Air Source Heat Pumps. Real world experiences?

And don’t start me on Heat Geek and his disciples……

And don’t start me on Heat Geek and his disciples……

To be fair, they have probably done more to promote well designed HPs than anyone else. I have a personal issue with them in that I paid around £1600 to do their courses. 3 months later they got Government funding, and offered the same courses for £250. And to rub it in, there was a specific HP install course added on for those who got funded, but not for those who paid the full course fee.
I was on their map, which did produce a few phone calls and jobs, but now, to be on the map, I need to pay £350 a month. That isnt going to happen.

And, today I’ve been asked about a HP for a new build house. He’s had two quotes / estimates so far. One specified a 12kW Daikin, the other a 16kW. The house is 150m2, and passive. A quick back of an envelope calculation shows 3kW would be plenty. And both of those Installers were MCS registered. It shows how poor MCS quality control is.

Alan – that I totally agree with!
Not sure you would have seen the video where he basically said if your installer has worked in the heating industry for a long time then he’s probably too set in his ways to change, a d the other thing is his claim of a combi that is simply a thermal store. Having worked in the industry for nearly 40 years starting out helping my dad in the holidays I was quite annoyed. I put my first underfloor heating in in about 1985 I think and it was coupled to a condensing oil boiler. That was advanced for then! Mind you it was a rubbish boiler!

Have a look at Warmur, we have some dealings with them and have a couple of interesting ideas.

Our installer charged us for the survey, which was refunded when we placed the order. They need to do it first so the quote can include thinks like replacing rads.

That’s great info thanks, that’s the sort of thing I was looking for

Octopus gave us a quote (not an estimate) based on a few questions about our house and neighbouring houses. We didn’t even have an EPC at the time, though we did have to get one to proceed. The EPC said we needed cavity wall insulation before we could have the 7.5k grant for an ASHP. Turns out we didn’t as we already had it but the surveyor hadn’t seen it as we’d just had the house repointed.  Anyway, several months after expressing interest and paying a £500 deposit, they came to survey the house. The surveyor was recently qualified to work alone having been trained to then shadowing / working with another surveyor. In fairness he said the amount of enquiries that they’d had was incredible hence the delays while they trained staff.

The survey suggested we needed a 9kw heat pump, and that we need to replace several radiators: 4 regular rads, one towel rail and one fan convector. At this point I’d paid £500 for the survey but would have got a full refund if I’d decided not to go ahead. A friend also had an octopus survey, and also paid for a local outfit to do their own survey. In his case he’s decided to go with the other guys: the cost of their survey is offset against the cost of the fitting, which is more expensive than octopus, but also more adaptable: they’ve agreed to wall mount the ASHP above head level to preserve floor space (which octopus won’t do) and have a lower figure for the requirements calculation because they were willing to exclude the rarely used conservatory, as opposed to octopus who said “triple the size of the radiator in there, or disconnect them and cap them off completely if you want to exclude the conservatory”. The local guys were thus able to recommend a smaller pump than octopus for him.

We decided to go with octopus anyway and the wait for fitting was thankfully much shorter than the wait for the survey. The fitting is now complete.

There have been some minor issues like the team going ahead and fitting a radiator with visible damage rather than saying “this is damaged, we’ll get another”.  Same guy also dropped some hot flux on the floor and burnt the lino. They’ve subsequently replaced the chipped radiators and paid for replacement flooring, which is fair enough. The replaced towel rail radiator is now rocking slightly as the bracket is loose, so they’re coming to fix that at some point.

The 9kw unit they fitted is actually a Daikin 14kw unit that’s software limited to 9. It’s pretty darn quiet when it does run

Can share figures for radiator sizes if anyone wants to see them

@alanl

this is the WC curve for my veissmann gas boiler in a (very) well insulated house with concrete floor and UFH.  It should vary the temp by quite a bit.