By Paul Homewood
Finally the media is catching up with the truth about heat pumps!
The cost of running a heat pump in the average home will hit £1,251 this year, which is 27pc more than a traditional boiler.
The bills will soar due to the rising energy price cap, which limits how much suppliers can charge for gas and electricity. It will increase by 54pc from April, meaning the average home will pay £1,971 over a year.
This means gas boilers will cost £400 more to run than previously. But they are still hundreds of pounds cheaper than using a heat pump, new analysis has found.
The cost of heating the average home with a new gas boiler will climb from £584 to £984, according to analysis of Ofgem figures by the Energy and Utilities Alliance, a trade body. Meanwhile the cost of the equivalent amount of heat generated by a heat pump running at the minimum level of efficiency will rise from £919 to £1,251.
This means that homes heated using traditional means, such as a boiler, could save roughly £267 over the course of a year, despite seeing a bigger rise in bills. They would emit around 1,415kg more carbon over the year than heat pump users, the EUA said.
For larger homes the cost difference is even more dramatic. The cost of running a heat pump over a year in a five-bedroom house will increase from April from £1,301 to £1,773.
Meanwhile, the cost of heating the same house with a gas boiler would increase from £787 to £1,352, some £421 less than a heat pump.
The Prime Minister has vowed to wean British households off natural gas as part of his pledge to hit net zero by 2050. By 2025 builders will be banned from fitting conventional gas boilers in new-build homes. There are also plans to ban the sale of new boilers by 2035 for all households.
To help reach carbon emission targets, the Government wants 600,000 heat pumps to be installed each year by 2028.
But they come at a considerable cost. Purchasing and installing a heat pump can typically cost between £12,000 to £15,000. For older and listed homes it can be much more, with some homeowners incurring costs of more than £50,000 for the insulation, excavation and new radiators necessary for a ground source pump.
Poorly insulated and drafty homes also lower a heat pump’s efficiency, raising running costs and carbon emissions. This means households may have to spend additional money on upgrading to ensure their heat pump runs effectively.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/consumer-affairs/running-heat-pump-hits-1251-27pc-boiler/
There has been a lot of misinformation from the renewable lobby to the effect that running costs are lower for heat pumps. While this may be true when replacing electrical heating, it most certainly is not compared to a gas boiler, as I have long pointed out.
The figures of £984 for gas and £1251 for electric shown in the article correspond closely to mine:
The new OFGEM energy cap is:
Electricity – 28p/KWh
Gas – 7p/KWh
My calculations assume that an average house needs 12,000 KWh for heat; with 85% efficiency a gas boiler would therefore need 14117 KWh, costing £988 pa.
A heat pump working at an average efficiency of 2.7 would use 4444 KWh, costing £1244 pa.
What these calculations miss out however is the provision of hot water. A typical heat pump cannot provide water as hot as a gas boiler, unless run at extremely inefficient levels.
It is therefore likely that homeowners will need to either add an electric immersion heater, which will quadruple the cost of using gas, or have some sort of top up using gas. The latter will not increase running costs, but will add to capital costs, (as of course the immersion tank would).
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
February 12, 2022 at 05:04AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 