Keeping your home warm / heating / energy crisis / insulation etc

Yeah, I posted a mini guide. Will try to find it.

Here you go.

Thanks! I had read the some form of tape might be required to join up the lagging. Relieved to see it's not necessary. I think my pipe dia are the same as yours but will double check.

No rodents (or no evidence of them) thankfully as our airbricks are all pretty solid.

Fantastic. Thanks.

Is there anything you'd do differently now on reflection?

With more money and time, fill the entire subfloor void with an insulated clay aggregate slab with embedded wet underfloor heating in screed on top.

Anyone got any experience of having a heat pump installed through Octopus? Looking like an attractive option with the gov grant

Not if your house isn't super modern and well insulated.

It is 2019 build

Why do you say that? Do you have a heat pump? I have 3x friends and family with heat pumps in leaky old uninsulated Victorian houses and they work absolutely fine, cheaper to run than previous gas boilers.

The gas lobby is really polluting the discourse around decarbonisation of home heating...

Not if your house isn't super modern and well insulated.

This is old data.

Think @Soul had some dealings with them, not that confidence inspiring as I recall.

Cancelled before install. Design was shit, dealing with then was shit.

They even still turned up (in 5 vans) on the agreed install date despite the contract being cancelled nearly a month prior.

They installed a neighbors heat pump recently and apparently did a shit job there too.

Saying that I haven't been following HP upgrades recently, but now you can slap a HP into any old property and it's cheaper to run than a gas boiler? Is this a new gas boiler or an old boiler.

How have things changed where you down need to super insulate your house now before putting in one?

What was the cost on install and outlay to get this saving on bills?

How have things changed where you down need to super insulate your house now before putting in one?

I might have misunderstood but I think the implication is that the government grant for installing an ASHP isn't available unless your home meets air tightness and insulation levels.

This has never been true. To qualify for the £7.5K grant you just needed an EPC of D or above, and loft insulation. The gov then removed the loft insulation requirement a while ago. There’s never been any mention of airtightness or anything else like that.

Any details on what was shit about the design?

Did you go with another provider or not yet?

Nothing has changed. It’s always been like this; the Telegraph/Daily Mail/gas lobby groups have just been working hard to poison the public discourse about heat pumps by seeding bullshit about them ‘not working in old houses’.

Tbf I think there's also been more than a few badly designed or installed systems which hasn't helped! Normal learning curve stuff for an industry adopting new tech really but obviously jumped on.

True, more than a few horror stories about bad installs done by companies set up just to harvest the grant money, and a largely poorly trained and apathetic workforce. These then get amplified in the press at the behest of gas lobbyists, and before you know it people think they know that heat pumps are ‘shit’ and ‘don’t work in the UK climate’.

Does your fridge ‘not work in an old house’? How about aircon?

‘not working in old houses

I think I've mentioned on here before how information on how this works in reality is incredibly sparse though.

When I was hunting around before I couldn't find one decent website on fitting a heat pump into a poorly insulated property with small radiators so it's easy to assume it doesn't work.

When you look at the stuff to compare running costs they always have the heat pump running at maximum efficiency too, I couldn't find anything on costs when they're running at 60 degrees.

They designed for a very high flow temp (45deg) which would deliver a horribly inefficient COP.

I guess they have skin in the selling energy game.

This also meant they could underspec the radiators / change fewer of them.

In addition to the above, I had the following issues:

1. 1 month delay when they refused to believe my AC unit wasn't defined as a heat pump for planning permission. The local planning officer I spoke to described their POV as aggressively unnecessary
   
2. 1 month before install, I got an email saying they were swapping out the specced hot water cylinder for a much cheaper, less efficient one (about 20% less efficient). As it was a fixed price quote, they were not changing the cost to me. All margin for them.
   
3. The final straw was when they said three weeks before install that they'd need to go through another home visit and potentially go through planning because the surveyor put the heat pump in the wrong place on their drawing despite being incredibly clear where it would go from the start.
   
   

The person who dealt with my install throughout was incompetent, slow to respond and impossible to get on the phone.

The gov then removed the loft insulation requirement a while ago

Interesting, thanks. It seems to be different in Scotland where @konastab01 and I are.

From https://www.homeenergyscotland.org/home-energy-scotland-grant-loan-terms-conditions

Loft and cavity wall insulation
If your property’s current energy report recommends loft and/or cavity wall insulation, you will need to install this before you can claim funding for other improvements.

We will only release funding when you send us a post-installation EPC which does not include a recommendation for either loft or cavity wall insulation. If loft and/or cavity wall insulation are not suitable for your property, then your application must include information from a qualified professional explaining this.

Thanks for this. My dealings with them so far have been good but will keep this in mind.

How did you get a view on what you thought the right flow temperature? Presumably this meant you weren’t happy with the radiator upgrades they were suggesting. Just did the heat geek quote as comparison and they are quoting a lot more.

We don’t need planning permission so that side is simpler for us.

Does anyone know of a loose bead cavity wall insulation system that doesn't then glue the beads together?

I've seen YouTube videos of Germans installing loose bead insulation in lofts and under floors and this seems like a good system to avoid all the risks of damp/moisture migration with shit UK installs.

I really need to get my house insulated properly but it was built by charlatans in 1979-80 and I already have moisture issues in the bathroom and by all windows.

Plus a timber window protrusion that is neither weather sealed or insulated to deal with (it's plasterboard to cavity to cladding) also none of my windows have cavity closers so cold air behind plasterboard direct to warm internal air= damp.

Who'd own a fucking house?

Any cost comparison simulators are useless, as every house is different. This is why to get the grant, the installer must do a full heat loss survey on your actual house which will give a vague estimate of running costs.

This heat loss survey often over-estimates energy requirements; ours suggested a parity in running costs (in kWh delivered) with gas, but in reality so far we’ve been using half the estimated energy and the house is at 21deg, not the 20deg design temperature.

With regards to radiators: they cost so little (relative to the total cost of an ASHP install) that it’s a no-brainer to upgrade any that need to be. But even if you don’t, the beauty of a heat pump system is that they all modulate the flow temp according to the weather, so your ‘design flow temperature’ will only ever be reached on a couple of really cold days/weeks of the year. The rest of the time it’ll be coasting along at 30deg or whatever, just slowly and constantly topping up just the right amount of heat in your house, keeping every room at a constant temperature. The radiators will never, ever feel warm to the touch.

This last bit is what the UK seems to have a hard time understanding: it’s not a gas boiler, and doesn’t work well if you try to run it like one. Program it to come on for a few hours in the morning and evening at full blast, and you’ll have an uncomfortable house and high running costs.