Eco 4 solar and heat pumps.

Unlikely, budget up to £5k for a battery system

Usually as an air to radiator system but can be air to ducted air.

In a suitable place outside.

You might need to have some installed or a ducted air system.

We have storage heaters. Would the storage heaters have to be taken out? Probably Yes.

You could keep the E7

No

Probably lots, the installation costs for heat pumps can be £10k+ then you might need a radiator system installing.

Unless you are dissatisfied with your storage heaters or they need replacement, a heat pump will take a very long time to payback it's installation cost.

On a technical note for aprilsweetheartrose…

The temperature of the water produced by a heat pump is lower to much lower than that of a conventional boiler.

Because of this, in order to transfer heat from the water to a room, the radiators are very much bigger than ordinary ones, typically floor to ceiling. You will need pipework to feed them. You will also need a large hot water tank. All this will take up space in your bungalow.

The hot water tank will need raising above 60degC once a week in order to kill off any Legionella bacteria. This action might be programmed into your control system.

Your heat pump will probably need its own electricity feed from your consumer unit (‘fuse box’), this might need your wiring checking and a new CU installed and certified.

There are some posters on this group that have heat pumps and are very satisfied with them, and there have been many posts on the topic. If you can use your newsclient to search the group for the phrase ‘heat pump’, they should show up.

HTH

You would be eligible for the Boiler Upgrade Scheme:

For ECO4:

ECO4 will cover a heat pump (it may be the whole cost of one), and other kinds of insulation.

From what I understand, a grant may cover solar PV if your home is electrically heated. I suppose it would be once a heat pump is installed. The rules say that you can apply the boiler upgrade scheme to get a heat pump and then ECO4 but the ECO4 looks at the building before BUS is applied. (normally this works in your favour, if the situation was worse before you started).

Never ever go with a cold caller, you're being scammed. The good tradespeople don't need to do that, they have enough work. It's only the wide boys who resort to cold calling.

Here is a guide to the schemes:

DIY is doable if you are electrically inclined. Look at

The way the grants seem to work is somebody looks at your property and decide what kind of improvement would get the best bang for buck. I imagine that solar/battery would be fairly low down the list - I would guess replacing the storage heaters with a heat pump would be the biggest improvement.

I think ECO4 won't, it seems like one of the other grants (HUG - Home Upgrade Grant - I note Cornwall Council are participating) may since that applies if you're off the gas grid.

You can get 'air to air' heat pumps which operate like air conditioners: a box with a big fan on it goes outside, a smaller box goes on the wall inside). Warm air is blown out of the inside unit, the heat from which is captured from the air outside.

There are also 'air to water' heat pumps which heat water and operate like a boiler: they can also do hot water - it may work out better to install one of those and new radiators as that will also make hot water for you. With modern flexible plastic pipework it isn't as awkward to install pipework as it used to be with copper.

It should cost about a third of the cost of storage heaters to run (although maybe a bit more since the heat pump can't really use Economy 7 electricity apart for maybe hot water)

Outside somewhere - can be on a wall like an outdoor air conditioner you may have seen in hot countries, or some have a standalone unit that looks more like a barrel. It is possible to site it some distance away, with a bit of loss of performance through the insulated pipework.

Not strictly, but it might be a condition of the grant to remove them.

E7 is generally a bad deal unless you can use a lot of your energy in the night time. Most single-rate tariffs give you a much lower rate than E7 day rate, which would be the time you'd run the heat pump. There are also cheaper 'smart' tariffs which give you cheaper rates at certain other times of day, or depending on market energy prices.

I would guess the storage heaters aren't very efficient (eg warm up the house in the daytime when the sun is out, and run out by evening when you want the heat) so I would expect the heat pump to be cheaper overall even despite the tariff differences (maybe not 3x, but still cheaper).

It is hard to say without knowing the size of your house, the temperature you keep it, what other appliances you run, etc, as well as the tariff you're paying (a pre-Ukraine fixed tariff could be much cheaper than the current ones). Your bill should say how many kWh you use per year, that's a good figure to start from.

Heat pumps are generally happier if you keep the place at a semi-constant temperature. They are less efficient if you let it get cold and then try to warm it up in a hurry. If you're at home all the time that's perfect; if you weren't I'd suggest keeping the heating on at a medium temperature during the daytime so the heat pump doesn't have to work hard to warm it when you got home in the evening.

You don't want to control it like a boiler (with a hot/cold off/on thermostat), and most of the controls designed for boilers are unsuitable.

Theo

They're not floor to ceiling. If you have existing thin radiators they may need replacing with thicker radiators (technically single-panel to double- or triple- panel, maybe with extra convectors). That need not take up a lot of extra space than making the radiator a couple of inches thicker. They might take up a bit more wall area than the storage heaters. Most of ours are say 1600mm x 600mm or thereabouts, K21 or K22.

Since they run at a lower temperature, it's ok to put low furniture up to them if you leave maybe an inch or two gap (I'd not put a wardrobe, but a sofa is fine)

Most people's radiators are mounted horizontally (below windows, for example). If you choose to mount them vertically, I suppose the vertical radiators might be floor to ceiling, but only a couple of feet wide :-)

Although if you use an air to air unit then the wall units are typically smaller than storage heaters, and just needs thin (insulated) refrigerant piping to the outdoor unit.

The control system will handle that, it's a legal requirement to do so otherwise the hot water is unsafe.

It's only likely to need a new CU if it is a very old consumer unit, eg with rewireable fuses. If it's been installed this century it's probably ok. It is possible to install a new circuit in an older CU as long as the new circuit is able to meet regs.

The electrician will do calculations to ensure you're not going to exceed your electricity supply - it may be that would entail removing the storage heaters since you could blow the supply fuse if you ran both at once. (the current standard is a 100A supply fuse, but older properties can be on

I posted my one year numbers in this thread:

Theo

Interesting question. So all heat pumps work in the same way, like a fridge, so they can move "heat" from a cooler to a hotter. They use energy to do this, but less energy than they move. Typically between 3 and four times as much.

One of the reasons they give out grants for air to water heatpumps is that they are expensive to install. I personally don't like them as pumping water round seems inefficient, but the vendors will stress you only get a grant with these, so try and sell them to you but for that you would needs pipes and radiators.

You don't say how many rooms you have but I would say in your situation you might be better swapping the storage heaters for air-2-air heatpumps. Commonly sold as air conditioning they will use about 1/3 of the electricity that your Storage units use for the same amount of heat.

Looking at the E7 Tarrif you would save money....

.. but on the other hand some people find aircon noisy and intrusive but of course it will also cool in this nasty hot weather....

Dave

Not necessarily. They just have to be sized correctly for the room's heat loss and the temperature of the feed water. It could be that the radiators need to be perhaps 2x or 3x the depth of what may be fitted with a conventional boiler. This may only add 10cm to the depth of a radiator. A lot depends on how well the house is insulated. Ideally a large radiator in the form of underfloor heating works well with heat pumps.

In the case of the OP the storage radiators would need to go and probably a water based radiator CH heating system installed.

Isn't the house already de-carbonised if they haven't got a boiler and are using electric storage heaters?

During the various lockdowns we streamed a number of TV series of the fictional kind. After a while I began to notice in people’s houses large ‘things’ mounted floor to ceiling. These were present in buildings where the action was set in Finland, Sweden, Norway, Germany, Poland, and the UK, and they all looked very similar. I could only conclude these were low-temperature radiators probably being driven by a heat pump. I mentioned it because the OP might need to consider the implications.

And the advice by another poster to avoid cold-callers is crucial to avoiding a botched job; reputable installers tend to be fully booked, only the cowboys are looking for jobs and their £100 companies will disappear when the grants end.

This will be a major installation for the OP, with many ‘gotchas’ along the way. She will need to do a lot of research.

A heat pump should reduce the gas needed to generate their electricity. Even if they only used green electricity it should reduce the emissions needed to built capacity to meet peak needs.

Can you find a picture of the 'things'?

A number of other countries don't use water-based heating systems like we do, they use air-based systems. So they don't have radiators, they have either room fan coils or a central heat exchanger and air ducting. Some use radiant electric panels where electricity is cheap enough, or the house is so well insulated that you don't need very much heat. It doesn't follow that their heating system design has any similarity to ours.

You can of course fit floor to ceiling radiators if that's the aesthetic you're going for - if it's post-industrial scandi noir then maybe that's the look the art director wants, I couldn't say.

Theo

This is the nearest I could easily find:

To my mind there are two separate issues here; firstly the solar panels and battery are a good idea and will save you money on your electricity bills.

Eco4 has many qualifying requirements you may get the solar panels but unlikely to include the battery.

Secondly the case of a heat pump to replace your storage heaters this will be a case of economics, you say your electric bills are around £1320 approx (6*70)+(6*150).

Bearing in mind a heat pump will not normally provide domestic hot water, you might reduce this to around £1000 (6*70)+(6*95).

For a heat pump and radiator installation budget between £6k to £8k.

So you might save £350 a year therefore the payback is 15 to 20+ years.

If your storage heaters are working OK, I would stick with them.

All figures are rule of thumb and approximate so don't take them as gospel!

Indeed. My sister was unaware of what heating system she had in sweden, beyond it was underfloor, and Just Worked ™

IIRC it was simple resistive wires. I saw the same in France, Both countries who derive the majority of their electric supply from Nuclear and Hydro, and don't havce to piss around trying to extract 4:1 from a heatpump when its -25°C outside., dark and there is no wind...

Realistically if you are building from scratch you tend to use UFH everywhere or even in-wall water pipes to give a large area of slightly warm. Radiators are really a thing of the past and should never have been used on new builds at all since 2000 or so

They all do that I have come across.

Jack,

You are missing one factor, that is how much day time electricity does he use and pay for. The E7 tarrif promises cheaper overnight electricity, but the day time rate is horrendous, typically 35p a unit so around 16% more expensive than the cap.

Dave

Dave

The grants are mostly about fuel poverty not decarbonisation. If you're a pensioner in a windswept cottage with a single one bar electric fire you run for an hour a day because you can't afford any more heating, you're emitting a lot less carbon than a millionaire's castle with roaring coal fires in every room, but in the first case the resident is suffering through being cold, and a better heating system would allow them to be warmer within their limited budget.

For those in fuel poverty situations, it makes sense to also fix the decarbonisation problem by installing low carbon heating, which is why you can't get oil heating and only limited gas heating on the schemes.

It sounds like the OP's storage heaters are still a fuel-poverty situation because it's unaffordable to just run them when you want heat, you have to take your limited amount of heat at the mercy of the timer, which makes them inefficient in terms of delivering a comfortable house. And so the risk is you will still be cold, or will economise in the face of the running costs and so end up cold.

Theo

My screenreader says roman 20 for your xx by the way. Well, I'm on a fixed rate on a smart meter with no gass, and have e7 and have three storage heaters. The official non subsidised by government bill would have been £609, With the subsidy, which has now ended by the way, it was around 474, which was actually cheaper than it used to be. What people often forget is that it may seem high, but if you had gas aand added the two bills you soon get to a similar level no matter what you cook with. Its swings and roundabouts. It would be nice to have a heat pump to keep cool during this hot weather and warm in the winter, but I don't think for older people this is cost effective. Brian

There is an advert in the local paper ( weekly) I saw today saying much the same as I was called up about. . It looks like a government one and it says "Grants 4 hi" They also say that it is not necessarily benefit dependent but income dependent. Its got a Cornwall Council logo on it too. I looked at the page and there they were saying that replacement storage heaters might be an option if the ones in situ were over 10 years old. Mine are from the 1970's.( Yes they do still work but I only usually have two of them on - the living room and the bedroom. The rest I usually use convector heaters for quick heat and an open fire in one room.

I am not sure I want the disruption for a radiators to be fitted or holes in the walls to put in ventilators for air conditioning/heating. I had been attracted by the solar panels - apparently they are also available . All is subject to a survey and you applying by putting in your name and address.

OK, so that's not a lot bigger than a regular radiator rotated 90 degrees. It is possible it's taller than it needs to be, because a radiator that leaves a gap between it and the ceiling looks weird.

Also vertical radiators are less effective than horizontal ones, which may be why it's larger. This one also has no fins which would make it less efficient too, and the actual surface area is not that great.

Looking at that particular one, for the rad 1802x564x101mm, the heat output is 5530 BTU/hr at 75C flow temp. At 75C a boring cheap Stelrad white 600x1800mm panel has:

K1 (single panel single convector): 6019 BTU/hr P+ (double panel single convector): 8273 BTU/hr K2 (double panel double convector): 1073 6BTU/hr

Basically it's mostly optimised for aesthetics and not for effectiveness. Which is what you might go for in a post-industrial designer apartment, but is pretty terrible for actually doing the radiator thing.

What is quite possible is that apartment is so well insulated you don't actually need very much heat, and so you put in a pathetic designer radiator because anything else would be overkill. Another thought is the building has a communal heating system (very common in continental Europe), rather than a heat pump.

Theo