Gas boiler ban brought forward.

[The Natural Philosopher]

You must demolish your house, clearly

[Brian Reay]

Where will these new builds be built?

The tree huggers object to green field land being used. The supply of brown field land is limit. Due to mass immigration the demand for housing has rocketed. Ditto the demands on services such as schools, hospitals etc which need land, not to mention water, energy, transport, .....

[Steve Walker]

Ah, so even more expensive and unaffordable to the average householder, especially as an emergency purchase.

How many weeks or months to get someone to come and prepare the ground?

As a larger pump, needing more input power and running on expensive electricity, it is going to push ther bills up even more, when many cannot afford it now.

SteveW

[Steve Walker]

It is new build at the moment, but as the market shrinks, manufacturers will stop making gas boilers, even if governments don't ban them completely - look how quickly 4* and then LRP disappeared, leaving people with older, maybe classic vehicles having to use unsuitable unleaded petrol. Now it all has 5% ethanol in and will, at some stage, be going up to 10%, despite E10 fuel attacking the fuel lines and brass components of older fuel systems and severely damaging them.

SteveW

[Andy Burns]

There seem to be a slim handful of garages still selling 4*

[RJH]

Yes - but that's on a different scale and level of seriousness. 21m households rely on gas for heat, cooking and hot water. Maybe a couple of 1000 motorists affected? Most of whom could convert to standard fuel if they needed to keep the vehicle that badly.

I'd think spares will be available for many years after a total ban on new installations. Which is itself many years off (if at all).

The most likely sign of phasing in will be hiking of tax rates for domestic gas. Cost will be *the* key driver of change IMHO.

Only if it can be shown beyond reasonable doubt that you/yours are affected by gas consumption will the motivation shift and cost start to become less important - bit like smoking.

[invalid]

IIRC the ban was on supplying gas to new builds not supplying boilers.

[alan_m]

It will be interesting to see if the ground can recover on an estate with so many bore holes? Around my way housing estates are being build with only postage stamp size gardens.

[RJH]

That'd maybe get one ball rolling - but affect re/sale values. So, without subsidy, homes wouldn't get built in the first place.

[Brian Reay]

If we are force to switch to electric heating, there is the problem of supplying the power. Not only in terms of generation but delivery. Not all houses have cabling which is adequate for even the added load of a EV charger*, let alone domestic heating.

*it is one of the things which was checked under the free charger scheme. Ours was ok, although we needed the main fuses upgrading. One of the things the man who did that mentioned was not all houses had adequate cabling to the house for the additional load.

[tabbypurr]

So currently we burn gas, recovering over 90% of the heat. Instead someone wants us to turn gas to electricity at around 40% efficiency and with the cost & ungreeness of building & running power stations, and use that to hear houses at 3 or 4 times the cost, and either use 2-2.5x as much gas to do so or drill holes in & freeze the local environment, affecting home grown food crops. You couldn't make it up.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

That's going to be ever so easy in the average block of flats.

[Andrew]

Londoners will be ok. That Super Sewer will hold lots of fementing s**te, so they could put a huge ground source loop down there :-)

[mm0fmf]

But Boris has promised we'll have fusion power by 2040 so they will produce "electricity too cheap to meter". I think I've heard that phrase before.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

My old car is 35 years old, yet runs happily on standard unleaded. Any old vehicle may need some adaptation to be used today anyway.

But are you saying there was no need to ban the use of lead in things like petrol? Just another nutty 'green' thing?

[Brian Reay]

My wife did a research project at Uni re lead pollution from lead in petrol. In simple terms, it involved seeing how far from roads the pollution actually spread.

The distance was amazingly short, 10s of metres, certainly not 100m.

On stretches where the cars were free running (ie not junctions), the levels were markedly lower. This was around 1977 when leaded petrol was the norm.

I'm not suggesting lead in petrol was a good thing but the idea it polluted everywhere is nonsense.

[Steve Walker]

Oh they made a small exemption, but it is a tiny amount and most people are not near any of the few garages still stocking it. The point was more about LRP - how long did that stay in the majority of garages? Certainly most people now will have little choice but to use unleaded and an additive on a pre-unleaded car.

SImilarly, once new builds cannot have gas boilers, how long will it be before manufacturers stop making them or stockists stop stocking them?

SteveW

[Steve Walker]

What I said was that 4* was phased out, but Lead Replacement Petrol followed pretty quickly after. Garages simply stopped stocking it, as sales declined. If new builds cannot have gas boilers, it is likely that one at a time, manufacturers will stop making them. A point will then rapidly be reached where they are not available - leaving people with a failed boiler with a major problem.

SteveW

[ARW]

So there are still 23m houses with gas boilers that are not new builds.

[Steve Walker]

Yes, amd that document looks at moving existing housing stock away from gas boilers - suggesting hybrid systems with a heat pump combined with a small, top-up boiler (so even more complex and expensive) to adequately heat existing homes; conversion to Hydrogen (a far more dangerous gas than natural gas); and more loan facilities to allow people to replace with heat pumps and upgrade insulation (still a lot more cost for households - assuming they have a sufficiently good credit rating to obtain such a loan). It is clear that, although not immediately, they do intend to move everyone away from natural gas boilers - which will leave many people, some years down the line, with only a very expensive, complex and slow to install upgrade instead of a simple replacement, for a boiler failure.

SteveW