Ed Miliband’s Boiler Ban U-Turn
This week, reports emerged that Ed Miliband was considering rolling back the looming boiler ban. It turns out that, despite offering homeowners the offer of a whopping £7,500 grant against the cost of installing air source heat pumps, the Boris Era policy is going to fall far short of the target of 600,000 ‘upgrades’ a year. Consequently, the policy is doomed to a spectacular failure. However, don’t celebrate yet, because the Government and the Green Blob have other plans to force your home heating system to be carbon-free in ways that are no better than the boiler ban.
‘Miliband poised to scrap 600,000-a-year heat pump target,’ proclaimed the Telegraph, adding that: ‘Just 65,600 heat pumps installed in the year to April’ – barely more than a tenth of the target.
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Welcome to the next nonsense where they will put extra tax on the use of gas and probably petrol in order to save our planet! Just like charging people more in ULEZ zones also saved the planet, even though they were still using the same vehicles.
However people vote with their wallets as the Uniparties are slowly finding out.
“they are between 280% and 340% efficient heaters – you get that much heat out as energy that you put in as electricity.”
I don’t understand this, can anyone explain? How can you get more than 100% energy out of anything?
Yes that baffled me too. Truly miraculous new technology to make all that extra energy appear out of thin air (quite literally in the source of a heat pump, in fact). I guess we are misunderstanding something along the way!
Heat is given off when compressing a gas – ever used a bicycle tyre pump? Heat is absorbed when a gas expands. A hydro fluorocarbon (HFC) gas is used in fridges, air-con units and heat pumps. (The latter are air-con units in reverse). Fridges: In a closed circuit the gas is compressed by an electric pump through a pipework grid outside the fridge (usually at the back) which has decreasing diameter pipework as it gets further away from the pump. This causes the gas to compress and an exothermic reaction takes place and heat is emitted from the gas and dissipates into the air at the back of the fridge. The pipework grid travels into the walls of the fridge where the pipework diameter increases allowing the gas to expand causing an endothermic reaction, which takes in heat from inside the fridge. The warmed gas via the pump goes into the grid outside the fridge, decompresses and releases the heat into the air. This process being continuous, the heat from inside the fridge is gradually removed to the outside so inside gets colder. Heat pumps: they work in the same way, but the circuit with the gas operates in reverse… Read more »
Yeah that makes sense, I knew there would be some sort of complicated explanation!
Switching. A heat pump transfers heat from a heat source to a heat sink. It needs energy to do so. But the amount of heat transferred is not proportional the amount of energy used to transfer it because the heat existed independent of the energy put into the transfer system.
At least, that’s my best guess as layman.
OK thanks yes I see where you’re going with that
Yes except it only works above about 5 degrees C and better above (say)10.
Thinking out loud here… If the green blob achieves its target of everyone switching to heat pumps, they’ll all be blowing out a lot of cold air into the environment. In dense areas of housing, will you get the opposite of a “heat island effect”, with the combined exhaust of the heat pumps reducing the air temperature? As the air gets cooler, the pumps will need to work harder to extract the heat the residents want, so efficiency will go down, and electricity bills will go up. Of course, by then there’ll be no money being raised to fund “green energy” from levies on domestic gas bills, so it will need to be loaded onto electricity bills instead, to stop the wheels falling off the green energy bandwagon. On top of that, with the takeup of heat pumps running at 100%, there will be no need for subsidies to incentivise people to buy them, and of course replacements will be the homeowner’s full responsibility, as is already the case. Just to top it all, they won’t work if there’s a power failure. And with everyone forced to use electricity to do everything, grid failures like the recent one in the… Read more »
It would be even worse with ground source heat pumps in dense urban area. The ground is (luckily) less fluid than the air and heat can only be transferred into the area from other bits of ground, and if the adjacent bits of ground are all in the same situation then there is no surplus heat to extract. The end result after a period of time is permafrost.
Similar effect to all those North Sea wind turbines… they don’t collect and convert wind energy for free, what they remove from the natural environment no longer blows over the land… cooling it… which causes the land to heat up more. Everything has an opposite reaction – its physics
They don’t like damp climates either.
Exactly, you have to have a sufficient difference between inside and out for it to work. Often the water heaters are backed up by traditional resistive electrical heaters, which are effectively 100% efficient (ie they convert virtually all the electrical energy into heat energy), but cost a fortune to run
The extra comes from the heat that was in the soil or water which the heat pump is connected to. That satisfies the First Law of Thermodynamics. The Second Law poses an upper limit to the theoretical “efficiency”. The term “efficiency” is not pedantically the correct term. The figure is HeatEnergyOut divided by ElectricalEnergyIn. This upper limit is a fraction bigger than 1, with the denominator being the difference in temperature. The smaller the difference, the bigger the figure. However, in practice heat pumps get to a couple of hundred percent. With poor maintenance the figure will drift down towards 1.
One small thing, shouldn’t the efficiency of the heat pump be measured taking into account the cost and the pay back time of the installation. If it never pays for itself, how can it be efficient?
It can never be fincially efficient ( at current prices, anyway).
Efficiency = ratio of input v output. Increased efficiency means reducing input per unit of output. (Anathema to Governments.)
The efficiency mentioned with reference to heat pumps is energy efficiency not cost efficiency.
It is meant to deceive because the Net Zeroids know that most people will think “efficiency” means “costs less”. They further deceive by saying heat pumps are more efficient than gas boilers.
However the cost efficiency will be dependent on input cost, that is price of electricity v price of gas.
Since gas prices are lower than electricity, even allowing for energy efficiency being higher in heat pumps, their costs are still higher.
The Net Zeroids know this hence the deception and now the plan to increase gas prices, which is an admission heat pumps are not cost efficient.
They certainly like to cherry pick the figures / comparisons they make to avoid comparing apples with apples, however, as others have said, from a financial point of view they will never be lower cost to run
It gets the extra out of thin air (or the ground), in the same way that your fridge extracts heat from whatever you put in it, and disperses it via the ‘radiator’ at the back.
The daft thing is that the theoretical maximum efficiency of a gas boiler is 100% whereas the theoretical maximum efficiency of generating electricity from burning gas is around 70% and the achieved efficiency by the time it gets to a domestic heat pump is less than 50%.
It means that a heat pump will generate the thermal power equivalent to 280 to 340% of the electric power that it consumes.
In other words, if you have an electric heater, 1 kW of electrical energy will be converted to 1 kW of heat output.
With a heat pump, 1 kW of electrical energy will be converted to 2.8 to 3.4 kW of heat output.
The “surplus” comes from the environment.
They are still crap though.
100% (electrical energy) goes in, 280% to 340% x 100% comes out as heat. The 100% is used to extract heat from the outside air.
Percentages should not be used in that way. Better to say output 2.8x and 3.4x input.
It is better expressed as for every 1kW of electrical energy input, 2.8kW to 3.4kW is output as heat.
I’m still absolutely convinced that the Milied isn’t mad at all, just working towards a comfortable retirement on some Caribic island far away from the Britain which has to endure the policies which were enacted there to enable him to do that. That is, his political agenda might be mad. But it’s not his political agenda because he believes it would make sense, just because he expects to benefit personally from implementing it.
It’s been a while since we had this quote from a philanthropillionaire here that, in order to achieve green targets, one has to “invest in elections”. But that’s certainly still being done.
Does anyone know how heat pumps function in terms of thermostats, or indeed turning “on” and “off” (old fashioned concepts I know). I am one of those people with quite poor temperature regulation and if I’m too hot in particular I feel quite unwell. The thought of my heat pump churning out heat all night as I lie sweating and unable to turn it off is quite horrible.
When I lived with a retrofitted heat pump in a rented cottage, it never go hot enough – ever – to sweat. Rads had thermostats but the timings controls on the heat pump were worthy of NASA – & never mind any mild warmth in the night, the thing that kept me awake was the unacceptable noise like an engine starting randomly as it went through its’ hot water cylinder safety check.
I would rather have no heating at all than have a heat pump.
Northern UK isn’t generally hot enough for long enough to justify pulling one or two degrees out of already cold damp air where I live!
Fair enough, more of a problem being too cold in winter then than too hot in summer!
They are controlled exactly the same way as a central heating system with a gas boiler, that is by thermostat and/or timer.
So if I’m too hot I can just turn it off? We are always given the impression that they are just on 24/7 providing this lovely constant heat, so I wasn’t sure if turning off was even an option.
In theory you can turn the output part off, i.e. pumping heat to radiators, however because of the super low level of heating, these are usually left on – they can’t go from cold to hot in minutes, it takes hours and hours and hours to go from cold to ‘warm’…
As I understand it, there is usually an intermediate heat store where the heat is concentrated – this is then effectively used as a battery of heat to pump to radiators, to heat hot water etc. It’ll be supplemented by a restive electrical heater (like a kettle is). The main issue is, you need perfect environment + great insulation and minimal air loss in the building… all things UK housing stock is not known for, especially in older properties. And that’s before we get to gas being waaaay cheaper than electricity.
Last winter I upgraded my oil fired CH boiler and tank, cost c£8k. No subsidies, my own cash.
This guarantees reliable, cost effective, interruption free heating for the next 25 years.
And a heating system that actually heats, and does it quietly and cleanly.
You’re assuming they don’t go for the nuclear option and shut down the gas grid…
He said it was oil fired, not gas…
I propose we use the greenies-lefties logic and heavily tax French wine so we all feel better drinking English beer and New World wines. Yummy.
Congratulations – you have just understood trade tariffs.
Only Lunatics Want Net Zero
Miliband – the gift that keeps giving to Reform in spite of their internal problems.
Suppose you had a spare £5,690 kicking around, your options would include:
1. Putting it in the Building Soc, earning say 4%, so £227 a year in interest, plus your money is always there.
2. £13,190 in the Building Soc would earn you £527
3. Or you spend it on a heat pump & maybe benefit £120 a year, but you don’t get your money back!
Like the subsidies on EVs all this stuff is for the upper middle class to virtue signal, they’re the only group who will reap the subsidies. They have the private drives, the feed-in tariffs, the south facing roof.
Your money depreciates with inflation, but heat pumps will need replacing about every 10 to 12 years, so you are better off putting your cash on deposit, maybe a 10 year fixed term with higher interest rate.
Juxtaposition of “Ed Milliband” and “boiler” – possibilities teasing my imagination.
“…for heat pumps with COPs of 2.8 and 3.4.” But… the amount of electrical energy input is not static to achieve those outputs. How much needs to go in is determined by the temperature differential between indoors and the air outdoors, plus the relative humidity of the air. The lower outside air temperature gets, therefore the wider is the gap between inside and outside temperature, and the harder the unit has to work. The higher the humidity of the air, the harder the unit has to work. Work requires energy input. More work = more energy. Also in these circumstances efficiency declines as temperature drops outside, until the unit cannot maintain the temperature indoors as required. This decline starts after -7C. A gas boiler’s efficiency is not determined by outside conditions, only indoor temperature change. ““Taxes on electricity should be shifted to gas…” The high cost of electricity is down to wholesale prices not retail prices. Wholesale prices are determined by carbon tax on gas, Contract for Difference prices for wind and solar, Constraint payments to wind and solar, and the intermittency cost associated with keeping gas power stations on stand-by to back up wind and solar as required. As… Read more »
Every mad idea he has will fall at the feet of reality.
Mr Miliband appears to have adapted a phrase associated with a different bunch of dangerous nutters:
“You will be cold 🥶, but you will be happy 😊”
After spending circa: £14,000 to save a rather optimistic £120 P.A.🤔
I have a BtL, EPC D, in an area where there is no gas supply. When I bought it I ripped out the very old storage heaters and installed modern, slimline, programmable electric radiators. I figured that the house would most likely be rented by people who would be out at work 8+ hours a day (or night) and would only need to have the heating on for an hour in the morning and a couple of hours in the evening (the house is mid terrace and well insulated). Purchase and installation cost me about £2500. A far cheaper, more practical and sensible solution than a heat pump!
There are no circumstances where I will install a heat pump, either at the BtL or at my home.
Milliband is a Fabian.
You know : …Smash it all to bits and then// rebuild it nearer to the heart’s desire
Another act of extortion against the public. This is a criminal offence and should lead to prosecution of those responsible for abusing public funds.