Gas boiler lobby obstructing heatpumps

[Beelbeebub]

"Gas boiler lobby trying to delay UK’s heat pump plans, leak shows

Trade association, which promotes hydrogen for home heating, called for clean heat market mechanism to be pushed back to 2026...."

 

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/20/gas-boiler-lobby-uk-heat-pump-plans-leak

 

Shocked! I tell you! 😱

 

Shocked!😱

[JohnMo]

MCS is delaying heat pump roll out itself. Wouldn't worry about anyone else.

[Beelbeebub]

51 minutes ago, JohnMo said:

MCS is delaying heat pump roll out itself. Wouldn't worry about anyone else.

Willing to bet any tinkering to improve MCS (or replace it with something that works) would be interfered with by the boiler lobby.

 

I spoke to our regular gas contractors, they aren't training any of their guys on heatpumps because they aren't getting any signals or encouragement to do so.

 

A friend's son is an apprentice heating engineer with a small firm (a couple of guys).  One is LPG and oil, another concentrates on gas. They were thinking of training the apprentice up on Hydrogen "because that's what's next". It isn't, it never will be. It's just a fig leaf to allow the boiler industry to keep selling.  And it's working, the apprentice won't be trained on HPs, so the firm won't be able to (really) offer HPs so nobody will buy HPs because it's difficult to find a fitter.

[JohnMo]

23 minutes ago, Beelbeebub said:

spoke to our regular gas contractors, they aren't training any of their guys on heatpumps because they aren't getting any signals or encouragement to do so

MCS have basically made a heat pump unaffordable for most people. Only the well off really get the grant, as who really can justify spending £15k on a boiler system, when you can get a gas boiler for £1500.

 

Most the population think you need to go through the grant scheme. So why would your normal plumber be asked for a heat pump.

 

Others on here have DIY installed for boiler money, but that is not the normal person.

[Beelbeebub]

I'm pretty sure it's possible to install HPs for about the same as a boiler. 

 

Maybe not the absolute cheapest "15kw whatever the merchants had a clearance on Regular boiler" but on a par with a top brand combi.

 

the costs of any changes to the system like rads would be extra, but they are one time.

 

the magic number (I believe) is 2.5. if the scop can beat that, you get more heat burning gas in a power station, transmitting it to a house and using a heatpump, than to burning the gas in a boiler.

 

as long as any heatpump replacing a gas boiler can beat 2.5, it's a carbon reduction.  That should be possible for most modern units as long as the flow temps are below 55C

 

If it can hit about 3.5 (much harder need flow temps in the low 40's) you could end up costing less to run.

 

If we can get simple HPs that can (near enough) plug into existing heating systems and beat 2.5 we are good.

 

if we can create a subsidy regime where such an install would end up costing the customer no  more to run than a gas boiler we can sort out the efficency later.

 

 

[JamesPa]

It was always going to happen, because the boiler industry risks extinction (and must become extinct), but as others have said the Heat Pump (installation) industry is complicit.  As @JohnMo says, MCS has made it too difficult and too expensive (in a way which protects the installer not the customer), and there is too much focus on optimum efficiency and not enough focus on good enough.  Too few system designers have been trained and far too many of those are just grant harvesters, so we end up with over specified, over engineered over priced quotes with too much disruption for most to contemplate, and so much system complexity that the monkeys who install it get it wrong, leading to poor performance.  Our planning regulations aren't up to the job and, if my LPA is anything to go by, nor are at least some planning authorities (I did a bit of a web search and mine is not alone in making it inordinately difficult to get express consent).  Its not entirely their fault, they have been starved of funds by the governments council tax cap (sorry 'referendum') so cant recruit people with sufficient intelligence and engineering know how to get their heads around new technology.  My Green Party run LPA is about to declare a climate emergency, having effectively made it impossible, by imposing unachievable and wholly pointless noise constraints, for me to install a heat pump under express planning consent, both at home and at work.  The irony is shocking.

 

All very depressing and, with a government that is asleep at the wheel on almost anything of consequence, unlikely to get better soon.  

 

On a slightly positive note I actually received a faintly reasonable (by heat pump standards) quote for an install today.  A mere £9800 (after grant) for a not too over-specified Daikin monobloc and UVC, fully supplied and installed.  That's way better than many I have so far turned down.  The guy who visited is a regular middle aged plumber, decided to get into heat pumps, and has trained with Daikin and Samsung.  He was lamenting how MCS has made the task difficult and the officials running the government grants even more so.  The only problem I can see with Daikin is that they make it very difficult to find detailed literature (eg a table of capacity and COP by OAT and flow temp, which the guy who visited had but I have yet to find).  Nor can I find anything out about their modulation capability (perhaps someone here knows)?   I'm hopeful I might get another quote next week as well.

 

 

 

 

Edited July 20, 2023 by JamesPa

[LnP]

Powering boilers with renewable hydrogen uses six times more renewable energy than the renewable energy used for heat pumps. You can't beat the second law of thermodynamics. To get heat from renewable hydrogen, you have to generate electricity from solar or wind, convert it from AC to DC, electrolyse water to produce the hydrogen, compress and transmit it and then burn it in a boiler. Each of those steps has unavoidable losses. To get heat directly from renewable electricity, you cut out all of those losses apart from transmission, but then multiply it up by the SCOP in your heat pump. It makes no sense at all to burn hydrogen in a boiler and moreover, because of the inefficiencies, hydrogen will unavoidably be much more expensive than electricity running a heat pump.

 

To heat our homes with renewable hydrogen, our off shore wind generating capacity will have to be 40 times larger than it currently is. To heat our homes with renewable electricity and heat pumps, it only needs to be 6.5 times larger.

 

Hydrogen will play a key role in decarbonisation, but we should prioritise its use for applications where there is no alternative. For heating and transportation, the alternative is electricity. But there are no alternatives to industrial uses such as producing ammonia (used e.g. to make fertilisers) and producing methanol (used e.g. to make paints and adhesives). At the moment those processes get their hydrogen from natural gas and release CO2.

 

One thing I can agree with the politicians about, is that the UK has a large energy resource in North Sea off shore wind. This is a great opportunity but we should use it wisely - to heat our homes, power our cars and yes, produce hydrogen, but to bring back some of the well paid chemical industry manufacturing jobs which have been lost over the last 50 years.

 

Government support for hydrogen in domestic heating will just increase the cost of getting to net zero and is a distraction which will cause delays. They need to think more about how to make it financially attractive for people to install heat pumps. Decoupling the price of electricity and gas would be a good start - as long at electricity is three times the price of gas, there's no incentive to incur the extra costs of a heat pump.

[Beelbeebub]

I am coming round to the idea of good enough.

 

As long as the SCOP is better than about 2.5 you get more heat from your gas by burning it on a power station to run the HP than in a boiler.

 

2.5 should be achievable by a modern pump with a flow temp below 55C.

 

The cost break even is closer to 3.5, which require flow temps closer to 35C. That, in turn, requires careful system design and setup and probably upgrades for retrofits.

 

The cost break even can be addressed by changing the electric unit price structure in relation to gas and by a price match to gas guarantee for X years after installation.

 

The price march guarantee gives 3 big advantages

 

- is it removes the uncertainty factor from the buying decision.

- It also allows the actual performance to be measured

- it gives time for any upgrades to be identified (from actual monitoring) and carried out before the subsidy tapers away.

 

Once caveat with this is, and this might be a PR issue, we may need to build more gas.power stations! Our overall gas consumption (and this carbon) would fall but the amount that get turned into electricity would increase hence we might need more gas generators in the short term.

 

Fortunately, gas stations are quick and cheap to build and pretty clean (apart from the co2).

[JamesPa]

11 minutes ago, Beelbeebub said:

I am coming round to the idea of good enough.

 

As long as the SCOP is better than about 2.5 you get more heat from your gas by burning it on a power station to run the HP than in a boiler.

 

2.5 should be achievable by a modern pump with a flow temp below 55C.

Definitely.  It should be possible to achieve better than 2.5 at 55 check the latest Vaillant specs.

 

I think we need to talk a bit more about dhw also.  Replacing existing dhw tanks is an overhead we could do without.  With modern high temp heat pumps we can reach a sufficient temp to reuse existing, or worst case splice in a PHE and pump. Is this good enough?

 

Obviously this won't work for a combi retrofit but if we could crack the case where there is already a dhw system it's a good start.

 

 

[sharpener]

3 hours ago, JamesPa said:

I think we need to talk a bit more about dhw also.  Replacing existing dhw tanks is an overhead we could do without.  With modern high temp heat pumps we can reach a sufficient temp to reuse existing, or worst case splice in a PHE and pump. Is this good enough?

 

It occurs to me that a contributory factor is the typical HP mfrs' scheme with DHW priority and a full-flow diverter valve, which means all the output has to go to the cylinder. Gas/oil boilers aren't installed like that, often S-Plan.

 

If instead you had just a single circuit at 55C then it is likely that at any one time some of the rads will be calling for heat as well so the HW coil will not have to absorb the full output. (Any UFH would of course go on a different circuit designed for a lower flow temp.) In summer you might have to fall back to resistive heating from PV which is hardly a disaster, or at worst E7.

 

I will put this to my potential installers and see what they say, though I suspect the answer will be "it is not in the Vaillant schematics book".

 

FWIW Grant do market their HPs as a drop-in replacement with S-plan plumbing which might make it a bit easier with them.

 

[JamesPa]

10 minutes ago, sharpener said:

 

It occurs to me that a contributory factor is the typical HP mfrs' scheme with DHW priority and a full-flow diverter valve, which means all the output has to go to the cylinder. Gas/oil boilers aren't installed like that, often S-Plan.

 

If instead you had just a single circuit at 55C then it is likely that at any one time some of the rads will be calling for heat as well so the HW coil will not have to absorb the full output. (Any UFH would of course go on a different circuit designed for a lower flow temp.) In summer you might have to fall back to resistive heating from PV which is hardly a disaster, or at worst E7.

 

I will put this to my potential installers and see what they say, though I suspect the answer will be "it is not in the Vaillant schematics book".

 

FWIW Grant do market their HPs as a drop-in replacement with S-plan plumbing which might make it a bit easier with them.

 

The problem with running the CH flow through the DHW cylinder, which I agree seems initially like a good idea, is weather compensation.  A friend of mine had to build some (simple) circuitry to fool his weather compensating boiler into upping the flow temp when it was heating the DHW.  Fortunately heat pumps natively distinguish, but that alone doesn't solve the problem.

 

 

[JohnMo]

Trouble with accepting a CoP of 2.5 could be running cost compared to gas especially with the new prices gas 7.5p and electric 30p per kWh. A well installed gas boiler can achieve 100% + efficiency.

 

You may be better with DHW heating accept the limitation of the normal cylinder, let it heat to around 40 with the heat pump, finish of heating with the immersion to about 50 or as low a figure as you can get away with.  CoP of 3ish for the heat pump.

 

1kWh at CoP 2.5 is 12.5p, so heating bill will 40% higher than with gas, not many volunteers I would assume. Even a good heat pump install achieving a SCoP of 4 will be on parity price wise with gas.  

 

 

[JohnMo]

59 minutes ago, sharpener said:

If instead you had just a single circuit at 55C

That's a scheme from old when heat pumps were just on or off at a fixed temperature.

 

My heat pump has such a setting for charging a thermal store. It basically running DHW mode all the time, knowing the thermal store provides heating loads also.

 

In that mode the CoP isn't as bad as you think, as the heating of the cylinder starts as low as possibly and it just manages flow and return dT and slowly creeps up in temperature until thermostat is made or it hits 60. So a lot of the heating cycle is spent in the 40s.

[sharpener]

1 hour ago, JamesPa said:

The problem with running the CH flow through the DHW cylinder, which I agree seems initially like a good idea, is weather compensation.  A friend of mine had to build some (simple) circuitry to fool his weather compensating boiler into upping the flow temp when it was heating the DHW. 

 

Yes, I had to add a relay to mine so the weather sensor is open circuit when cylinder calls for heat, seem daft they didn't build this into the boiler.

 

1 hour ago, JamesPa said:

Fortunately heat pumps natively distinguish, but that alone doesn't solve the problem.

 

I knew there would be a catch with HPs, it seems there always is!

 

12 minutes ago, JohnMo said:

My heat pump has such a setting for charging a thermal store. It basically running DHW mode all the time, knowing the thermal store provides heating loads also.

 

Yes, I have proposed a TS also. It would go in the same space in the utility room as the replacement cylinder and I would rather spend the money that way. But as posted elsethread I can't get Vaillant tech to agree it, they have sent me a "TS" schematic but it is basically the same as their buffer scheme and has nothing to control when it charges/discharges.

 

12 minutes ago, JohnMo said:

My heat pump has such a setting for charging a thermal store. It basically running DHW mode all the time, knowing the thermal store provides heating loads also.

 

In that mode the CoP isn't as bad as you think, as the heating of the cylinder starts as low as possibly and it just manages flow and return dT and slowly creeps up

 

in temperature until thermostat is made or it hits 60. So a lot of the heating cycle is spent in the 40s.

 

Given that I think the only real problem is that Part L and MCS require weather comp so the installers won't allow any space heating which disables it.

[sharpener]

16 hours ago, JamesPa said:

A mere £9800 (after grant) for a not too over-specified Daikin monobloc and UVC, fully supplied and installed.  That's way better than many I have so far turned down. 

 

There were some stories on here about Daikin consuming serious power when off. I looked into this and there is a bit in the installation instructions about needing to keep the compressor heated to ?5C or it will not start when required.

 

Last I heard from their "recommended" installer was a cryptic "I will be in touch" >two weeks ago so I have in practice given up on them.

[JohnMo]

40 minutes ago, sharpener said:

Part L and MCS require weather comp

You can add that to a thermal store, the WC controls the discharge from the thermal store via a mixing valve, or if you had UFH it does it direct on the manifold.

[sharpener]

2 minutes ago, JohnMo said:

You can add that to a thermal store, the WC controls the discharge from the thermal store via a mixing valve, or if you had UFH it does it direct on the manifold.

 

Well yes, that would work, do you have a schematic in mind? I want to charge the TS during E7 and discharge 0700 - 0800.

 

I think however you have no longer got the efficiency gain from running the HP at a lower temp if you are charging the TS at high temp and mixing it down. Either with the fancy mixing station at £800 or the existing blending valve on the UFH. Which is also why I plan on not having the UFH going when I am charging the TS.

 

If I go for a TS then once I have got it up to say 55C there is no benfit in tempering to any less and I will get faster warmup by supplying the rads at the max temp, the TRVs will limit the heat input to the rooms and hence the overall heat demand according to the weather.

[JohnMo]

Have attached a PDF instruction manual for a WC controller (I use their solar thermal controller)

 

It has lots of different schemes at the back of the manual. They are based in Germany, but ship to UK. They have a shop on eBay.

Clima500 (1).pdf

[JamesPa]

45 minutes ago, sharpener said:

 

Well yes, that would work, do you have a schematic in mind? I want to charge the TS during E7 and discharge 0700 - 0800.

 

I think however you have no longer got the efficiency gain from running the HP at a lower temp if you are charging the TS at high temp and mixing it down. Either with the fancy mixing station at £800 or the existing blending valve on the UFH. Which is also why I plan on not having the UFH going when I am charging the TS.

 

If I go for a TS then once I have got it up to say 55C there is no benfit in tempering to any less and I will get faster warmup by supplying the rads at the max temp, the TRVs will limit the heat input to the rooms and hence the overall heat demand according to the weather.

This is getting interesting.  We are well into the realms of 'good enough as opposed to perfect' once we talk about operating heat pumps at 55C for domestic heating.  Whilst we are at it, why not operate mains pressure DHW as a thermal store at 65 (70C flow temp with PHE or large coil) and avoid G3 and legionella cycles?  Or is that one step too far?

[JohnMo]

43 minutes ago, sharpener said:

If I go for a TS then once I have got it up to say 55C there is no benfit in tempering to any less and I will get faster warmup by supplying the rads at the max temp, the TRVs will limit the heat input to the rooms and hence the overall heat demand according to the weather.

Are are better drip feeding the heat to match the heat loss, for one the thermal store will be depleted much slower, best will in the world a big store will take a while to reheat, worst case is you have a hot house and no DHW.

 

If you go for a thermal store, charge the store direct not via a coil. For DHW you can get them with tank in tank, with big DHW coils and external or internal PHE.

[JamesPa]

5 minutes ago, JohnMo said:

Are are better drip feeding the heat to match the heat loss, for one the thermal store will be depleted much slower, best will in the world a big store will take a while to reheat, worst case is you have a hot house and no DHW.

My experience with my boiler is that running 'low and slow' makes for a more comfortable house because the room temperature variations with time are less as are the thermal gradients.  So if you decide to run the heat pump at a constant 55C and accept the loss in efficiency (at 55C constant you will require about 25% more energy input compared to 55C with weather compensation, based on some modelling I did a while ago) then it still might be worth weather compensating the output from the buffer for comfort.  

[SteamyTea]

CCGT produces around 490 CO₂ tonnes/MWH. https://gridwatch.co.uk/co2-emissions

So a heat pump at CoP 2.5 is in the region of 200g/kWh.

 

A combi boiler is around 220g/kWh. https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/POST-PN-0523/POST-PN-0523.pdf

 

If all our marginal generation was via CCGT (which it is pretty close to at the moment), then the CoP figure of 2.5 is about right.

 

2 hours ago, JohnMo said:

gas boiler can achieve 100% + efficiency.

Can they reach 110% reliably? then they will equal the 200gkWh.

 

I am sure I heard on the radio during the week that hydrogen research has been dropped (in the UK) and it is all about CCS (again, again, again).

 

The main thing is to reduce CO_2e emission in all sectors of society.

This is the 2020 government report about it.  If we must pick one thing, it won't be personal transport or housing. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/uks-carbon-footprint/carbon-footprint-for-the-uk-and-england-to-2019

 

Edited July 21, 2023 by SteamyTea

[JamesPa]

If we must pick one thing, it won't be personal transport or housing.

 

I think I would argue that

 

1. we need each individually to fix our own heating and transport

2. we need each individually to reduce the quantity of goods and services we buy

3. the manufacturers need to reduce the carbon content of the goods and services we sell

 

If we rely on (3) alone we are saying that we have no individual responsibility, which is clearly immoral.

 

its interesting that the emissions from UK goods and services have fallen quite dramatically.  Sadly I fear that maybe because less of the goods and services we purchase is UK produced rather than because our industry is especially green, but I cant evidence that at present and would dearly love to be proven wrong.. 

 

 

[SteamyTea]

1 minute ago, JamesPa said:

If we rely on (3) alone we are saying that we have no individual responsibility, which is clearly immoral.

That is what we elect governments for though.  Without government legislation, it becomes a free for all and when that happens, the shysters and con artists arrive.  That has to be avoided.

It is always better to tackle the big problems first, they have the highest number of low hanging fruit.

 

The easy way around it is a CO_2e tax.  Then the only argument is how much a tonne.

[SteamyTea]

34 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

490 CO₂ tonnes/MWH

Should read GWH.