7 July 2022

Late 2022 update: I forwarded this blog to my excellent local MP here in St. Albans - Daisy Cooper - who tabled two parliamentary written questions on the costs and complexity of planning and noise survey requirements and on the inapplicability of the boiler upgrade scheme subsidiary to hybrid installations. The questions are here:
https://questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-questions/detail/2022-09-02/46152/

https://questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-questions/detail/2022-09-02/46151/

You can see that the questions got the inevitable departmental brush-off. However, I think this does show that talking about our efforts to decarbonise can send out small ripples into the political process.

My experience installing a heat-pump shows the massive gap between climate policy and what happens on the ground. 

Race to net zero

Three years ago I wrote about my family’s aspiration to halve our carbon footprint in seven years, i.e. by the end of 2026. A key component of this is getting a grip on home energy and heating, responsible for around 5 Tonnes of CO2 emissions per annum for our household. Indeed home heating is one of the thorny issues to overcome in the UK’s decarbonisation pathway.

One of my principles has been to try to pick approaches and technologies that are consistent with a net-zero world in 2050. I have previously written about the difficulties of picking the future technology that will prevail in home heating. Heat-pumps are a possibility but require significant upgrades to grid capacity and smart management given the peak winter grid load they imply. Perhaps green hydrogen is the answer, but the practicalities of home distribution are formidable. So perhaps district heating networks are the answer.

In the end, I decided that air-source heat-pumps are likely to be at least part of the answer, and are at least a technology that is available now. So I started on the path of installing a heat-pump for heating and hot water. Given that I view my electricity supply as zero-carbon, this delivers a 5 Tonne saving in our household footprint.  

A Kafkaesque experience

Looking at the planning rules I was pleased to find that a heat-pump doesn’t require planning permission provided it is positioned more than 1m from the household boundary. I live in a good-sized detached house and decided that locating the heat-pump on our garden-facing back wall was the way to go. 

We had a portion of back wall that was nicely heat-pump shaped, but it turned out that was no good. Health and safety requirements prevent the heat-pump from being located within a minimum distance of any window (due to some remote possibility of refrigerant gas leakage). Because we have bifold doors at the back of our house plus a kitchen window there was no rear location that would work for us.

So we had to go for the side of the house. Unfortunately, the distance from the boundary was not quite enough, meaning that the edge of the heat-pump would be 70cm from the boundary not 1m. That 30cm would prove costly, to the tune of £6,000.

Being within 1m from the boundary triggered a requirement for planning permission. I was able to put this together myself, but it still cost about £300. In addition, we had to commission a noise survey for about £1,000. The noise survey compares ambient background noise at our neighbour’s nearest window with the noise produced by the heat-pump.

We live on a moderately busy urban road that has traffic intermittently through the night. However, the ambient sound standard is the 10th percentile 15 minute term average sound level through the night. Because there are occasionally no cars for a short period of time in the night, the heat-pump exceeds this threshold level.

The noise engineer’s recommendation was therefore to put the heat-pump in a sound enclosure that effectively reduced the noise of the heat pump to zero. Unfortunately, the size of this enclosure (requiring a double-skinned shell with spacing in between the layers) would’ve required close to two metre clearance from the boundary. So not possible. And totally excessive given the regularity of traffic on our road.

At this point, I’ve invested a total of around £2,000 in the combination of the initial survey from the heat-pump installer (refundable on installation), planning permission, and the noise survey. Yet planning permission seemed impossible. 

After extensive to-and-fro with the planning officer we got to the following compromise. They would give us planning permission for a heat-pump operable between 6am and 10pm. We never have the heating on at night and could mange the hot-water heating within this timeframe, so this didn’t seem like a big drama.

However, a further condition of the planning permission was that we must retain the gas boiler, because they refused to provide planning permission for a heating set up that would not enable heating at night, on the basis that they didn’t feel they could rely on that being observed by all future owners of our house.

In a way I was not so concerned about this, as a hybrid system had been my initial preference, given that it provides a hedge in relation to future technologies, e.g. in case a form of green gas became prevalent in future. However, as another sting in the tail, I discovered that the Government’s new Boiler Upgrade Scheme, which replaced the old Renewable Heat Incentive this year, only provides the £5,000 subsidy towards the costs of a heat pump if it replaces a gas boiler entirely.

So a shortfall of 30cm in clearance from my neighbour’s property has ended up adding over £6,000 to the cost of installation.

There are additional issues with heat pumps. Although they can now heat hot water to 70 degrees, they are most efficient around the 45-50 degree level so require larger (or multi-panel) radiators to operate effectively. All of our radiators are pretty antiquated so an upgrade was potentially in order anyway, but that is an additional cost.

A big unknown is the impact on future energy bills, which will depend on relative gas and electricity prices plus the actual operational efficiency of the heat-pump. On average it seems like the fuel cost is broadly neutral, although this could move in the heat-pump’s favour if the global gas prices remain elevated at current levels.  

An expensive solution

Assuming a neutral impact on future energy costs, I estimate that the heat-pump will save carbon at a cost of around £200 per Tonne of CO2. That’s about twice the self-imposed carbon tax I’d proposed of £100 per Tonne in my initial principles.

There’s arguably better use to which I could put the money I’m spending on the heat-pump. For example, around £2,500 donated to the Against Malaria Foundation is estimated to save the life of a child under 5 through distribution of mosquito nets.

But on the other hand climate change really matters too and there’s a need for people who are able to be first adopters to stimulate the market in technologies that will be part of the solution. Heat pumps are well established in parts of Europe, but trades in the UK have not yet trained up to deliver them at scale. I hope that in a small way I can contribute to market signals to increase capacity.  

Something needs to change

I also hope that my experience can, again in a small way, inform policy, which needs to be adapted in at least three ways:

• It needs to be ensured that safety regulations around where heat pumps can be located are not excessively onerous.

• Planning rules on noise need to strike a more pragmatic balance between avoidance of noise pollution and the policy imperative of decarbonisation.

• The Boiler Upgrade Scheme needs to be more flexible for appropriate hybrid installations, given that any heat-pump installation will significant reduce the carbon footprint of a home.

The Conservative Government has been good on big-picture commitments. But as the Climate Change Committee has highlighted, “tangible progress is lagging the policy ambition”. I also agree with the Committee’s recommendation on housing that there needs to be bespoke support for households wishing to undertake more complex retrofits. I have found myself having to self-educate to a remarkable degree in order to navigate a market where too many providers have a fixed solution to sell.

Have I found the right path? I don’t know. It’s nerve-wracking reconfiguring something as fundamental as a home heating system. I’m determined to do it to have a chance of meeting our commitment on reducing our carbon footprint. I live in a good sized detached house, have the time and motivation to attempt to navigate the technical, regulatory, and planning requirements, and have the capital to meet a very significant upfront capital cost. If it’s a disaster, I know I can reverse it, again at a cost.

But I’m in an unusual position. Unless it gets easier, I suspect few will follow suit.