“Not Clear if Heat Pumps Will Save Money,” Government Adviser Admits
Heat pumps are not guaranteed to save households money in the long-term, the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser has conceded. The Telegraph has the story.
A meeting chaired by Professor Dame Angela McLean found it was “not currently clear” if heat pumps were cheaper to run than a traditional gas boiler.
The revelation comes amid Ed Miliband’s push for homes to switch to low-carbon heating as part of a drive to reach Net Zero.
Heat pumps, which can cost up to £13,000 to install, are the backbone of the Government’s green agenda, despite concerns they can negatively impact a property’s EPC score, which can make mortgages more expensive.
Minutes from a roundtable discussion chaired by Prof McLean in January were published by the Office for Science on Wednesday.
The report cited heat pumps as “a major financial decision and long-term commitment,” adding “it is not currently clear that heat pumps will save people money”.
The meeting, attended by climate minister Kerry McCarthy, was held with the ambition “to provide accessible science advice for policymakers”.
It cited a 2023 study by Polish academic Agnieszka Kijo-Kleczkowska, which found the shortest payback time for a heat pump, together with solar panels, was 11 years and six months. It noted this would be “unacceptably long to many”.
Households can still claim grants worth up to £7,500 for the installation of a heat pump, and Labour is looking at expanding grants to include different types of models such as ‘air-to-air’ heat pumps, which can also function as air conditioning.
Richard Tice, Reform UK deputy leader, said: “Another net zero policy unravels as heat pumps are shown to be an expensive con. People have been deliberately wronged in another major mis-selling scandal.”
Even with a grant, a typical heat pump costs £13,000 to install – and according to YouGov polling, most households are reluctant to pay an additional £5,500 themselves.
Worth reading in full.
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And for how long has this been said, but did they listen? Perhaps they’ll listen now.
That’ll be the day.
Buddy holly and the crickets!
Or John Wayne
Ethan Edwards, your as old as me🤭
🎶 Starry starry night 🎶
Sorry, couldn’t help myself!🫠
“Even with a grant, a typical heat pump costs £13,000 to install”
The cost of installation doesn’t change with a grant – the only thing that changes is who pays.
And wait till someone has to pay to replace it with their own money and no subsidy. It cost only £3k to replace our 25 year old boiler for a much better model, with zero subsidy.
That is just the heat pump. What about all the new radiators, additional insulation and electric immersion water heater all required because heat pumps are useless.
And the grant won’t be available when it needs to be replaced in 10 to 15 years.
Heat pumps having been in use for years, any lack of clarity about whether they save money is due either to incompetent data collection, or just obfuscation. Ergo I read this as an admission that the costs are much higher than they are willing to admit.
The heat production from a heat pump is fine so long as your dwelling place is insulated to fu@k!
Nigh on passive levels of insulation!
Did you know the human body gives off the equivalent heat of a 500watt (incandescent) light bulb? Ergo a family of four can heat a home with 2000watts of heat,.. if..and its an expensive if…it is passively insulated, that said insulation cost tens of thousands of pounds to put in place!
Milibrain is a dickwad!
What you say may be true, but I wonder how practical that kind of modification would be for someone lived in anything other than a detached dwelling. If you’re attached to other people’s houses or flats, it may be not be possible to do the kind of changes necessary without their permission and for blocks of flats you may well need to get the freeholder to agree.
Exactly 👍
It’s a pipe dream!
Heat pumps are air-conditioning units running in reverse. So you are quite right costs are well known, and well known that air-conditioning is expensive to run and pulls a high, continuous load from the electricity supply to the property. A heat pump will pull on average 7kW to 11kW – depending on how big, how cold it is outside. In the US where air-con is ubiquitous in homes, shops and offices, local low voltage transformers/distributing equipment is designed to handle on average 13kW per property they serve. Also each local unit serves only up to ten properties. In the UK the average is estimated to be 1kW to 2kW, and local units will serve up to 20 properties. These are averages, so at time some properties (UK) will pull bigger loads for electric cooker, for example, but that’s not multiple properties continuously drawing. If heat pumps are fitted in more homes, the electricity supply to those homes and the area will continually fail particularly in Winter, unless the local supply us upgraded. There is no evidence this is happening or planned. The focus on grid upgrades is high tension wires to connect up all the wind and solar installations scattered… Read more »
Excuse me, Professor Dame Angela McLean, it isn’t about saving the plebs money. It’s about
sAVinG ThE plANeT
Who provides the grant money?
We do!
Sorry Tof, didn’t mean to duplicate!🤓
The message needs to get across though I guess here we are preaching to the choir
Who provides all the money Hux?
We do!
£13,000 you must be kidding. My house has small bore pipes which would have to be replaced and then all the walls re plastered and the rooms redecorated. I suspect the floorboards would need replacing too in some areas once they had been ripped up.
If you have tongue and groove floorboards then good luck getting those up without ending up with a pile of firewood. Probably an extra £20,000 of expenditure. And when you add in ever increasing electricity costs some people will be dead before seeing any financial benefit.
If the meeting was in January, why are the minutes only published now?
DENZ say a family could save £100 a year (on a smart tariff). Great. That £5500 will be paid back in only 55 years. Of course one would be very lucky to get 20 years out of a unit.
Heat pumps in conjunction with solar panels? Great, plenty of heating when it’s nice a sunny.
Absolutely idiocy at every level.
Rather hilariously my 1 bed Flat has just got an F rating on the pointless EPC, so I can’t rent it out, apparently if I retro fit storage heaters this will make it an E, meanwhile the flat below is a C? Because it has gas central heating??? Time to sell up and take another rental flat off the market….. not sure what the rationale is behind the EPC ratings, surely it is up to the tenant whether they wish to save an imaginary sum of money on overpriced energy…..
I think we know that any concern for the welfare of tenants is purely performative
Better to have no home at all than a flat with no EPC cert!
Who said it would save money?
Not even the slimy, commission-paid heat pump salesman that I once had the misfortune to listen to (long story…) promised that it would save money.
His sales spiel was that the oil central heating that I was going to install would be illegal in a few years’ time, so I had better change before I freeze to death.
I still went for the oil though.
A few years back when heating oil was been driven up in price due to oil hitting $120 a barrel a reporter in the Mail wrote about how he was approached about switching to a heatpump to save money. The chap was not convinced but his neighbours were. Move on a few months and the price of oil dropped rapidly and heating oil was now half the price it was so the reporter was happy. His neighbours, less so. Their electricity bill was now eye watering and probably now is even worse.
Heat pumps are 3 times as efficient as gas, but gas is a third the price of electricity, so they cost about the same to run. Given the installation costs, and the fact that heat pumps let you down in the lowest temperatures when you need them most, gas is a no brainer.
Heat pump efficiency ratings are like mpg ratings for cars – for amusement purposes only.
That 3 times reduces to 2 times then +/- 1 times in Winter depending on the temperature differential between indoors and outside air temperature. The colder outside, the less efficient.
There is another factor. GB being an island, the air in Winter carries a lot of moisture, and this causes heat exchangers on the heat pumps to ice up, which reduces efficiency. The units do stop periodically to run a de-icing cycle for this reason.
£13 grand .. and the rest.
I won’t be getting one … because I don’t want one. My house; my decision.
i read a case where a man had a heat pump installed grant funded 15 years ago. It now needs replacing, no grant this time. He’s going back to gas
Another eco scam promoted by the UN and WEF.
I did speak to a plumber…got gas.
The last people in the world I would take advice from on anything, is this gov’t. Remember the safe and effective mantra. The six foot distance, the masks, the business and school closures and on and on.
“… found it was “not currently clear” if heat pumps were cheaper to run than a traditional gas boiler.”
A blind man on a galloping horse could see they are not cheaper than gas boilers!