Heat in the home

[VinceLedge]

We have family in Aberdeenshire (pretty much the coldest part of Britain) they live in a converted steading type building heated successfully by heat pump, their 2nd house with one.

[axel_knutt]

As for the Moggy, I had one, a Mini Clubman, a couple of Maxis, a couple of Montego load luggers, Cortinas,Viva and a series of Mercs. I loved all of them. Yes they rusted except the later ones, most cars did at that time. So what?
Al

All the cars I ever owned:

Mini
It was a bit of a rust bucket, but it was my fathers before me, and I have a lot of affection for it because of all the father & son time spent repairing it.

HB Viva
I'd had too little experience of other cars at that time to feel competent to express an opinion of it.

Capri
Something I really wanted. I loved it, and kept it until it was on its last legs

Cortina
Same as the Capri

TR7
An impulse buy. Impractical, but fun to drive until I wrote it off.

Carlton
I never wanted it, but had to settle for it after about a year of looking for something better with enough headroom.

Accord
The best car I ever had by far. I loved it, did the most miles in it, and kept it the longest.

Here's the point: most of these were objectively better than the previous one, and the last one was the one I liked the best, aside from my affection for the Mini. However, if I was buying now, I'd be quite happy with a 'new' example of that model of Accord, and if I was offered any new gadget on it that modern technology could provide, I can't think of anything I'd want added. Reliability? Well, they were renowned for it, and I can't say mine was particularly wanting on that score.

[Jon in Sweden]

People I know and respect who have heat pumps have cold houses and no satisfaction whatsoever from the installers. I believe thats because the installers they used were incompetent. The Telegraph article quotes accurate costs. The costs are very high and at the moment it seems there is a good chance that one will get a duff installation.

And there you hit the nail on the head. Dodgy installation in the UK is ruining the reputation of a reputable technology.

Any electrician here can install a heat pump. We have three in our house/cabin. Air to air is used everywhere. Even garages.

We had a large air to air heat pump put into our house when we moved in just for the living room (it's about 40 square meters, and it was for the AC function as much as anything). It's a first floor installation and it was just over £2k. The installation in our holiday house was cheaper, as the unit was smaller and ground floor.

The UK tends to approach new technology with grant funding. This instigates a gold rush of cowboys looking to cash in. This increases the cost to everyone and means that the UK now sits a long way behind in most renewables

[axel_knutt]

People I know and respect who have heat pumps have cold houses and no satisfaction whatsoever from the installers. I believe thats because the installers they used were incompetent. The Telegraph article quotes accurate costs. The costs are very high and at the moment it seems there is a good chance that one will get a duff installation.

And there you hit the nail on the head. Dodgy installation in the UK is ruining the reputation of a reputable technology.

....

The UK tends to approach new technology with grant funding. This instigates a gold rush of cowboys looking to cash in. This increases the cost to everyone and means that the UK now sits a long way behind in most renewables

98% of external insulation work faulty

Well, couldn't you just see that one coming a mile off, it's not as if we haven't already had decades of it with cavity insulation and CIGA. My guess is that the next one will be heat pumps. They may be a mature technology in Scandinavia where they have decades of experience and a competent workforce, but with fewer trained installers and a market awash in government subsidies I reckon it'll just turn into another feeding frenzy for the sharks.

It'll all be fixed free of charge they say, well lets wait and see if that in itself becomes another gravy train for the cowboys. I wonder who'll get to decide what 'fixed' means, and who's deemed competent to verify it.

Looks like I was wrong, it's solar panels apparently. There's been a rise in solar panel fires that's much faster than the increase in the number of panels, so the suggestion is that it's due to cowboy installers jumping on the bandwagon.

https://www.homebuilding.co.uk/eco-home ... ion-checks

The right wing press were all over it for the opportunity to blame Milliband.

[PDQ Mobile]

Any electrician here can install a heat pump. We have three in our house/cabin. Air to air is used everywhere. Even garages.

I understood that upthread you said you had "geothermal"?
Maybe I misunderstood?

Quote
""The right-wing press likes to say that heat pump heated houses are too cold. Have any of them visited Scandinavia? We're in the warm bit (the SE) and weekend before last we had minus 21c. We didn't notice it from inside. Our geothermal system worked as normal and we were perfectly warm. There is no fossil fuel heating here. ""

[Jon in Sweden]

Any electrician here can install a heat pump. We have three in our house/cabin. Air to air is used everywhere. Even garages.

I understood that upthread you said you had "geothermal"?
Maybe I misunderstood?

Quote
""The right-wing press likes to say that heat pump heated houses are too cold. Have any of them visited Scandinavia? We're in the warm bit (the SE) and weekend before last we had minus 21c. We didn't notice it from inside. Our geothermal system worked as normal and we were perfectly warm. There is no fossil fuel heating here. Zero. It's nearly all heat pumps. The north sees minus 40c every year at some point. ""

We have both. It's super common here.

Most houses run geothermal as primary heating. It's always on and the house holds a steady temperature.

Almost everyone then has air to air as well if you want instant heat/cooling.

We keep our house cooler on the geothermal thermostat (between 16-18c normally) and then boost as needed with the air to air or the wood burner.

A point to note is that even though firewood is 2-3 times cheaper here than the UK, it's still cheaper to heat the house with the heat pumps.

We use the stove mainly because:

1) it's nice. Our kitchen is 35 square metres and it's a lovely heat.

2) it's useful when electricity prices are super high. That happens sometimes in cold snaps

3) I work in forestry, so often don't pay market rates (or at all) for firewood

[PDQ Mobile]

Any electrician here can install a heat pump. We have three in our house/cabin. Air to air is used everywhere. Even garages.

I understood that upthread you said you had "geothermal"?
Maybe I misunderstood?

Quote
""The right-wing press likes to say that heat pump heated houses are too cold. Have any of them visited Scandinavia? We're in the warm bit (the SE) and weekend before last we had minus 21c. We didn't notice it from inside. Our geothermal system worked as normal and we were perfectly warm. There is no fossil fuel heating here. Zero. It's nearly all heat pumps. The north sees minus 40c every year at some point. ""

We have both. It's super common here.

Most houses run geothermal as primary heating. It's always on and the house holds a steady temperature.

Almost everyone then has air to air as well if you want instant heat/cooling.

We keep our house cooler on the geothermal thermostat (between 16-18c normally) and then boost as needed with the air to air or the wood burner.

A point to note is that even though firewood is 2-3 times cheaper here than the UK, it's still cheaper to heat the house with the heat pumps.

We use the stove mainly because:

1) it's nice. Our kitchen is 35 square metres and it's a lovely heat.

2) it's useful when electricity prices are super high. That happens sometimes in cold snaps

3) I work in forestry, so often don't pay market rates (or at all) for firewood

It sounds really nice.

Though free firewood (even if you discount the labour involved) would seem to be inevitably cheaper than bought leccy?

No matter, it's the future.
We just elected a young Green MP.

Ps.A brighter evening-nearly all the planets are visible tonight.
And spring is in the air.

[Cugel]

We have both [ground source & air source heat pumps]. It's super common here.

Ditto. Also a recently installed air source in the garage/workshop, which also acts as a dust filter for the wood dust that escapes the grasp of the enormous dust extractor.

There's a huge wood burner in the hoose, installed by the original designer/owner. In the 7 years we've lived here its been lit four times: once to see if it worked; twice to demo it to visitors; and once when the heat pump was "serviced" by an inept organisation and had to wait a week for a proper service engineer to be found. That wood burner is too hot, even with just a couple of sticks burning in it. Also, I fear the gassy stuff and particles it thrusts down one's breathers.

The heat pumps are very inexpensive to run, even in a totally electrical house with an e-car and some e-bikes. It was all designed well, mind, inclusive of a well insulated house. Two difficulties with heat pumps in Blightedland, then: the capital cost; the cowboys not only installing heat pumps but those cowboys of the past 150 years who built all the terrible housing and are still at it (often on a flood plain).

But a gas boiler or wood burner are just going to make things even worse. At the very least they knock 1.5mph off one's bicycling average speed for the ride to and from the shops, work or the lung-clinic. For others it means worserer effects, including early death, not to mention those effects on neighbours of all the gas and particles belching from their chimneys, filthy beasts.

[Jon in Sweden]

We have both [ground source & air source heat pumps]. It's super common here.

Ditto. Also a recently installed air source in the garage/workshop, which also acts as a dust filter for the wood dust that escapes the grasp of the enormous dust extractor.

There's a huge wood burner in the hoose, installed by the original designer/owner. In the 7 years we've lived here its been lit four times: once to see if it worked; twice to demo it to visitors; and once when the heat pump was "serviced" by an inept organisation and had to wait a week for a proper service engineer to be found. That wood burner is too hot, even with just a couple of sticks burning in it. Also, I fear the gassy stuff and particles it thrusts down one's breathers.

The heat pumps are very inexpensive to run, even in a totally electrical house with an e-car and some e-bikes. It was all designed well, mind, inclusive of a well insulated house. Two difficulties with heat pumps in Blightedland, then: the capital cost; the cowboys not only installing heat pumps but those cowboys of the past 150 years who built all the terrible housing and are still at it (often on a flood plain).

But a gas boiler or wood burner are just going to make things even worse. At the very least they knock 1.5mph off one's bicycling average speed for the ride to and from the shops, work or the lung-clinic. For others it means worserer effects, including early death, not to mention those effects on neighbours of all the gas and particles belching from their chimneys, filthy beasts.

Nice to hear that you have a good experience with your heat pumps.

You are right to include the general quality of the housing stock as an issue for heat pumps. To insulate adequately the housing stock of the UK could be compared to trying to make watertight a colander.

But there is going to come point (I'd argue that the energy crisis of 2022 was that point) where we can't keep arguing for the use of fossil fuels to heat badly built housing stock. Instead of people spending money on pointless cosmetic "upgrades" on their houses (often to try to maximise their retail value), they should be investing in making them more efficient and healthier to live in.

It's a bit like having a car with a catastrophic fuel leak and instead of fixing it, you buy some new alloys!

[Jon in Sweden]

It sounds really nice.

Though free firewood (even if you discount the labour involved) would seem to be inevitably cheaper than bought leccy?

No matter, it's the future.
We just elected a young Green MP.

Ps.A brighter evening-nearly all the planets are visible tonight.
And spring is in the air.

It's still hard to make the case for it.

I bought some super cheap spruce firewood from a guy that was having a clearout. About £25 a loose cubic metre. That's about £0.03p per kWh. But then I still had to drive a 9km round trip 3 times and it was a total of about 5hrs labour to collect and put it away in the store.

The ground source heat pump is around 400% efficient. Electricity costs about £0.18/kWh just now (sometimes more, sometimes less) so a unit of heat is 4.5 pence.

The firewood I bought was ridiculously cheap too. Usually close to double that cost, at which point it starts to get a bit more expensive than the electricity. That's why we generally save it for the colder days in winter, when it can be the cheapest option.

I've mentioned it before, but our Swedish house costs 3x less to heat and power than our house in Devon, despite being nearly 2.5 times larger. The 8 weeks after New Year here were 12c colder here than where we used to live, so the thermal performance of our 1957 house (with it's original windows) is quite superb.

[axel_knutt]

Whatever the problems with electric, they don't appear to be hindering Norway much.

Regarding cars in general, regardless of fuel, and other products besides for that matter, what people are clearly getting increasingly hacked off with is the excessive levels of computerisation. Some people simply don't want to have to be computer experts just to make everyday objects work, and I doubt there's any evidence that computerising cars makes any difference at all to the likelihood of the sills rusting, gearbox falling out, or fan belt breaking. It probably does make quite a significant difference to the probability of having to scrap the car because the computer keeps crashing, or electrical fire, or the manufacturers are no longer providing security updates for the software.

No sooner has Cory Doctorow published his book on Enshittification than the Norwegian Consumer Council are onto it.

Here's their report:
https://storage02.forbrukerradet.no/med ... future.pdf

And here's a page from their website with a parody video, "The Enshittificator":
https://www.forbrukerradet.no/breakingfree
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ&t=205s

"In the new report Breaking Free: Pathways to a fair technological future, the Norwegian Consumer Council has delved into enshittification and how to resist it. The report shows how this phenomenon affects both consumers and society at large, but that it is possible to turn the tide. Together with more than 70 consumer groups and other actors in Europe and the US, we are sending letter to policymakers in the EU/EEA, UK and the US."

[PDQ Mobile]

It's still hard to make the case for it.

I bought some super cheap spruce firewood from a guy that was having a clearout. About £25 a loose cubic metre. That's about £0.03p per kWh. But then I still had to drive a 9km round trip 3 times and it was a total of about 5hrs labour to collect and put it away in the store.

The ground source heat pump is around 400% efficient. Electricity costs about £0.18/kWh just now (sometimes more, sometimes less) so a unit of heat is 4.5 pence.

The firewood I bought was ridiculously cheap too. Usually close to double that cost, at which point it starts to get a bit more expensive than the electricity. That's why we generally save it for the colder days in winter, when it can be the cheapest option.

I've mentioned it before, but our Swedish house costs 3x less to heat and power than our house in Devon, despite being nearly 2.5 times larger. The 8 weeks after New Year here were 12c colder here than where we used to live, so the thermal performance of our 1957 house (with it's original windows) is quite superb.

Clearly things are different in different places.
However on purely economic criteria a local wood source is still hard to beat IMHO.

Without a domestic battery (5kwh = 1500?) daytime leccy costs are much higher than yours in the UK (but you know that).

You really could do with a vehicle that will carry a cube in one journey because that is where most of your time and money is going- 3 times back and forth for a single cube.
I can collect (chainsaw in forest waste),transport, process(split), and store(stacked) that same amount in less time than you.
It's down to a fine art after 40 odd years!
Transport distances here are never so far as yours but can be say 5 km, usually a lot less though.

0.03 per kwh is a dream for many; perhaps given the factors above and the fact that I can collect my own (you did say you sometimes get free firewood?)then my kwh cost is likely to be even less.

Throw in the super low carbon, total sustainability into the foreseeable future, and from my angle it still looks pretty favourable.

Furthermore, Geothermal HPs are much more efficient in winter than air-source ones.
The discussion on here has been primarily about air-source because that is what is mostly installed at the moment in the UK.

Even Cugel has just said that "2 sticks" (I wish!) on his never used wood-burner make his eco house too hot!
(The capital cost of which was doubtless pretty high.)

That tells you something about the calorific value of DRY wood.
I fear the smell of woodsmoke less than him.
And I cook on wood too.

[Jon in Sweden]

Clearly things are different in different places.
However on purely economic criteria a local wood source is still hard to beat IMHO.

Without a domestic battery (5kwh = 1500?) daytime leccy costs are much higher than yours in the UK (but you know that).

You really could do with a vehicle that will carry a cube in one journey because that is where most of your time and money is going- 3 times back and forth for a single cube.
I can collect (chainsaw in forest waste),transport, process(split), and store(stacked) that same amount in less time than you.
It's down to a fine art after 40 odd years!
Transport distances here are never so far as yours but can be say 5 km, usually a lot less though.

0.03 per kwh is a dream for many; perhaps given the factors above and the fact that I can collect my own (you did say you sometimes get free firewood?)then my kwh cost is likely to be even less.

Throw in the super low carbon, total sustainability into the foreseeable future, and from my angle it still looks pretty favourable.

Furthermore, Geothermal HPs are much more efficient in winter than air-source ones.
The discussion on here has been primarily about air-source because that is what is mostly installed at the moment in the UK.

Even Cugel has just said that "2 sticks" (I wish!) on his never used wood-burner make his eco house too hot!
(The capital cost of which was doubtless pretty high.)

That tells you something about the calorific value of DRY wood.
I fear the smell of woodsmoke less than him.
And I cook on wood too.

I was using a trailer to transport the firewood - it was 8 cube, split into 3 runs. I collected it and offloaded it, and my wife put it away. Our current woodstore is under the house, which is annoying. I'm building a new one next month adjacent to the road with a pop up roof so that I can chuck the timber directly from the trailer into the store.

When I was in the UK, I set up and ran a sawmill in Scotland and then had a forestry business down in Devon. From 2009 to 2018, we burnt on average between 19 and 38 cubic metres of firewood per year (depending on which house it was) as our primary heating. I'm honestly pretty sick of firewood, TBH. I can cut and process it extremely quickly (I'm 6ft 8 and very strong/fit) but I just don't want to anymore. I'd rather enjoy the easy heat of cheap-to-run heat pumps.

If money were no object, I would get a large battery for the house to draw electricity during the cheap periods to use when it was expensive. I'd also consider solar - Sweden is very sunny (we get a little over 2000hrs a year where we are) and especially in spring, we have a lot of strong sun, but also overnight frosts. Solar, coupled with a battery would probably cover our heating needs.

Additionally, during hot spells in summer (and it gets really warm here for sustained periods June-August) we'd run the AC like there was no tomorrow if we had solar.

[Jon in Sweden]

This is an oak framed store I built in 2013 in Scotland. Milled the timber myself. It'd hold about 20 cube. It was strong enough to severe it from the ground (the posts were concreted in) and load it to a lorry to take to Devon.

It then served us well down in the SW from 2018 to 2022, at which point I gave it away to a friend, and it was again loaded onto a lorry and hauled away

[PDQ Mobile]

Ah sorry I understood a single cube.
Now I understand 3 runs.

I never got tired of using wood.
And I love being in the woods getting it.
Coming home with the trailer full is one of life's happy moments.
(Maybe(??!)) one day I won't manage the physicality of it but not there yet. I am in my 70's.
I have never bought processed firewood and have burned no coal etc for 20 years.


I can't tell you how much I run on per annum for sure.
I would guess less than 20 cube though.
Heating cooking and all hot water.
House is very old or part of it is.
Small is beautiful.
I did my best to insulate it but it could be better.
However Wales isn't Scandinavia or Scotland!

I like your wood store.
Mine is a bit more rustic! But it works ok.

I do stack neat and high.
It compresses the volume surprisingly and makes it easy to divide various ages etc.

Go for your solar/wind and HP- it has to be the future esp in urban areas.

Has the snow gone there?