WEBVTT NOTE Transcript 2024-07-28 from MP3 by https://elvery.net/prototypes/transcribe/ on my MacBook Air M1 on maximum quality setting. NOTE Body edited. 00:00.000 --> 00:05.920 Okay, hello everybody. We installed a heat pump, well it's nearly 15 years ago now, so we were 00:05.920 --> 00:11.920 distinctly early adopters of this, and it was really part of a project to try and reduce our carbon footprint, so no calculations about payback period or anything like that.  I divided it into "What is a heat pump?" ... there is so much 00:20.880 --> 00:26.320 misinformation and disinformation around heat pumps, just try and get everybody on the same 00:26.320 --> 00:33.920 same place. "Our experience with owning and living with one of these things for 15 years" and then "Why 00:33.920 --> 00:40.240 heat pumps are necessary" really for the country, not just for individuals, so a heat pump. Okay, 00:40.240 --> 00:45.360 well most people are absolutely shocked at this price and really when you start to look into them 00:45.360 --> 00:51.760 they are extraordinarily complex engineering devices, much much more complicated than a boiler, 00:51.760 --> 00:57.200 stuffed full of electronics, compressors, heat exchangers, all sorts of things and you think 00:57.200 --> 01:03.200 they're very sort of new things but they're not. The first heat pump was made in 1830, well before 01:03.200 --> 01:10.400 anybody thought about gas boilers. You all, each of you, probably has three heat pumps, maybe more. 01:10.400 --> 01:16.400 You've got one in the fridge, one in the freezer, one in a car, you might have an air conditioning 01:16.400 --> 01:21.840 and you might have dehumidifiers. They are everywhere, it's very common technology now, but 01:21.840 --> 01:30.320 complicated. Basically what it does is that it pumps heat backwards against temperature. I mean 01:30.320 --> 01:33.520 you'll think about your fridge, this is what happens, you know, your fridge, you're making a fridge 01:39.200 --> 01:43.600 and the fridge keeps on pumping it out and dumping it back in the kitchen and it's just going round 01:43.600 --> 01:48.960 and round in circles and that's what heat pump does. It needs some electricity to work because 01:55.200 --> 02:00.800 a gas boiler, the gas boiler or electric heater, you buy the electricity or the gas, you put it in, 02:00.800 --> 02:06.480 that's got the energy in it and you release it as heat. So you take the chemical energy in the gas 02:06.480 --> 02:13.040 and convert it into heat energy, um, the efficiency is maybe 80 or 90 percent, some of it's waste, 02:13.040 --> 02:18.880 some of it goes to the gym and that's fine. With a heat pump, you're not actually converting one 02:18.880 --> 02:23.760 form of energy to the other, you're harvesting energy in the environment and pumping it into 02:23.760 --> 02:29.360 your house. It takes some energy to run the machine and that energy is not wasted, it is, most of it is 02:29.360 --> 02:37.120 retained in the system, so it's not wasted energy, um, but the efficiencies are huge because it's, 02:37.120 --> 02:42.240 instead of being saying 90 percent for a good gas boiler, it's 300 percent for a heat pump, 02:42.240 --> 02:46.720 so it's harvesting three times as much. Now, when I sort of mentioned it, everybody said, 02:46.720 --> 02:50.960 well what happens on a really cold day when it's freezing, surely there's no energy left in the air. 02:50.960 --> 02:56.720 Um, well there is lots of energy left in the air, um, you have to think that there is no energy 02:56.720 --> 03:03.760 left in the air at minus 273, which is absolute zero. Now, you wouldn't exist in that form at 03:03.760 --> 03:09.040 minus 273, but if you think that you're, the environment we live in, it's maybe, you're going 03:09.040 --> 03:15.520 to be using a heat pump from when it's about 10 degrees to minus 5 degrees here, and the change 03:15.520 --> 03:21.360 in energy in the air over that range, tiny. The temperature difference does affect the heat pump, 03:21.360 --> 03:26.880 but it doesn't affect the principle of there being lots of energy in the environment to be harvested. 03:26.880 --> 03:33.920 So these are strange devices, um, very reliable, established technology. We went for a heat pump, 03:38.880 --> 03:44.960 your house. I thought, well okay, so we better check this. So we went to Daikin's training 03:44.960 --> 03:49.440 centre in Woking, where they got lots and lots of heat pumps, and we heard them. They sent them 03:49.440 --> 03:54.720 running, and we listened to them, and we thought, well okay, they're not silent, they make a noise, 03:54.720 --> 04:00.160 and it's probably a bit noisier than the flu on a gas boiler, because gas boiler makes noise, 04:00.160 --> 04:05.600 um, but it's okay, it's going to be okay, or we can live with it. And anyway, what's the equation 04:05.600 --> 04:10.720 between climate change and a bit of noise, why these two equated, I don't know why they equated, 04:10.720 --> 04:18.640 but people do. It was installed, um, we were the first customers in this company, and it showed they, 04:18.640 --> 04:23.840 um, we had three guys. We had a guy who dealt with refrigerants, a guy who dealt with electrics, 04:23.840 --> 04:28.640 and a guy who dealt with plumbing, and they were very good, but they never done one before, 04:28.640 --> 04:35.680 and they fled after they'd fitted me, and left me with a manual. This, they translated from 04:35.680 --> 04:42.000 Korean, I suppose, and my first was like, how on earth can they sell these to the general public? 04:42.000 --> 04:46.240 You have to be, I'm an engineer, and I have to be an engineer really to cope with this. I find it 04:46.240 --> 04:50.400 very stressful, very difficult, and I find faults, and they have to come back, and you know, I had to 04:50.400 --> 04:54.960 commission it and get it running, but we've got it settled, and I think if you went to Octopus now, 04:54.960 --> 05:00.160 who are the big sellers of them, it will be absolutely fine. Okay, it's been reliable, 05:00.160 --> 05:05.760 it had its first fault a couple years ago. In fact, it was a trivial fault. It took quite a 05:05.760 --> 05:10.880 lot of money to fix it, because the diagnostics in the machine are not brilliant. Ours is a very 05:10.880 --> 05:17.280 early one, and when it came out with its error code, and I phoned Aiken and said this is the 05:17.280 --> 05:22.800 error code, and he said, oh dear, that one covers a whole lot of faults, and we can't really tell. 05:22.800 --> 05:29.200 And so they changed lots of parts, which they didn't need to change, but I think machines, 05:29.200 --> 05:35.200 you know, it's all got better now. It was really just a solenoid that got a bit sticky, and it 05:35.200 --> 05:40.000 actually went into, like cars do, a limp home mode. So it carried on working, so this was in mid-winter, 05:40.000 --> 05:47.440 but it carried on working, not very well, but it kept our house warm over that time. So, and I have 05:47.440 --> 05:54.320 its checked every year, it doesn't really have any requirements for servicing, very, very simple. 05:54.320 --> 05:59.440 And the people who come and service it, they're really, they're absolutely excellent people. 05:59.440 --> 06:06.400 That was cost, well, in 2009, cost 12,000 pounds, so very expensive compared to gas boiler 06:06.400 --> 06:12.640 at the time. This is the crux of it, really, a graph of the efficiency and how the efficiency 06:12.640 --> 06:19.680 varies with the temperature of the water. Because it really is just a straight replacement for a gas 06:19.680 --> 06:24.880 boiler, in our case. So it connects into a hot water regulator system, which I've come on to, 06:24.880 --> 06:34.240 and the vertical bit is the efficiency, and it goes from four times to two times. So 400% efficiency, 06:34.240 --> 06:41.920 down to 200% efficiency, and this is the difference in temperature between hot water in the radiators, 06:41.920 --> 06:46.800 so that's what it's producing, and the temperature outside, because the temperature outside 06:46.800 --> 06:54.080 affects how it works. And what this means is on temperate days, when it might be seven degrees 06:54.080 --> 06:58.159 outside, and you want to heat your house to 20 degrees, and you might need water in the 07:05.760 --> 07:11.120 five, and you want to get water in the radiators up to 50 degrees, the efficiency drops. So the 07:11.120 --> 07:16.160 efficiency of it is changing rapidly all the time. It's not like a gas boiler, which is pretty 07:16.160 --> 07:22.560 constant. This is dynamic. It's moving around the whole time, depending on how cold it is outside, 07:22.560 --> 07:29.040 and how warm the radiator needs to be. So with this sort of thing in mind, you need to really 07:29.040 --> 07:34.800 try to get it to run as cool as it can all the time. So it's not like a gas boiler, which is 07:34.800 --> 07:41.040 blast water, hot water at 70, 75 degrees. Shouldn't really do this, but they do. This you need to 07:41.040 --> 07:46.240 always think about getting the temperature of the water down as low as possible, because the 07:46.240 --> 07:51.760 efficiency rockets you do that. And this I think this is why, you know, there's so much criticism 07:51.760 --> 07:56.960 in the press of people finding fault is because they haven't been installed with this in mind. 07:56.960 --> 08:02.000 The temperature of the water has to be as low as possible. And if you lower the temperature of the 08:02.000 --> 08:07.360 water and the radiators, the output of the radiators goes down more rapidly than the 08:07.360 --> 08:13.200 temperature that goes down. It's not linear, so it can go horribly wrong if you don't get it right. 08:13.200 --> 08:17.840 And there are two ways of addressing getting the temperature down. One is you improve the efficiency 08:17.840 --> 08:22.400 of the insulation in your house, which you might or might not be able to do. And that people say, 08:22.400 --> 08:27.600 you know, insulates your house. Well, okay, but you can put some loft insulation in, you can put 08:27.600 --> 08:33.840 some better windows in, some draft proofing around the doors. And then it starts to get difficult. 08:39.280 --> 08:44.320 insulation, but if you've got an old house with solid brick walls, it becomes very expensive. 08:44.320 --> 08:48.640 It's a Victorian house, you start to change the character of the house if you put it on the outside. 08:48.640 --> 08:56.480 There's just a heat pump. It's an easy fix, really, because what you do is you reduce your energy 08:56.480 --> 09:02.480 consumption three times. And there's no insulation, which you can do to a Victorian house, which will 09:02.480 --> 09:08.160 get anywhere near that. And if you did try it, it would cost you hundreds of thousands of pounds, 09:08.160 --> 09:12.240 you know, make sure you're loft insulation, fine, make sure you've got the windows draft proofing, 09:12.240 --> 09:16.720 maybe you can seal the floor. So you haven't got lots of drafty floors, and then stick a heat 09:16.720 --> 09:22.160 pump in. That's the best thing. There are settings in our machine, which you have to go in and set. 09:22.160 --> 09:27.200 I'm not showing the installer should do this is where you actually set the temperature in the 09:27.200 --> 09:33.360 radiator to be dependent on the temperature outside. So on really, really cold days, our 09:33.360 --> 09:39.680 radiators are about 50 degrees, maybe that's 49. And that's as hot as they go. And then as we come 09:39.680 --> 09:44.480 into this time, well, it's not on now. But you know, a few months ago, when it was maybe 10 degrees 09:44.480 --> 09:49.600 outside, I would have the temperature and the radiators about 2022. And what that does is 09:49.600 --> 09:53.920 because the pump's compressor now doesn't have to work so hard, because he's not having to produce 09:53.920 --> 10:01.440 very hot water. The electric demand drops and the efficiency rockets. And this is what we did, we 10:01.440 --> 10:07.600 put in bigger rate, we had steel radiators. And at the time we did this the best way, because 10:07.600 --> 10:11.600 everybody has a problem, they have pipes coming up to the floor, and what are you going to do to tear 10:11.600 --> 10:17.920 up the floor to put in bigger radiators. So we went for fitting radiators to the same pipes. 10:17.920 --> 10:23.680 And we went for cast aluminium radiators. So instead of having a steel panel radiator, 10:23.680 --> 10:29.920 we put in cast aluminium radiators, which is like this and this, which have much higher output. 10:29.920 --> 10:35.600 Basically, you need to be doing something like increasing, well, it depends on what you've got 10:35.600 --> 10:41.280 in the house, but you may be looking to increase the radiator outputs by 50 to 70%. Something of 10:41.280 --> 10:48.000 that order is likely to work. If you take a radiator, steel radiator, which is designed to 10:48.000 --> 10:54.560 work with water going in at 70 degrees, and then you then change that and put water in at 50 degrees, 10:54.560 --> 10:59.600 the output of the radiator will be hard. Now, since we did this, which was obviously 50 years ago, 10:59.600 --> 11:06.560 Stelran, who are the big manufacturers of steel radiators, now produce a radiator, which is 11:06.560 --> 11:12.800 designed to go onto the existing pipes and have twice the output. So they have actually solved 11:12.800 --> 11:19.040 this problem, but we didn't have that choice. So on our pipe, you can probably see just about, 11:19.040 --> 11:23.840 there's a sort of conch of botch pipe workers, the plumber, the pipes didn't quite line up with 11:23.840 --> 11:27.040 the size of the radiator, and the plumber had to do with the chicken was around. 11:27.040 --> 11:34.720 You wouldn't need to do that nowadays. So one of the things, if you can add insulation and reduce 11:34.720 --> 11:38.800 the heat loss of your house by doing that and draft quickly and get that improvement, 11:38.800 --> 11:44.320 sort of reducing airflow, sweeping heat out through the house, you might reduce, say, 11:44.320 --> 11:49.040 the heat demand of the house by 10%. If you could do that with a heat, if you do that with a gas 11:49.040 --> 11:54.000 boiler, you can just save 10%. If you do it with a heat pump, what it means is you can take the 11:54.000 --> 11:58.720 opportunity to lower the temperature in the radiators because you no longer need so much 11:58.720 --> 12:03.760 heat flowing into the house. You lower the temperature in the radiators and the efficiency 12:03.760 --> 12:11.200 goes up. So you probably save 15%. Our energy bills are energy consumption normalized. It's 12:11.200 --> 12:17.920 about 50 kilowatt hours of energy. This is everything we use. So I can't separate out 12:17.920 --> 12:22.960 televisions left on standby and all this sort of stuff, because we just can't be bothered to sort 12:22.960 --> 12:31.360 that out. It's about 50 kilowatt hours per square meter. And UK norms are 150 to 300 kilowatt 12:31.360 --> 12:33.800 hours per [square] meter, maybe more, depending...