The UK has had a £5,000 subsidy since April 2022. This rose to £7,500 in October, one of the world’s most generous. It has not yet caught on, either because of half-hearted political leadership, or because Britain’s gas mafia has been especially clever in capturing the media.
Electricity from nuclear power is cheaper in France (although gas has been subsidised heavily since Putin’s war). This changes the calculus, but not by much.
It turned out that we qualified for the French scheme since our daughter lives in the farmhouse and is a French resident. A metropolitan company was in touch almost instantly. A team of Moldovans from Bordeaux installed the whole system a week later.
Total cost: €18,900 (£16,225) for a large 12 KW heat pump and a separate 200 litre Thaleos thermodynamic water heater. We should receive around €9,000 in state aid. That money has not arrived yet. Assuming it does, the bill amounts to £8,500 for the two systems.
We picked a Therma V Hydrosplit made by Korea’s LG Electronics with a top temperature of 65 °C. It uses R32 refrigerant as a working fluid with a global warming potential of 677 times CO2 if it ever leaks, three times less than the old R410 refrigerants.
We have changed no radiators. We have broken every rule by starting with the heat-pump before installing double-glazing or extensive insulation. Result? It works more or less as we hoped and expected.
The temperature in the radiators at full-throttle is almost too hot to touch, much as it was with the old gas boiler. It coped fine with the first deep frosts at -5°C.
While we have high heat in reserve, we have been running the pump at 40-44°C, rising to 48°C when it is very cold. This has been sufficient so far. Heat pumps save you most money when run them low for longer.
It is noisier than we expected, given that it is supposedly one of the quietest models at 44 decibels. This is not a problem for us. The machine is at the back of the house. It would be a problem if you had confined space, but then you would also have a smaller model.
The installation company cut corners. They left the old gas boiler and water heater behind, having told us that these would be removed. We have still not received a guarantee.
We cheat since we also have wood-burning stoves. I know, this is “problematic”, as they say in climate-land. But the wood comes from fallen oak trees on our own land. We cut them with an electric chainsaw, powered off solar panels. The round-trip carbon emissions are near zero, though pulled forward when compared to letting the wood rot. We are in the deep countryside.
Not everybody has free wood or this moral luxury. If you live in London or Manchester, your chimney smoke is polluting other people’s air with toxic particulates. If you import wood cut from Canada’s old forests and then shipped thousands of miles, it is worse than sticking with gas.
My heat pump experience in France
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The UK has had a £5,000 subsidy since April 2022. This rose to £7,500 in October, one of the world’s most generous. It has not yet caught on, either because of half-hearted political leadership, or because Britain’s gas mafia has been especially clever in capturing the media.
Electricity from nuclear power is cheaper in France (although gas has been subsidised heavily since Putin’s war). This changes the calculus, but not by much.
It turned out that we qualified for the French scheme since our daughter lives in the farmhouse and is a French resident. A metropolitan company was in touch almost instantly. A team of Moldovans from Bordeaux installed the whole system a week later.
Total cost: €18,900 (£16,225) for a large 12 KW heat pump and a separate 200 litre Thaleos thermodynamic water heater. We should receive around €9,000 in state aid. That money has not arrived yet. Assuming it does, the bill amounts to £8,500 for the two systems.
We picked a Therma V Hydrosplit made by Korea’s LG Electronics with a top temperature of 65 °C. It uses R32 refrigerant as a working fluid with a global warming potential of 677 times CO2 if it ever leaks, three times less than the old R410 refrigerants.
We have changed no radiators. We have broken every rule by starting with the heat-pump before installing double-glazing or extensive insulation. Result? It works more or less as we hoped and expected.
The temperature in the radiators at full-throttle is almost too hot to touch, much as it was with the old gas boiler. It coped fine with the first deep frosts at -5°C.
While we have high heat in reserve, we have been running the pump at 40-44°C, rising to 48°C when it is very cold. This has been sufficient so far. Heat pumps save you most money when run them low for longer.
It is noisier than we expected, given that it is supposedly one of the quietest models at 44 decibels. This is not a problem for us. The machine is at the back of the house. It would be a problem if you had confined space, but then you would also have a smaller model.
The installation company cut corners. They left the old gas boiler and water heater behind, having told us that these would be removed. We have still not received a guarantee.
We cheat since we also have wood-burning stoves. I know, this is “problematic”, as they say in climate-land. But the wood comes from fallen oak trees on our own land. We cut them with an electric chainsaw, powered off solar panels. The round-trip carbon emissions are near zero, though pulled forward when compared to letting the wood rot. We are in the deep countryside.
Not everybody has free wood or this moral luxury. If you live in London or Manchester, your chimney smoke is polluting other people’s air with toxic particulates. If you import wood cut from Canada’s old forests and then shipped thousands of miles, it is worse than sticking with gas.
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