Itsallaguess wrote:
Hi Howard,
You'll know I've followed your air-to-air heat-pump journey with huge interest, and it's great to hear that you've seen such good results from your installation, but I've kept meaning to come back to you after reading a number of recent 'heat pump' related articles, where they almost universally seem to be panning the suitability of 'whole house' air-to-water heat-pump systems, and where the clear benefits that you've seen from your own type of multi-room air-to-air heat-pump installation is rarely, if ever, mentioned in them.
However, critics of heat pumps say the devices remain far too expensive for most households and that installing them will require costly adaptations in many homes.
The above is a typical example of mainstream heat-pump related features that seem to solely concentrate on the well-known downsides of 'whole house' air-to-water heat-pump installations, and I'm yet to encounter a single related article that properly highlights the clear benefits of the type of multi-room air-to-air heat-pump installation that you're clearly over the moon with.
As an owner of this type of technology, and as someone who's experienced the clear benefits of it over this past winter, are you equally surprised to see this 'heat pump' technology get lumped together and criticised like this, when they should clearly be getting discussed as completely separate installation-types, with the benefits and downsides much more clearly defined between them?
Is it any wonder that the type of relatively cheap heat-pump installation that you've installed and are happy with are not more widely known about and considered, when it seems clear that there would be huge benefits in doing so?
This seems such a crazy situation to me that I'm struggling to see how the industry are actually allowing it to happen...
Cheers,
Itsallaguess
Itsallaguess
You are right that heat pumps don’t seem to get a good press. But I’m really pleased to read that AF 62, DrFfybes and funduffer also have good experiences of air to air systems.
In answer to your comments (which I have paraphrased above), neighbours and friends were generally very suspicious of the benefits of aircons. The disadvantages they worry about are that they are bulky, noisy and expensive to run. A couple of friends, when challenged, have taken some time to find my operating external unit because it is very quiet and I have “hidden” it in a frame which serves as a table next to our bbq.
We’ve used the downstairs unit almost every day this winter and cut our usage of gas by over 20% without using much extra electricity.
Going slightly off-topic I’m pretty sure that the hundreds of pounds of gas we’ve saved is because I’ve finally found how to run my powerful condensing boiler much more efficiently. It’s a system boiler which is probably over-specced for our five bed house with only two of us in it most of the time. This winter, instead of letting it run continuously, I set it to heat the water in our large, well insulated thermal store in the early morning for an hour when we get up and in the evening for an hour. At the same time I run the central heating. So instead of modulating frequently it has to work really hard in cold weather twice a day. This seems to be a much more efficient way to use the boiler. The heat pump is used to heat one room that we use most of the time and the CH is just used occasionally for background heating.
If one wanted to completely replace the gas boiler, then heating the water with an immersion heater would be ok but ducting warm air to all downstairs rooms might be the problem. Aircon ducting in the loft is easy to install out of sight but the cavity between downstairs ceilings and upstairs floors isn’t big enough to conceal ducting for the downstairs rooms, so wall units are the only solution I have seen.
Hope that answers some of the questions.
regards
Howard