Rethinking the mindset for mass retrofit - a provocative idea

[Roger440]

6 minutes ago, JamesPa said:

Agreed with the first sentence.  Second less so, oil bills/gas bills/smart meter readings can be produced and analysed easily and will give a much more accurate indication than the current theoretical calculations.

 

I can tell you how much oil i use. 1600 lites a year. How are you going to work out the system design from that?

 

Id venture to suggest you cant. Plus, rule number one. Never believe anything the customer tells you. Got that t shirt too!

[Roger440]

7 minutes ago, JamesPa said:

Not necessarily.  Builders aren't liable for design mistakes by architects or structural engineers, they are only liable if they fail to follow the instructions.  A reputable builder will always reserve the right to question an architect or structural engineer, a reputable plumber can do the same.  This problem is soluble if it needs to be solved! 

 

I think you entirely missed my point

 

It wasnt about the design. It was about, effectively owning any problems with the existing system.

 

Bit like when i ran the workshop. Had a 944 in. Oil change, set of pads etc. When he picked it up, the clock was no longer working. (they are notorius for that btw). Well that was our fault, no amount of reasoning would change that. Never came back. Doubtless bad mouthed us to anyone that would listen.

 

The same will happen here. The customer has a problem, which in reality is unrelated to the work. However, heating now broken. Especially if short of money, the installer will get the blame, and be exptected to put it right, or be "outed" on social media. Thats just how it goes.

 

Fitting a "full" system gives you complete control of the end result, and allows you to stand behind it 100%. 

 

Anything else is a massive grey area.

 

All im doing is to say, look at it from the installers view point as well, even for the moment putting the profit element to one side.

 

Just comes back to the motivations. Whose interest is it in to do budget partial installs?

 

 

[JamesPa]

6 minutes ago, Roger440 said:

 

I can tell you how much oil i use. 1600 lites a year. How are you going to work out the system design from that?

 

Id venture to suggest you cant. Plus, rule number one. Never believe anything the customer tells you. Got that t shirt too!

Fairly easy, that figure tells us the total heat input, about 16MWh.  The amount of energy needed to heat a house with a given loss in a particular location is well established.  Your bills can be checked and you can be asked some simple questions about how you heat the house.  From this a whole house estimate of load can be calculated, certainly to an accuracy MUCH better than the theoretical calculations appear to produce (see graph upthread).  Really this is about the easiest part of the process.

 

If the current calculations gave an accurate answer we might not be having this discussion, but they are way out, so we are.

 

Finally oil really doesn't matter that much in the grand scheme of things, a tiny proportion of the heating in the country, so if we just did this for gas installations in the first instance it would suffice.  No need to rely on what the customer tells you, the gas supplier has the data.

[JamesPa]

1 minute ago, Roger440 said:

Just comes back to the motivations. Whose interest is it in to do budget partial installs?

 

All of us.  Unless these are done we wont fix our heating systems so they dont contribute to climate change.  So we have to make it work!

[JohnMo]

6 minutes ago, JamesPa said:

Whose interest is it in to do budget partial installs

 

9 minutes ago, Roger440 said:

Whose interest is it in to do budget partial installs

Think the terminology is wrong, I think it should be fit for purpose installs, not  a gold plated solution that skips everything to replace with new. So not an on the cheap install.

Edited April 28, 2023 by JohnMo
Missed the word not on final sentence

[markocosic]

6 minutes ago, Roger440 said:

Ref the WC, i was pondering this earlier in the week. Surely it cannot be beyond the wit of man to have it self learn. This isnt rocket science

 

Absolutely it isn't.

 

It's been around for years.

 

It comes built into the standard controls. 

 

Along with load compensation for those times when a purely temperature based curve isn't appropriate due to solar gains / internal gains.

 

 

 

If your heat pump is a heat pump designed by a heating company that is.

 

(as opposed to an air conditioning firm with little experience of hydronic heating)

 

 

e.g.

 

Buy the Vaillant package with the standard controls. Put them somewhere that they sense the air temperature and don't get hit by sun / draughts. Enable the adaptive heat curve?

 

It is absolutely not rocket science if one can RTFM.

 

 

Even my old VRC470 (controlling an old Ecotec 824 combi) has this adaptive heat curve function.

 

 

Don't try using it with time clock heating control though. Or auto learning a curve un summer / spring / autumn. 😉

 

 

And if you've actually done the sizing calcs to check what your radiators can do then you'll of course already know (well enough) what the curve should be and can largely leave it to the  manually set curve plus load compensation to choose an appropriate flow temperature.

 

 

Not a barrier to deployment.

[markocosic]

10 minutes ago, JamesPa said:

All of us.  Unless these are done we wont fix our heating systems so they dont contribute to climate change.  So we have to make it work!

 

You're cherry picking one line from a more comprehensive explanation of why capitalism is relevant here. And unpaid design time. Uncosted risks etc.

 

"Whose interest is in to do more work and accept more risk for less money?"

 

Not all. Yours. Not theirs.

 

Absolutely unrealistic to expect otherwise and plans that rely on this are doomed to fail.

[markocosic]

8 minutes ago, JohnMo said:

Think the terminology is wrong, I think it should be fit for purpose installs, not  a gold plated solution that skips everything to replace with new. So not an on the cheap install.

 

Fair point.

 

I think "Whose interest is in to do more work and accept more risk for less money?" is probably fairer.

[JamesPa]

17 minutes ago, markocosic said:

 

You're cherry picking one line from a more comprehensive explanation of why capitalism is relevant here. And unpaid design time. Uncosted risks etc.

 

"Whose interest is in to do more work and accept more risk for less money?"

 

Not all. Yours. Not theirs.

 

Absolutely unrealistic to expect otherwise and plans that rely on this are doomed to fail.

Agreed.  As you say in an earlier post supply market needs to expand and if necessary be tweaked by govt intervention.  It has to become in someone's interest.

 

And when plumbers replace a gas boiler they don't 'own the problems with the existing system'.  

Edited April 28, 2023 by JamesPa

[markocosic]

17 minutes ago, Roger440 said:

It wasnt about the design. It was about, effectively owning any problems with the existing system.

 

...

 

Fitting a "full" system gives you complete control of the end result, and allows you to stand behind it 100%. 

 

Absolutely

 

 

17 minutes ago, Roger440 said:

All im doing is to say, look at it from the installers view point as well, even for the moment putting the profit element to one side.

 

Just comes back to the motivations...

 

Somebody not giving me what I want? Clearly that person is my enemy/oppositon.

 

Something too expensive? Clearly that person needs to be made to charge less.

 

etc

 

 

Supply. Demand.

 

Prices fall if you increase the supply of trades people.

 

 

Price. Profit. Cost. Value.

 

Prices fall without sacrificing profits or quality if you remove the non-value-adding costs.

 

 

Their own time is the biggest avoidable cost for trades people.

 

Dead end sales efforts; doing automate-able tasks manually; wading through pointless paperwork; risking callbacks for things that aren't your fault etc.

 

 

You don't ask Elon to re-use the tyres and the floor mats from your old diesel VW. 

 

You wouldn't buy a new set of tyres and floor mats just before you're due to replace it either.

 

Apply the same to the house?

[JamesPa]

3 minutes ago, markocosic said:

Somebody not giving me what I want? Clearly that person is my enemy/oppositon.

Sounds like the argument the Brexit brigade are using to justify the mess they have made, so fair game apparently.

[SteamyTea]

1 hour ago, markocosic said:

You don't ask Elon to re-use the tyres and the floor mats from your old diesel VW. 

He maybe, via a roundabout route, using recycled materials.

[JamesPa]

I think its fair to say that a consensus has emerged on this thread (with a few exceptions of course) that, if we are to achieve the mass roll out of heat pumps that is necessary to achieve our climate change goals, changes must be made in the regulatory regime, in the installation industry and in the ‘toolbox’ with which the installation industry works.

 

The essential background is that today we install about 1.6M gas boilers each year of which 1.4M are retrofits.  Each gas boiler installed is an opportunity lost.  In 2022 we installed about 60,000 heat pumps.  The UK is 20^th on the eurpoean league table of heat pumps per person. (https://www.theecoexperts.co.uk/heat-pumps/top-countries). 

 

To achieve mass roll out it seems also to be generally agreed that the market needs to be opened up beyond the special purpose fly-by-night companies that have grown up to harvest the grant, don’t do a particularly good job, don’t have a roadmap to mass adoption and, through MCS, are stifling innovation and cost-effective system engineering.  Furthermore they are structured for, and probably quite happy with, low volume-high price.  Arguably this means opening it up to local plumbers and electricians, who today are excluded from the market, but certainly it means opening it up.  Some other work force changes may be needed as well, discussed above.

 

So in this post Im going to try to summarise the regulatory changes that it has been suggested are needed, and invite constructive comments.  Engineering/workforce changes will be summarised separately

 

The following was suggested by @markocosic

 

·       Kill the MCS stranglehold. That eliminates the fly-by-night grant chasers AND a good chunk of non value add tasks. You keep the requirements (e.g. the technical requirements with regards noise for permitted development) but make it the job of planners to enforce planning conditions (e.g. please prove it's adequately quiet, where here are the requirements lifted from the old MCS standards, and if you meet them them it's deemed fine, but you don't need to partake in the rest of the MCS charade)

 

·       Relax a few planning conditions too. They're asking for units to be too small. It should be permissible to have both a heat pump and an air conditioner. There shouldn't be stupid restrictions on siting R290 propane units near to doorways whilst it's still ok to keep two 15 kg propane cylinders inside your house.

 

·       Take a chill pill. AC in cars is ubiquitous. Let people do AC in houses more easily. Don't mandate that in order to receive grant funding the heat pump must deliver heat AND hot water. Chop the available grant to £1k and apply the condition that it's a packaged/tested solution with a  sCOP of 5 or above. It's pish easy to install A2A units in this ball park. They work. People will rave about them.

 

In a related forum, the following package of liberalisation measures was proposed, aimed also largely at killing the MCS stranglehold

 

·                No Vat on HP at purchase - regardless who/where/how. It really got on my wick that they announced that and then there's the "oh yeah you only get zero vat  as part of an MCS install...grr..."

·                BUS if Boiler swapped for HP - for all . regardless of by who or how. Boiler removal part to be by a GasSafe engineer who signs off that its was previously in service and this audited against premises recent gas bills and boiler servicing bills to prevent fraud on the BUS.

·                Additional grant support above and beyond BUS for low-income people (means tested) to genuinely get the install price down to same as gas for them.

·                Grant support for electricity price for HP use to be same as gas to get the run cost equal or better. Requiring separate input metering prior to any structural changes in the market like moving the green levy (if ever...)

·                any qualified plumbing and heating contractor to do the work

·                an umbrella organisation providing support and advice to those heating contractors , with their decision making as to what system design  and HP type to use. and providing a warranty (And access to swat team of Seasoned Veterans to troubleshoot) if there are performance issues.

 

Pulling these together I offer up the following combined strawman:

 

1.        Permitted Development rules in relation to air source heat pumps amended to remove all reference to MCS.  The noise condition only in MCS-020 to be incorporated into the PD rules (without reference to the spreadsheet being completed by an MCS engineer)

 

This will address the problem that, as things stand today, only systems designed and installed by an MCS contractor are Permitted Development and, as such, import into planning rules engineering considerations which are well outside the scope of planning.

 

2.              Permitted Development rules in relation to air source heat pumps amended to allow 2(?) ASHPs provided that the combined noise meets the noise condition (and the other PD rules are met in relation to both)

 

This will allow a combination of A2A and A2W heat pumps, or other two pump installation, without material negative effect on the built environment

 

3.              Grant support under the BUS or similar to be available wherever a HP is installed to replace a gas boiler (used for domestic heating and the primary source of same) by a contractor accredited under NICIEC, NAPIT, GasSafe (list of organisations to be expanded), without regard to MCS or other complex design rules.  Boiler removal part to be by a GasSafe engineer who signs off that its was previously in service and that he has audited against premises gas bills (to prevent fraud on the BUS).  Support reduced to £1K if A2A installed as a part-replacement (conditions, and whether a later full replacement attracts a grant, to be defined)

 

This will open up the market further and allow, for example, a separately contracted consultant to design the system to the person who physically installs it, currently forbidden under the MCS rules (much like the architect-builder relationship)

 

4.              No Vat on HP at purchase - regardless who/where/how

 

This will remove the discrimination against plumbers who fall below the VAT threshold (who currently cannot reclaim the VAT on the purchase) and  against self-installers

 

As I say above this alone wont be enough, we also need technical and workforce changes.  I will try to summarise the suggestions for these (where they have gained some traction) in a separate post.

 

Comments/suggestions for improvements please, preferably constructive (this thread went very negative for a while then became more constructive.  Please lets keep it more constructive.

 

 

[ProDave]

^^^^^^ Top post

[markocosic]

I don't believe the zero rating for VAT requires MCS.

 

It's only the planning and the grant funding gravy that MCS controls.

 

That and export payments for PV. (it isn't a requirement that they ask for an MCS ticket but all the energy companies ask for an MCS ticket)

 

 

I don't think zero rating the VAT on supply of heat pumps is needed / enough for the unregistered plumbers. You actually get to zero rate the lot (heat pump, cylinder, pipework, wires, radiators replaced - all the ancillaries too - including the labour) which there's no practical way to allow them an exemption for if they're buying these and they're not themselves VAT registered.

 

If they're serious they'll setup a Ltd company, register for VAT then do nowt but heat pumps through that company so that they can reclaim all the VAT whilst charging zero on the installations including ancillaries and labour. Whilst keeping the sole trader below VAT threshold wheeze going for non heat pump work no doubt.

[JamesPa]

33 minutes ago, markocosic said:

I don't believe the zero rating for VAT requires MCS

I believe you are correct

 

34 minutes ago, markocosic said:

 

I don't think zero rating the VAT on supply of heat pumps is needed / enough for the unregistered plumbers. You actually get to zero rate the lot (heat pump, cylinder, pipework, wires, radiators replaced - all the ancillaries too - including the labour) which there's no practical way to allow them an exemption for if they're buying these and they're not themselves VAT registered.

Agree with the second point, so any concession would be on the hp and controller only.  Its still worth perhaps 600-1000 though.

 

36 minutes ago, markocosic said:

If they're serious they'll setup a Ltd company, register for VAT then do nowt but heat pumps through that company so that they can reclaim all the VAT whilst charging zero on the installations including ancillaries and labour.

Probably true, although it's possibly hassle which deters one man bands (who are exactly the sort of people we don't want to deter because some can be very good, very intelligent and think out of the box).   Perhaps we need opinions from some of them.  Also VAT relief on sales helps the  DiY market.  However I do grant that this us the least important of the measures and, if it were contentious/problematic the first to drop.

[ProDave]

47 minutes ago, JamesPa said:

I believe you are correct

 

Agree with the second point, so any concession would be on the hp and controller only.  Its still worth perhaps 600-1000 though.

 

Probably true, although it's possibly hassle which deters one man bands (who are exactly the sort of people we don't want to deter because some can be very good, very intelligent and think out of the box).   Perhaps we need opinions from some of them.  Also VAT relief on sales helps the  DiY market.  However I do grant that this us the least important of the measures and, if it were contentious/problematic the first to drop.

I am probably not the best to comment as I am winding down my business towards retirement, so not the young keen active person I used to be.  But I have never wanted to be VAT registered, for a sole trader it adds a level of paperwork and costs that I don't want and never have.  It was the introduction of VAT many many years ago that persuaded my father, a self employed plumber to give up being self employed and become an employee and let someone else have the bother.

 

I have installed (as in wired) a number of ASHP's for self builders who have bought the kit (and will reclaim the VAT) and because I am not VAT registered my labour only charge to them has not included VAT.

[saveasteading]

2 minutes ago, ProDave said:

for a sole trader it adds a level of paperwork and costs

What is the turnover threshold these days?

It isn't specially reasonable (nobody says tax is fair) that a business with low materials cost (window cleaner) can stay below the threshold easily, whereas another can spend more on materials than their labour.

[ProDave]

£85K turnover for compulsory VAT registration.

[JohnMo]

You can register for vat at any turn over it is when you go over that threshold it is compulsory.

 

I set up a company and the next day registered for vat, had zero turnover at that point.

[Roger440]

Id say your biggest challenge there is breaking the MCS stranglehold. There will be significant push back id predict. Its a gravy train and those on it will do everything to keep it going.

 

 

[TonyT]

On 23/04/2023 at 20:15, TonyT said:

Found this 

incase it’s helpful for anyone else

 

https://vivatraining.co.uk/blog/training/how-to-range-rate-a-boiler/

 

I emailed the manufacturer and they emailed me the service engineer manual

all good

[JamesPa]

1 hour ago, Roger440 said:

Id say your biggest challenge there is breaking the MCS stranglehold. There will be significant push back id predict. Its a gravy train and those on it will do everything to keep it going.

 

 

Without a doubt. 

 

But @markocosic tells us that the industry hates MCS.  The current government is fundamentally anti regulation and pro free market.  Furthermore we were told that MCS was invented to convince the EU we had a qualification scheme, and the current government is also desperate to find any benefit from 'Brexit freedoms.'

 

So if this is all true then there is lots in our favour.   Who can we influence and how?  

Edited April 28, 2023 by JamesPa

[ProDave]

Okay, we want simple.

 

ANYONE including the house owner can buy the ASHP and any required parts, tanks, radiators etc..

ANYONE can install it as long as there is a gas safe person to disconnect the old boiler.

 

Upon submitting the gas safe boiler disconnect certificate, the receipt from the installer and the receipt for the materials (that may or may not be supplied together) and a couple of photographs, the BUS scheme will refund up to £5000.

[JohnMo]

11 minutes ago, ProDave said:

Okay, we want simple.

 

ANYONE including the house owner can buy the ASHP and any required parts, tanks, radiators etc..

ANYONE can install it as long as there is a gas safe person to disconnect the old boiler.

 

Upon submitting the gas safe boiler disconnect certificate, the receipt from the installer and the receipt for the materials (that may or may not be supplied together) and a couple of photographs, the BUS scheme will refund up to £5000.

That would be nice, I would make a £2k profit. Or at least get what I am doing free of charge.