Great news, though I may be late to the champagne party?
It is possible to install domestic air conditioning without paying VAT.
Upgrade your home, live the dream ...
Who thought not distinguishing between heat pumps and aircon was a good idea?
I'm pretty sure that each time they have given incentives to install heat-pumps, they have not applied that incentive to reversible ones that can cool as well.
But with some, it's a simple case of replace or remove a wire link between two terminals inside, and cooling is magically available, just look for the spanish installer's instructions rather than the uk instructions ...
They have.
When I did this in 2005, you could pay a reduced rate of 5% VAT IIRC. However, everywhere that was setup to charge the reduced VAT charged more and the benefit was more than completely lost.
I went for a B&Q system when it was on special offer and paid full VAT, which was the best value system I could get at the time. It's still working today. I did buy it for cooling, but it's actually been used much more for heating.
I ran an experiment in the light of gas prices going up. I turned off my central heating on 2nd Feb, and used only the air sourced heat pump since then. It only properly heats the main downstairs room, but also the hall and kitchen enough. Total cost of running the air sourced heat pump from 2nd Feb to 2nd May was £38.79 (allowing for price rise part way through) - vastly less than central heating. (On 3 nights during that period, the central heating did come on due to a frost stat kicking in in the loft.) I slept in the main room on a camp bed with the temperature setback to 16C overnight (which happens to be the lowest you can set it).
My unit puts out 3.5kW according to the rating plate, and uses just under 1kW electricity (measured) although the rating plate says more. Mostly it was running on a low duty cycle (it's not an inverter unit, although I suspect they probably all are nowadays). One really nice thing about it is the room can be freezing cold, but within 3 mins of switching on, it feels warm. I also found it worked perfectly well even when temperature well below freezing outside.
This experiment has made me consider fitting another unit upstairs. I haven't got as far as looking for another split unit self-fit kit though, and B&Q only sold them for a couple of years, 2005-2006. (Fitting wasn't easy, and I guess many people many have screwed it up.) What made it financially viable was the DIY installation, as professional installation charges way exceeded the cost of the units at the time. I think the unit was around £450 at the time, which was £200 for the inside unit and £250 for the outside unit (which is very heavy). I do actually have another unit I saved from my parents house when they moved out, although it had been broken for some time - it lost its gas when builders put scaffolding up around the outside unit, so they probably clobbered it at some point and generated a leak which would need finding and fixing.
I also discovered that a crappy camp bed I used with no mattress during the experiment doesn't give me the back-ache that the nice bed I have upstairs does.
Andrew
Hmmmm,
"The zero rate / 0% will not apply to the material or equipment itself when bought from a supplier on its own. To qualify for the 0% rate VAT the AC installer has to be the one supplying the unit and can then Zero rate VAT his whole supply to the domestic customer thus saving the customer the VAT had they gone and purchased it from the open market."
More jobs for the buys, let's screw the DIY installers as usual.
Always the way with government schemes and it's not just DIY.
Many years ago I looked converting my car to LPG. Funnily enough every installer that was on the government scheme (presumably paying to be part of it) charged more (by exactly the amount of the grant) than those that weren't - despite all having to be qualified and registered to install such systems anyway and therefore there being no justification to discriminate between them!
I similarly have been experimenting using only use the the heat pump, not for domestic hot water, but for radiators in bathroom and living room. Hot water is derived from electric shower on a demand basis. It works out at £2.50/day over 60 days.
open a window or get a swamp cooler
Which system is that? Thinking of similar . . .
In real life, even though it's pregassed so you don't need cylinder of gas, you really want to evacuate the loop and leak test it - that's a couple of hundred pounds worth of kit you need to do that.
You could DIY install the unit and pipework and just get an F-gas person to do the connection and testing though.
Theo
I would like to suggest the reverse is now true and no allowing the VAT reduction on AirCon would be a very bad idea.
I think that installing Air or Ground to Water heat pumps is a bad idea and we will have problems with it the long run.
Firstly if summer temperatures continue to rise we will want cooling. Vulnerable people will need cooling if heat related deaths are to be avoided. The type of heat pumps being installed now don't deliver that.
Secondly the forced air circulation from an properly sized AirCon unit quickly produces a much more even heat throughput the room. I think radiators will go the way of storage heaters.
I am still on an old tariff so only paying 3.83p/kw for gas and 19.28p for electricity so I still think, for the present the gas is better value.
Dave (p.s. I also feel such government schemes are seen by the suppliers as an excuse to ratchet the price up, so I am not sure us punters benefit)
Not so good if your heating works by radiator or underfloor. You'll just get higher humidity and water dripping everywhere. Cooling systems have to dehumidify as well as cool the air.
Actually, they mostly do. It's just that, due to the old RHI rules, UK distributors have been forced to downplay or strike out mention of cooling from their spec sheets. But the same units are sold in other countries where cooling is a feature, and often it's trivial to re-enable.
However the main problem isn't the unit, it's the emitters: radiators aren't good for cooling. Fan coils are the primary solution to that, along with some UFH, but that requires extra plumbing.
A phase-change refrigerant as in an A/C or air2air ASHP system is more efficient, but you need an extra outdoor unit for that.
Air has a low heat capacity, so you have to force a *lot* of air to get the same BTUs in. That's noisy, dusty, and hard to distribute. Most houses aren't ducted, so you're going to depending on wall mounted coils blowing air through relatively small apertures, which makes them loud.
If your primary goal is cooling (ie much of southern Europe) with heating less necessary, A2A makes sense. For us, where we want 90% heating and 10% cooling, A2A is less attractive.
There is a view that the point of the schemes is to fund the training budget for the installers - ie to incentivise train up the industry - and consumers should not expect to see the benefit. I think a better plan would be to offer free courses and subsidise the hardware so the customer does not bear the brunt of the training cost and a DIY install can be cost effective.
Theo
When cooling a whole house, during an air conditioner run, the condensate might amount to a gallon of water.
Normally there's a condensate line that runs off somewhere. My condensate line runs to the sump pit.
If you install a split-unit, there might be a drain line on it.
On a window air conditioner, some of those just drip the water on the outside-the-house side. A few are civilized enough, to have a drain connection.
And for comfort, temperature and humidity go hand in hand. If you cool a room too fast, the air does not get dried out, and the result is the participants feel "clammy".
For example, if I cooled my house from 80F to 70F in two hours, the air feels "clammy" and unpleasant.
If instead, it takes five hours to go from 80F to 70F, that allows sufficient time for the humidity to drop to 40%RH.
The salesman can eyeball your thermal gain, and estimate the capacity of system needed in "tons" as a unit of measure. He knows the right size, would give a five hour run, like my example.
The benefit of dry air, is the next day, when the sun beats down, you can allow the house to be a bit warmer before switching on the AC. That's because the dry air in the house from the last run, helps keep you comfortable even when the temp starts to rise a bit. That will help you for part of the day. Maybe around 5PM, it will be too uncomfortable to leave it switched off.
I tend to run mine, when electricity is cheapest.
Running an air conditioner is similar to running a dehumidifier. And the dehumidifier has a tank that collects the condensate. Air conditioners don't bother with a tank, and it's "drain lines or look out".
Paul
with a monoblock air/ground to water heatpump you can have cooling either from a fancoil unit, or perhaps less effectively, underfloor cooling.
Both parts were pre-pressurised and a connected with a self-sealing connector. No pumping down or checking for leaks was required. Similar pre-pressurised extension pipework was available, but I didn't need any.
When I looked at the F-gas regs some time back, mine was still legal to self-fit, but I don't know if it's changed since then. F-gas reg wasn't required for installing this, but was required for searching for leaks, refilling, or emptying. (I haven't looked to see if this changed since.)
The easy-fit units on the web page above are not self-fit. I think there are units available nowadays which don't use a refrigerant requiring F-gas cert.
Andrew
It is an Airforce system, but that was a B&Q brand name of 17 years ago.
Andrew
Do like the Continentals do, have external shutter to keep the solar gain to a minimum. also very common on tower blocks in South America where I have seen aluminium louvre panels on sliding rails that can be pulled across the inward-opening windows.
And/or clad all south-facing walls with uPVC shiplap (or use the wodd-effect stuff) on battens. You could add some insulation in-between the battens too to reduce heat loss in winter.
In my house which has about 8" of concrete with UFH, in summer opening the curtains and windows at night drops the floor temp to under 25°C, and by day, when the air temp is over 30°C outside, if I SHUT the windows and draw the curtains, its stays at 25-27°C all day...a heat pump keeping the floor at 15°C would be excellent, but with one massive gotcha. In sultry weather you are likely to see floor level condensation.
And that is why aircon is air fed - so you can cool below final temps, drop the condensate out and then mix back to final temps.
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