies to replace methane gas, it looks like it will be very expensive, take a long time, and have a lot of political reaction. Most people are used to their gas boilers and central heating systems, nice and simple with north sea gas. To rip out all that? I call that politically brave. We haven't quite worked out how to do that.

Instead there's a lot around Hydrogen (which really wasn't happening when I was Secretary of State).

Whether or not hydrogen or some other form of hydrogen mix or a biofuel could be used as a replacement for fossil fuel gas. We're a long way off from knowing if that is going to happen, so don't rush off say Ed says hydrogen's the way of the future. it may be, it may not, we don't know.

What we should be doing is very large scale pilots of all these different low carbon, zero carbon heating options. All these heating options. We've got to get cracking on this, the government's being far too slow.

We could crack up the pace in our time, but we weren't able to fix that as well as all the other stuff we were doing.

So, to c>

Where are the EU's proposals for kettles?

I saw in 2016 they had decided against early action but were including kettles (but not toasters!) in the Ecodesign programme of work for