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As someone who recently moved to the UK, how at they so expensive? The price for the unit isn't that bad, but I assume duct works to all rooms would be? Maybe I'm just not understanding apples to apples coming from the US.
Heat pumps in UK are mostly air to water and integrate into your central heating They do not offer cooling, so no need in ducting to every room.
UK problems are around retrofitting housing stock never designed with an idea of a unit outside. For example the logical place for me to place a heatpump is roughly more than 8m away from where the water tank would be. So you would have to run ducting outside of the house.
And thats after i took out a door and walled that in (with eventual upgrade to heatpump) to leave the space specifically for the heatpump.
So alot of the extra cost would be working around ducting it to the place where it integrates into existing heating system.
We tend not to have air-conditioning either, housing stock can suffer from condensation and mould easily here. As its old and never designed for modern standards. Mine is about 130 years old or so.
So all in all, its a right pain to do.
The main problem with heat pumps is that it usually don't generate as much heat as burning something(gas, wood...) So if houses are not well insulated you will spend much more time and a lot of electricity heating it and maybe won't have the same comfort
Yeah that's a worry for me, I do want to switch to heatpump in the future, I can benefit from having solars on the shed (have a nice ~25m2 shed), and a few panels on the house, so it may offset the running costs. But ofc thats some time in the magical future where I have money for all that.
And I have yet not done any surveys about how effective it would be
There are calculators online where you can enter your house/room details and get an estimate if any upgrades would be needed to make it reliably comfortable with a heat pump. I don't know any for the UK specifically tho. Maybe those estimates are too climate/building code sensitive
In the UK we have A LOT of safety regulations for these sorts of things. They were mostly EU rules that we kept after Brexit (not necessarily a bad thing), getting something approved takes time, development and money. Another issue is we have many MANY small terraced (lots of houses joined together in a row) houses that would struggle to fit a large heat pump and many of these houses are old, like 100 years + making modifications expensive. Until they're smaller and cheaper with better incentives I unfortunately just don't see us taking them up.
I don't understand why any of these factors, none of which seems specific for the UK but instead applicable to the entire EU, would make heat pumps more expensive in the UK compared to the EU.
AFAIK they're really expensive in Germany because of how they're subsidised.
Aka... they're purposely overpriced because "free government money" brings the price back to what it would be, theoretically. Ain't capitalism grand?
Youβd think all new builds would have to have heat pumps and solar panels, thereby reducing demand.
Sadly, thatβs probably like 1% of housing stock.