Attention Homeowners: Is Your Home Suitable for a Heat Pump?

A burning question with so many answers, is your home suitable for a heat pump? With the launch of Green Homes Grant there has been an increase in demand for heat pumps throughout the country.

Why Heat Pumps?

Home energy use accounts for around 14% of all the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions, and most of that comes from burning fossil fuels in boilers, like oil or gas. Heat pumps are a renewable source of heating because they utilise solar energy that is stored in the air (or in the ground in the case of ground source heat pumps). The only energy consumed by the heat pump is the electrical energy they require to move heat from outside to inside the home, in the form of useful heating and domestic hot water.

For every unit of electricity consumed, a heat pump will deliver 3 – 4 units of high-grade heat energy into the home. As well as using less energy in the first place, with the massive recent expansion of the UK’s wind and solar power sources, this electricity comes from an increasingly decarbonised source. In the not too distance future, all of the UK’s electricity will be zero or near zero carbon, meaning that the heat delivered into the home by the heat pump is also zero carbon.

What a lot of people often don’t realise, is that in the vast majority of cases, a heat pump will be a complete replacement for your old boiler to provide all of the heating and all of the hot water requirements for your home.

What If My House Isn’t Well Insulated?

Generally speaking you need to make sure you have done what you can do insulate your house before considering a heat pump. This is because heat pumps work on a different heating principle to boilers, and the heat loss of the house has a big impact on what size heat pump is needed, and therefore a big impact on the cost of installing a heat pump system.

For customers who have got options for improving the insulation of their homes, we recommend using the Green Homes Grant for insulation instead of a heat pump. Now, that might sound counter-intuitive at first, however it is due to the way the Green Homes Grant interacts with the existing scheme, the Renewable Heat Incentive (“RHI”). Under the RHI, you can receive up to £1,500 per year for seven years from the Government when you install an air source heat pump. When you receive the Green Homes Grant for a heat pump, this doesn’t preclude you from the RHI, it just means the amount you receive from the Green Homes Grant (typically £5,000 but in some instances £10,000) will be deduced from the amount you receive under the RHI. However if the Green Homes Grant voucher is instead spent on insulation measures such as wall or loft insulation, you are then still eligible to receive the full amount under the RHI scheme.

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