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

We just had a heat pump installed last week, using Octopus and the £7500 bus grant. They upgraded all our radiators at the same time, I think in total it cost us around £2300. Some snagging issues which I'm hoping they'll work out.

If anyone's considering buying one and is interested in the process or my experience please shout, happy to share.

We’re booked in for the start of December also with Octopus. How are you finding it so far? Cost savings vs your previous setup?

Not gonna have much data after one week of snags!

Initial impressions are always crucial :-)

It's better for sure, but we were starting out from a very low base - we had an old immersion heater system, powered by gas, with very inefficient single bar radiators. Too early to be sure about cost savings (especially given that it's recently gotten cold so our energy usage profile has changed correspondingly) but we've gone from using 80% gas and 20% electricity to the opposite; and we're having to set the thermostat much lower to get to a comfortable temperature.

One thing to bear in mind - you'll have probably a few days during install where you don't have any heating or hot wat. That sucked in October but suspect it'll be worse in December. They'll bring mini heaters which help but try to be out of the house as much as you can during the middle part of the install if you've got the option.

Ok cool thanks. Hopefully the first week of December is a warm one!

Congrats! Sounds like a fairly smooth experience. Ours is planned for mid jan, in scotland, so I am looking at alternative accommodation as I don't think it will go down well with wife and child with no heating / hot water for a few days!

Is a power flush worth it ?
Just had five new column rads fitted , other 4 or so rads and boiler maybe 15-20 years old. Boiler man coming on Thursday to commission as we had a number of rads disconnected for decorating. Heating did seem to work ok, but we did find some sludge in the rads we binned . Funnily the boiler man is not convinced we need it( will check when he is here ) , I am happy to pay to extend life of new rads etc

..

My kids playroom needs a new rad. It will be a 500mm high type 21.

Do I get an 1100mm or 1600mm one as the cost is the same to within £1.

Dog will likely transfer to living in there also.

I would always get the biggest rad I could, then you can run on a lower temp.

Just takes longer to heat up was only thing my boiler chap said to me

Will take longer to heat up. But will warm the room quicker (I'm sure there are some maths involved here) and will stay warmer for longer...

Anything will be better than the antique single panel thing that got removed.

We ended up fitting massive column radiators ( as missus liked the look of them ) relative to the smaller efficient ones we removed , I was not sure the boiler would be up to it, but plumber said it would be fine and it was , just takes longer ..

I don't think I'd ever buy another column rad. The one in our kitchen does nothing but look "nice"

The 900mm standard rad on the other side of the room does all the graft.

These have a decent kick even with the boiler set at 45c

Edit - probably less than the k3 stelrads I've got though!

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All ours are triple column, one vertical and anthracite so the wrong colour but the total BTU is the same as old panel rads but bigger bore manifold and insulation/new glazing.
No issues heating up and that’s at a low(ish) flow temperature on boiler.

Any thoughts on power flush to keep our new column rads from rusting ?

They will rust anyway but with the correct dose of inhibitor in the system they will be fine and also rads rust when your constantly putting fresh water into the system.

Flushing works when the system is full of shite but doesnt prevent rads rusting.

Thanks . Maybe just some inhibitor then . Which I think might be the recommendation of the plumber, we will see ..

They love recommending powerflush, specially in summer 😂 The other day I got a second opinion from a local plumber doing an annual service and he told me I shouldn’t bother. He said you just need inhibitor if system is emptied and recommended a magnetic filter (whoever installed the system hadn’t put one)

a magnetic filter

Many companies will extend their warranty if one is fitted. Ours (Worcester Bosch) was 7 years without, 10 years with a magnetic filter.

When we had our boiler replaced they recommended a power flush, but having seen the before/after IR camera shots of the radiators I can see it was justified. Must have been no idea how many years of crap building up in most of our radiators.

Thanks both, we have a magna flow , new one as old one was leaking.. let’s see what he says on the power flush

It was smooth in terms of the install, and the installers were efficient on what they were being asked to do, but I got the impression the planners don't really talk to the installers. For e.g.

• the planners told us to demolish an old wall and install a new one to allow the heat pump to be wall mounted. that's fine - we wanted it wall mounted - but the wall mount requires an enormous bracket which, it became clear after installed, is so large it stops us opening our kitchen doors! If they'd told us a bracket of this kind would be required then we'd have just asked them to floor mount and saved ourselves three grand.

• the planners told us that we needed a survey which found we needed a reinforcement beam to our attic to ensure the cylinder tank didn't crash through our ceiling. again, fine, but then the installers didn't install it where the reinforcement beam was!

• finally they damaged our wall when trying to install a vertical radiator which I don't think we really needed. we were consulted on that so it's partially our fault, but we do now have a busted set of tiles on the wall which is a bit depressing.

Hopefully they'll resolve this stuff. Waiting on a response for them atm.