WEBVTT NOTE Transcript 2025-09-22 from FLAC by https://elvery.net/prototypes/transcribe/ on my MacBook Air M1 on maximum quality setting. NOTE Body significantly edited. 00:00.000 --> 00:04.720 Twelve years ago I had that chap called Ed Davey, who happened to be the Energy Secretary 00:04.720 --> 00:09.760 at the time, standing in my living room, proudly telling him that I'd put enough solar on my roof 00:09.760 --> 00:14.400 that I would be able to cover our electricity all the year round and we basically wouldn't have 00:14.400 --> 00:22.400 much energy bills, whatever, but we'd be carbon neutral. And I achieved it ... on the 29th of November 00:22.400 --> 00:27.040 last year. So it took 12 years from getting ready to getting through, because [the] Renewable 00:27.040 --> 00:34.960 Heat Incentive didn't work right. And even if we take a slightly less harsh view, when I applied 00:34.960 --> 00:41.680 to Octopus for a quote, I think it was in April of last year and it took until November, 00:41.680 --> 00:45.600 And I had to really push, and because we don't turn our heating on until December, 00:45.600 --> 00:53.120 that was just in time. So I have a strong view, which I'm about to write in an open letter to the 00:53.120 --> 00:58.720 Secretary of State and to Greg of Octopus, that it ought to be possible for most people to put it 00:58.720 --> 01:03.440 in two days. And even in a distress purchase in the middle of winter, you're not just tempted to 01:03.440 --> 01:11.760 slap another gas boiler on the wall. So does it work? Is it saving? Was it quick? So here was my 01:11.760 --> 01:20.320 simple answer. Yes, yes. NO! 12 years, a bit slow. Does it work? Yes. So it went in on the 28th 01:20.320 --> 01:24.400 actually, it was officially commissioned on the 29th, and we've been warm and had hot water and 01:24.400 --> 01:31.680 stuff since then. Now they managed to install it with some interesting faults. So I spent quite 01:31.680 --> 01:38.800 a lot of time fighting it to start with, but absent those faults, it's been fine. We have not 01:38.800 --> 01:43.600 had no hot water. We have not been cold. I mean, I've been tweaking with the settings. So if you 01:43.600 --> 01:49.759 ask my other half, she might have a slightly different view, but that's one, that's an arguable one. 01:58.160 --> 02:02.400 So it does its job.  It did take two months to diagnose a fairly major installation fault.  On the other hand, the system was robust that it ran for two months with a fairly major installation 02:02.400 --> 02:13.120 fault. [] So Octopus came and did some sums. They didn't really pay attention to the insulation works I'd done and so they came out with a figure for heat loss and thus the the size of a heat pump we need which I said "That's out by a factor of two [] at least."  Being the sad git that I am I have half-hour gas readings 02:28.000 --> 02:32.240 through the coldest days we ever had in this house. So I can tell you exactly what we ... anyway, 02:32.240 --> 02:35.920 they're not allowed to take that into consideration, but they went and did their sums again and said "Oh yes, you're so right!" So in the end we only swapped out one radiator, and actually I should have let them 02:40.880 --> 02:46.000 put a slightly bigger one in [there]. But the really peculiar thing, the outside unit doesn't make any [noise] ...  02:47.360 --> 02:51.760 It's like having an oscillating fan [whoosh, whoosh] noise; when it's getting really flat out it's like [WHOOSH]... 02:51.760 --> 02:57.520 But it's not, you know, it's not a horrible noise, not a whine or anything. The really odd thing is that 02:57.520 --> 03:03.280 where the pump comes in from outside, the hot and cold water coming from outside, 03:03.280 --> 03:09.920 and the cylinder is right behind our living room wall. And the living room radiator is right on the 03:09.920 --> 03:15.520 other side of it. So it basically gets first dibs on any hot water coming in, which meant that this 03:16.240 --> 03:22.720 heat pump circulation, you need a lot more water moving around your system, a lot faster for a heat 03:22.720 --> 03:28.240 pump than you do for a gas boiler. And this is all getting piled through my poor little radiator. 03:28.240 --> 03:34.800 And the noise being made by this radiator, I mean, you know [SSSSH] , to the extent that, you know, 03:34.800 --> 03:39.520 the family's having to turn the TV up to hear over it. And so it took what it turns out that when 03:39.520 --> 03:45.200 the fault went away, they'd fixed the fault, I was able to reduce that. And now it's just like it was 03:45.200 --> 03:50.480 before, effectively. There are some very slight oddities like because it's running, it's actual 03:50.480 --> 03:55.200 water outside, running from outside in the external unit, there's no anti-freeze in it. When the 03:55.200 --> 04:00.560 temperature drops to close to zero, six degrees or below, it circulates the water and runs the 04:00.560 --> 04:06.400 compressor a little bit to stop it freezing, which means that at four in the night or something, you 04:06.400 --> 04:15.520 can hear [sssssh] noise. But it's not bad. It's fine. It's actually no worse than any, it's fine. It's a 04:15.520 --> 04:20.399 fairly nice heating system. But it did take some messing around - took me two months to solve that and I was on the point of writing to Octopus and saying "This is broken, this system. If no one can 04:24.720 --> 04:31.200 hear the TV, it's not working." We also are doing an unusual thing. So as I say, heat pump installers 04:31.200 --> 04:35.680 want you to have all of your radiators on or open all of the time, and all the rooms at the same 04:35.680 --> 04:43.360 temperature. NO! I mean, it's certainly the case that people sleep more comfortably in cooler rooms. 04:43.360 --> 04:48.159 And, you know, when you like us one of your kids has left home, why are you still heating their room? And stuff like that. If you have an absolutely bang-up-to-date Passive House you barely need to 04:55.040 --> 05:01.280 heat it anyway. So I'm with a heat pump installers at this moment. But my formal research shows you 05:01.280 --> 05:07.440 can have TRVs like the ones that are on the end of these radiators with 1-2-3-4-5 and very easily reduce 05:07.440 --> 05:12.480 the heat demand in rooms that you want to be cooler, save energy, save the planet faster, save money. 05:12.480 --> 05:18.880 So has it been saving? So it went in just at the end of November. So ignoring that for each of the 05:18.880 --> 05:24.000 following months, December, January, February, March, April, which we've had bills in for, that bill has 05:24.000 --> 05:31.200 been lower than the corresponding month last year, even though all of those, this month, other than April, 05:31.200 --> 05:36.400 were colder than the same one last year. So it's been colder outside and our bills have been lower. 05:36.400 --> 05:40.000 It's slightly cheating because I was doing complicated [stuff] with our systems before. 05:40.000 --> 05:46.960 But this energy bill for this whole of the last month was 20 quid. And most of 05:46.960 --> 05:52.880 that is standing charge. So that's we've got the PV and so on. But the heat pump was much better 05:52.880 --> 05:58.159 with the battery than I thought it would - with my electrical battery. So I expanded it a little bit last month - I bought a second-hand unit.  Our carbon footprint if you look this is 06:03.840 --> 06:10.960 our graph of our carbon [footprint] from gas and electricity since then. So you can see we made 06:10.960 --> 06:20.560 some effort. We started at six tons.  So here I assumed a fixed carbon intensity, how much carbon 06:20.560 --> 06:26.000 was emitted for every kilowatt hour generated - standard figure up until there. And then I changed 06:26.000 --> 06:32.640 to a SUPER (possibly!) accurate version where every hour I measure our actual whether we are importing or exporting 06:32.640 --> 06:37.280 and what the grid intensity is. So it makes that very little difference. But maybe it said we went 06:37.280 --> 06:42.880 slightly positive. I think we'll get come down and go negative again. And I had an idea yesterday 06:42.880 --> 06:50.640 in the bath as one does - I can knock another 10% off. So the cost [that] Octopus originally quoted 06:50.640 --> 06:55.440 as two thousand seven hundred in the end, I think partially to get rid of me, partially because I only 06:55.440 --> 07:00.960 wanted one radiator change, was two thousand five hundred. Octopus' target has been to get it down 07:00.960 --> 07:06.320 cheap enough that it's actually free. They are trying to make it possible to have no CAPEX and 07:06.320 --> 07:13.760 no OPEX (no bills). That's their target. Realistically, if you go to someone like Leah of Your Energy, 07:13.760 --> 07:17.680 Your Way, she'll tell you she can't get anywhere near Octopus because they're throwing a huge 07:17.680 --> 07:24.240 invisible subsidy in on top of the government. But a few thousand quid, which is roughly what it takes 07:24.240 --> 07:31.120 to put a new combi in - a condensing combi - is what you can expect. I mean, that grant is designed to 07:31.120 --> 07:37.920 make it no more painful than than putting a new gas boiler in, except for the disruption involved. 07:37.920 --> 07:41.760 Was it quick? Well, as I say, depending on how you measure it, there's the last time I had a 07:41.760 --> 07:44.800 Secretary of State for Energy in my house. I'm sure it happens to you all the time. 07:45.520 --> 07:51.440 And I had color in my hair - and it was 12 years. That's when I wanted to do it. So I would have 07:51.440 --> 07:58.400 been slightly behind Peter, but not much, in putting one in. I think getting in the queue, 07:58.400 --> 08:02.320 there aren't enough installers around. So you can't just phone up and have it done instantly. 08:02.320 --> 08:07.600 There are more works to be done. In this open letter to the Secretary of State and so on I'm going to say 08:07.600 --> 08:12.480 "This is how I think you could make it happen in two days for most installations." If it costs the same as 08:12.480 --> 08:18.720 a gas boiler, costs the same to run as a gas boiler as well, and you can do it in two days, why wouldn't 08:18.720 --> 08:23.040 you put in a heat pump, unless you believe the Daily Mail horror stories that it's going to make your 08:23.040 --> 08:32.400 children go trans or something - I don't know. Should be two days. So, space taken. So we had the 08:32.400 --> 08:37.840 the thing on the left, we had the combi boiler in here before, and I have a heat battery as well, which is sitting down here... If we didn't have the heat battery we'd just about - just about - have 08:43.760 --> 08:50.720 got the hot water tank inside there, we could have stayed in roughly in the same space - 08:50.720 --> 08:57.520 we'd have lost some cupboard space. All that needs to be in the house these days is a hot water tank. 08:57.520 --> 09:03.280 The reason we all loved combis is they were instant hot water, 09:03.280 --> 09:07.520 which never runs out. You didn't need hot water tank. And so people's airing cupboards got, you know, 09:07.520 --> 09:12.720 recovered for other purposes. So you need to have one back with a heat pump. However, 09:12.720 --> 09:18.000 I've got a heat battery. We've got a water tank. You can see the top of the thing sticking out of the 09:18.000 --> 09:24.320 top here. This is our replacement. You put all the gubbins inside. And if you go right back to the 09:24.320 --> 09:29.280 front [page], that is the thing outside, which is about the size of a moped. And I took this 09:29.280 --> 09:34.400 picture because it's interesting because it was just frosting up. So an interesting thing that 09:34.400 --> 09:38.320 happens in the UK is you spend a lot of time with the temperature just above zero and quite a lot 09:38.320 --> 09:46.560 of humidity in the air. And so you get frost on the fins and the system has to do a defrost cycle. 09:46.560 --> 09:54.240 It's quite spectacular. It's a plume of steam coming out of the thing. It's quite spectacular. 09:54.240 --> 10:00.240 You don't get that with the old boiler. It should be that if you have a boiler which fails 10:00.240 --> 10:03.920 in December, you're going to say, could you please repair it, or can I have like-for-like? 10:03.920 --> 10:12.560 Because you understand that. It took me 12 years or eight months or two months or whatever it is, 10:12.560 --> 10:19.120 to get mine in. And I had to do a lot of external works. So we've got to get over this. I wrote 22,000 10:19.120 --> 10:24.560 words on the process. [] When you've got a gas boiler, 10:24.560 --> 10:29.440 you've basically got two controls that you can touch. One is the temperature your radiators run at, 10:29.440 --> 10:35.440 and one is the temperature your hot water runs at. My heat pump's got something like 50 parameters. 10:35.440 --> 10:39.920 Now you don't normally get to see all of them. And I am doing PhD, and I've looked, 10:39.920 --> 10:45.360 but I've written 7,000 words on all the changes I've made to those parameters. And the aim of my 10:45.360 --> 10:50.160 research, which is improving home heating decarbonisation, so we can actually do it properly, 10:50.160 --> 10:54.240 is how can we make it as simple as [possible] - people didn't run their gas boilers properly - we have 10:54.240 --> 10:58.800 to make it simpler than running a gas boiler, and less disruptive, and no more expensive. And I 10:58.800 --> 11:03.680 believe all of those things can be done without huge changes to the way people are working. 11:03.680 --> 11:05.840 We just need to think about it very differently.