OT: Heat pumps

Because heat pumps are seen as a way to move away from gas, not towards it (i.e. they're not to save money).

If you use air2air , i.e. AirCon type units you can save a little. My Electricity is almost exactly four times the cost of my gas so if I can get a COP of more than four I can make money.

I understand that heat pumps which heat water struggle to reach this level of performance because they need to heat the water to a high temperature. Air2Air can get a little better...

Because its about reducing co2 emission. This does not achieve this.

Dave

Because the whole point is to get rid of gas. Which is plentiful cheap and reliable. And replace it with moonbeams and pixie dust, which are much more attractive

Ble4ss. It was never about reducing CO2 emissions,. It was always about central control of energy and making money.

Gas powered heat pumps would reduce CO2 emissions (but not eliminate them of course) and would be cheaper to run than electric ones. But when I last read about them they were bigger and more expensive to install.

They have some other advantages in that they are better able to produce high temperatures and would not require such an upgrade to the electricity grid.

-- Richard

But much of the electricity is generated using gas so using electricity doesn't necessarily reduce gas consumption, it just moves it somewhere else.

I found a government-commisioned report on them (ten years old now):

-- Richard

AIUI, an electric heat pump does reduce gas consumption, even if gas is used to generate the electricity. This is due to the heat pump Coefficient Of Performance (COP). Heat pumps have a COP of something like 3-4. Electric gas generation is a tad over 50% efficient, so you end up with a heat pump being ~1.5x more efficient in terms of gas usage.

Unfortunately the whole heat pump setup is more complicated/costly. Which is my problem with home insulation/heating improvements, I never spent much heating my home in the first place, I'm happy in a relatively cold house, so it is hard to stomach the "efficiency" improvements as they are economically costly.

Thanks, informative.

I thought about these years ago, and found that report (or a similar one) recommending them as a stop gap measure whilst we ramp up non-CO2 electricity generation. They are an obviously good idea, at least as a stop gap, but the minister at the time vetoed it as he wanted to move over to entirely electric heat pumps.

There's an Italian firm that's been making gas powered heat pumps since the 1950's - Robur SPA.

Einstein co‑invented an absorption refrigeration/heat‑pump cycle in 1926 with his former student Leo Szilard.

Still, what was good enough for a genius like Einstein wasn't good enough for a UK govt minister. Who'd have thunk it?

It's a dumb idea in the long run. The problem is that a heating installation lasts ~20 years, which means that installing a gas heat pump today will lock in gas consumption for the next 20 years.

Meanwhile, if you install an electric heat pump you can change how carbon intensive your heating is by changing the supply side - if you replace gas generation with renewables or nuclear then you can do that without homeowners having to alter their system. As the carbon intensity of the grid falls over time, so does the carbon intensity of everyone's heating.

If gas heatpumps were for a 5-10 year stopgap that would be a different thing, but the cost of installation and de-installation would not make that economic. Especially since for that to happen they would have to be a product you could buy in the average plumber's merchant, and at the time they were still a long way off that. It was better to put the development funding into improving electric heat pumps, which was the eventual end goal anyway.

Theo

If they managed to persuade someone to spend more on a gas powered heat pump than a gas boiler, how likely do you think that person will be to comply in future when told that was just a stop-gap and that they now need to replace it again with a more expensive to run electricity powered heat pump?

That would have to be the first 'green technology' that had the aim of improving it.

When I left home and rented my first flat (in the 1960s) my aunt gave me a fridge that she had stopped using because she needed a bigger one. She described it as "an electric gas fridge".

It was an absorption refrigerator that used a small electrical heater instead of the gas flame it had been designed for, and it worked for the

I can't see that system being used in the future, because it used ammonia as a refrigerant, and ammonia is a banned substance for that use these days.

You forgot to mention the unicorn saliva

And wombat turds

They're still made in quantity, especially small ones for hotel rooms and caravans. Don't know what the chemicals are though.

Apparently criminal gangs have cottoned-on to banned refrigerant gasses being lucrative commodities ...

Ammonia ?.

I had one at home for a few years. It had an electric heater and wasn't very efficient. Electrolux would sell kits to run it on Gas (incl bottled) or kerosene. Handy for places in Africa and the Aussie outback with no leccy on tap.