Homeowners in the UK will be offered £7,000 grants to help replace their gas boilers in a new £400million scrappage scheme.
Plans have been pulled together to improve the Clean Heat Grants scheme for relaunch in April next year.
Earlier reports about the future of the scheme suggested ministers were examining the idea of a £4,000 ‘clean heat grant’ that would help pay for new green boilers from next April for two years.
I don’t recall any
The scheme is just one of several plans Boris Johnson has announced in recent weeks, including plans to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030 and hopes to scrap all gas boilers within four years.
Again, no one voted for this.
Families will shoulder much of this expense – up to £400 a year per household – through having to replace their gas boilers and switch to electric cars, among other things.
Of course we will. These fanatics are fond of pissing our money up the wall on their insane schemes. And I am not going to buy an electric car. These monstrosities are not remotely environmentally friendly. Smug, self-righteous arseholes in developed countries get to feel all self congratulatory about their lack of emissions while in developing countries child labour is used to destroy the local habitat, but who cares about brown people and wildlife if you can virtue-signal in your latest electric motor, eh?
Although I always thought Boris Johnson was something of a lightweight probably unfit for high office, even I have been surprised by just how bloody awful he has been since getting into Downing Street. We might just as well have elected Jeremy Corbyn.
With milk floats, the remorseless propaganda is trying to create the impression that these stupid toys (which is what they are) are inevitable. But the momentum just ain’t there and real people in the real world who have real needs can see with their own eyes how useless these things are.
It’s going to crash and burn and it won’t be pretty.
To make them “work” requires a massive decrease in cumulative mileage travelled, with all that implies for the economy and basic freedoms. Again, something which is screamingly apparent to anybody with a functioning brain cell and an ounce of critical faculty.
Even more so with heat pumps for domestic use. If the taxpayer funded bung is £7k, that pretty well pins down the postcodes that will exploit it for the usual smug, virtue signalling.
This is going to crash and burn even harder!
I’ve noticed DPD using electric vehicles. Obviously for the local runs, not long distance. They have “zero emissions” emblazoned on the sides. Presumably “powered by slave labour” didn’t have quite the same ring to it.
If I understand correctly, electric vehicles are a lot heavier than ICE ones because of the batteries.
Weight that has to be carried around all the time. I wonder how much extra energy will need to be generated just to move those batteries around. Unless there is something I’m missing?
Or how much extra strain that extra cumulative weight will put on road infrastructure, wear and tear on surfaces etc. The Tesla S, X and Y models used to have issues with collapsing suspensions due to poorly designed control arm ball joints back in 2016-19.
https://insideevs.com/news/447593/tesla-suspension-issues-owners-true-stories/
Expect potholes.
Powered by subsidies to a large degree I think that should read.
Amazon recently ran ads trumpeting their new fleet of electric Vans. Funny that I’ve never seen one.
It appears the idea of getting rid of gas boilers has been dropped “However, the published version of the document had no mention of a 2023 target, and weakened the commitment so that new systems only need to be “zero carbon” ready”:https://www.diyweek.net/u-turn-on-gas-boiler-phase-out-in-2023-welcome-say-gas-users
We had to replace our boiler about 18 months ago. Did look at heat pumps briefly. Aside from being significantly more expensive, the warranties were only 1 or 2 years, versus anything up to 10 years for gas boilers.
Remind me again why we’re going to scrap perfectly good and proven technology in favour of inferior hardware even the manufacturers aren’t prepared to stand behind?
Yes, shortly before Mrs L died, we had a new boiler fitted. I think it was getting of for a grand and a half with a ten year guarantee. Earlier this year, I had cause to make a claim on that guarantee, which cost me nothing.
What plans have the government put in place to meet the huge increase in demand for electricity that heat pumps and electric cars are going to cause? Do they really imagine that solar panels and wind turbines are going to do all of the heavy lifting? We really are being governed by utter fools.
Reminiscent of a previous government’s “here’s a bung to scrap your old car and buy a new diesel”.
Remind me of how that turned out.
Promptly followed by “diesels bad, m’kay.”
But diesels aren’t bad are they? There is nothing wrong with our air quality which has been steadily improving since the industrial revolution. The case against diesels is based entirely on lies. The climate crisis is based on lies. Government policy is being built entirely on things that simply aren’t true.
Of course diesels aren’t bad. Modern technology makes them pretty clean and they have good range, but politics decided otherwise.
My understanding is that these heat pumps are rubbish. They take hours to heat a room to room temperature. So in winter, you’ll be sitting there in a freezing house for hours while you wait for the heat pump to do its thing.
I believe houses with heat pumps also need a lot more insulation installed. How many more thousands of pounds will that cost householders?
Air source heat pumps are not very good when the mercury drops to 30 Fahrenheit. Ground source in better, but for preference I’d like a gas boiler.
As for insulation, my attitude is more is better.
A heat pump moves low grade heat around. Think of it as a fridge in reverse. Think of that fridge with the door permanently open, or with little or no insulation. What will it do? Suck up power 24/7, cost a fortune and the food will quickly go off.
To have a ghost of a chance, it would need to be an integral element of the house design and the house insulated such as to make the heat pump work.
Can the average british house be insulated sufficiently to make a heat pump work? I doubt that very much. Will new houses be sufficiently insulated? I doubt that too.
Yet another hideously expensive clusterfuck in the making
You don’t really want the average british house to be super insulated. It rarely gets very cold, on the other hand, most of the time it is damp. Plenty of fresh air and some heating to reduce relative humidity is more important for comfort
My gas boiler is 45 years old, never goes wrong, never needs paid servicing and only costs £500 a year to run. The most a new boiler would save me is £50 a year in gas, but it would also cost me a couple of thousand to install, then £100+ per annum in mandatory services to maintain the ‘warranty’.
What’s more, the environmental damage-cost of manufacturing, delivering and installing a new boiler would be far more than my £50 of gas produces.
As Simon Maxwell (above) points out, heat-pumps (costing a minimum of £10k) do not generate adequate heat nor respond quickly enough to warm a house, so you need additional devices for that. Yet more greenwash cobblers.
My current boiler was a consequence of the back boiler we’d had for twenty odd years packing up. It cost around £1500 and yes has an annual service – same as the car. Cost is £50 – somewhat less than the car service. All in all, it’s efficient and reliable, so why would I change?
We are, sadly, council tenants. Our boiler was repaired and serviced a couple of months ago and then needlessly replaced on the surveyor’s say-so. Obviously the company saw the opportunity for some easy money, and the council has neither the inclination nor ability to protect the public purse. I asked the engineer, not a dim man by any measure, why new ‘naughty’ boilers were being installed so close to the 2025 moratorium. He was completely unaware that this was even being discussed. It might be utter incompetence that saves us from the government.
I’m surprised at the lack of outcry from the oil companies. If this lunatic ban on petrol and diesel car sales goes ahead don’t they stand to lose millions in oil sales?
I suspect that they know damn well that when it comes to practical road transport they are still the only game in town. You have to be completely away with the fairies to believe that the electric car revolution is actually possible in reality.
Our present boiler is 5 years old, cost £1300 fitted and £50 a year to service by the same chap who fitted it.
If this lunacy persists…we’ll replace it with another ne wone just before they outlaw the things.
However i have every faith that this green lunacy will fall flat on its face as the deadlines draw near and have to be postponed…by then the present govt will be out of office and probably enjoying the 30 pieces of silver they will apparently earned and someone else will be making wild promises.
“…this green lunacy…” – call it by its propoer name:- Mrs Johnson.
It won’t happen. Sane and sensible, normal people will set up alternative political parties that approve of gas boilers, ICE vehicles et al and who understand the sun drives our climate and not a trace gas. The eco idiots will never rule the roost in the UK or anywhere else. Electric cars are not the future.
I am still amused by the proposition that the Government is going to provide massive grants to households to change their boilers… grants which are funded by the very taxpayers they are offering the grants to…
Dear Longrider
£400 million at £7,000 a grant goes as far as … 57,142.86 homes, out of a housing stock slightly north of 27 million.
That’ll fix it.
DP