Owning your own home

Check with your broker, HSBC actually dropped the majority of their rates today, effective from Tuesday next week.

Also your broker should be able to explain the solicitors fee, it’s very likely that it’s not an additional cost, it’s an estimate.

If you look at your solicitors quote, they sometimes break it down and put a line like ‘fee for dealing with mortgage lender’ with maybe £200 on there.

The bank has no visibility of the solicitors quote, so put a generic figure that is not usually paid twice.

Depending on the loan to value, lenders can do electronic income verification and electronic valuations and offers for a number of lenders can be practically instantaneous.

I had a mortgage offer for a client in 30 seconds the other day.

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Yes, you should be able to request a new product even though you’ve got an offer. Change the product and they’ll issue an updated offer.

The new rates don’t exist until Tuesday, so you’ll have to check then. Looks like they are reducing pretty much all their fixed rates, but can’t say about yours specifically.

Our (just in case things are worse in 6 months) mortgage offer came through yesterday and the valuation was listed as the same as Zooplas

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It won’t be much more nuanced

I have heard some say that

So borker and I felt they would ask the least amount of questions because they can see I am not a drug dealer

I mean, they are also the bank that had the deferred prosecution for billions of dollars in transactions with literal drug dealers*.

* among other crimes past and present.

Anybody here with experience of installing an air source heat pump in a house?

Ours is half installed and I’m a nerd. Whatcha wanna know?

Awesome. Actually, I asked the wrong question I think but would really appreciate your opinion anyway.

We're (probably) buying a rural house. It is five miles from the gas grid so gas is a no go. It is currently reasonably well insulated (with lots of room for improvement) but with a little time and money spent should end up being well wrapped up.

Currently it is electric only throughout. I.e hot water cylinder and storage heaters.

If you have a rural home with no gas, does ASHP make sense for hot water and heating? Or should we be considering adding solar too?

We want to do this properly from the start which means doing disruptive stuff before we move our stuff in.

Sounds like an ideal candidate for an ASHP, or ground source if you have the cash. Find a friendly MCS registered plumber to hang an old boiler on your wall and claim the boiler upgrade scheme grant too.

We don’t have a bit of roof with the right aspect so I’ve not looked into it much, but solar would be an ideal addition. Handily it can also be added later if / when prices come down. You could be off grid running the HP from a battery bank.

If you have to replace the cylinder (almost certainly, with an unvented type) I think there’s specific ones made for multiple heat sources, but that may be just direct solar hot water, like pipes on the roof type thing.

Ideally you’d have wet underfloor heating with a HP but big rads work fine too.

If you want to get into it Heat Geeks videos and website have loads of info as well as a directory of installers. We went off-the-shelf cheapest installer, as I’m really on top of things I think it’ll be fine but they’re defo working to a bottom line rather than super-efficiency, which is really the game with HPs. In retrospect I’d go with a Heat Geek expert person, but only found out about it after we’d got going.

A HP will do heating and hot water on its own no problem. Solar is a nice but expensive addition to go off grid.

Also worth looking into Octopus or British Gas ASHP installs, they’ll be the cheapest, but are very off-the-shelf and generally geared towards a direct swap for an existing gas boiler.

@Nahguavkire knows all about this stuff iirc

I agree with all this. ^

We’ve had an ASHP for a year. I’d not do anything else. Ground source is tough to justify as the installation costs are many multiples of the yearly cost saving.

Doing underfloor may seem a big expense but if you’re insulating lots (which you should, that’s the most important thing by a mile) you’ll need to break out the floor to insulate it anyway so the cost isn’t loads more than radiators.

Solar isn’t essential. Even with a big battery set up and loads of panels you’ll struggle to run the heating off it all the time because it’s not sunny enough in the winter.

Really appreciate the detailed replies @dbr and @Hefty

This is not something I know anything about so we have a fair bit of learning to do.

Floor is solid so will be a ballache to get into for insulation but as @hefty says, it sounds like it will be worthwhile in the end. If we're going to be going into the floor and making a load of dust we might as well do the wiring too. Its only a small place.

Have you seen Homely? Like Tado for HPs, looks well good.

You can easily rout (sp?) channels into a concrete floor, for wet underfloor heating. We relocated a run of heating pipes in the extended bit of our place (concrete floor, pipes in front of the skirting and wiring in trunking, both of which we didn’t like).

Good luck!

Doesn’t this leave you just heating up the concrete block under the floor though?

I am in the same situation as @Stonehedge - minus the good insulation - storage heaters, vented cylinder, concrete slab.

I assume I will need to dig down, which sounds horrendous, get new cavity wall insulation (mine is ~30+ years old), and in the first place new windows…

Very interested in general on this topic, specially intrigued by @dbr’s boiler scheme plan!

If you have a rural home with no gas

I had thought that oil (intermittently delivered by truck) was traditionally the cheapest solution to this? Obviously not future-proofed or particularly green.

I don’t know about wet underfloor heating to be honest; ours is an electrically heated pad in the bathroom which I guess is like an electric blanket.

I was just making the point that concrete flooring shouldn’t necessarily be a showstopper for wet underfloor heating, particularly if the plan is to gut and redo the place before moving in.

You make a good point though: concrete would be quite the heat sink.

As @Howard mentioned this is indeed my area of expertise but to be honest everyone else here has covered it nicely! Unless you have the means of installing the collector yourself I would be quite content with an ASHP these days though if you have access to a digger and a few helpful mates it's not really a terribly tricky job to do a collector...
The most important thing to note is to make sure you have a buffer tank, insist on this and if the installer says it's not necessary I'd look elsewhere. As a general rule of thumb, the bigger the buffer the better... even with inverter driven HPs, a buffer will reduce starts of the compressor and ensure there is sufficient volume in the system to lose the heat from the compressor after runs which will increase longevity.

If UFH is in anyway conceivable I'd say do it. As mentioned before there are lots of ways to install it nowadays with cutting machines etc. and aside from reduced running costs the comfort is just another level compared to radiators.

If you have someone local to fit it and the budget suits I'd recommend Viessmann, they're the best quality domestic machines out there at the moment, I put one in my place.

Any other questions fire ahead and I'll do my best to help!