We live in a 1900s Victorian Semi detached house, our boiler still had some life left but wasn’t new by any means. We knew the government grant wouldn’t be around forever so with some research and a little push from friends (who have also got ASHP), we decided to go down the route of an Air Source Heat Pump. We knew we would need to replace a couple radiators as the flow runs less hot so we replaced the ones we thought would need changing beforehand to larger ones.
Going into the installation we had a couple concerns:
- Noise Level
- Running costs
- Less hot radiators being enough to warm the house
Not the biggest concerns in the world but nevertheless, they were the thoughts that were stopping us from diving straight into the renewable game. - As you can imagine a couple different “Energy Consultants” from a couple different companies assured me these are things not to worry about so (maybe stupidly) we went for it!
So here is my individual experience with an Air Source Heatpump in a solid brick house:
Winter Performance
As far as differences vs traditional gas combo boiler, there has been very little. The differences we have experiences have actually been a positive! (To my surprise) The main difference was continuous heat. So usually we would time the boiler to come on at 6am, before we woke the kids up or school and got up for work, so it would just be warm for us whilst having breakfast, preparing for the day etc. With the boiler it would just be a little warm whereas with our new ASHP, we have it running at a constant temp of 21 Degrees. So instead of getting ready in a jumper, which is what I used to do, I now proudly jump straight out of my bed in my t-shirt and boxers (I work out) and feel very comfortable - no rush for a jumper!
So yeah everything feels extremely snug ALL THE TIME thanks to our new heapump, I think it did help that we recently had our loft insulation upgraded.
Running Costs Vs Gas Boiler
As a family of 4, I’d say our energy bills are probably a little higher than the average household. So we used roughly around 15,000kWh to 17,000kWh of gas per year, which equated to roughly £1,100 per year or around £90 per month just on gas (including standing charge) Because we have an induction hob, with the new heat pump system we no longer had a standing charge for gas as we completely came off it, saving us around £110 per year straight away, which we were happy about.
Now probably the part you have all been waiting for, as a yearly average our heat pump uses around 7kWh to 8kWh of electricity per day which to my delight (&surprise) was actually cheaper than the gas boiler! For those of you who aren’t as tech and in tune with the unit rates as me, that equates to around £650 to £760 per year, which is around £400 cheaper than out gas boiler!
The installer we ended up going with did promise a little more savings (which I didn’t believe anyway) but I was impressed by their process + the kit they used, aiding my faith going into this about the running costs being lower than gas, which again to my surprise is now lower with our new ASHP system.
Summary
So there you go. We love our heat pump. Most of the time it just sits there doing nothing, and we have hot water whenever we need it and heating throughout winter. It's cheaper, cleaner, quieter, easier to maintain; plus we have a new kitchen cupboard where the boiler was, extra space in our cupboard where the meter was and I've been able to remove redundant gas pipework from various parts of the kitchen. It was installed with no changes to our radiator system too!