It’ll take a bit more than that.
Energy firm OVO is handing out £340 worth of free heating to customers who ditch their boiler and switch to a heat pump.
Heat pumps are a relatively new type of home heating which run off electricity rather than fossil fuels like gas – and now that the UK has shut its last coal fired power station, that electricity is much cleaner than before, too.
They work by heating the air, and many models can be switched into reverse and used as air conditioning in the summer.
Except… A boiler costs a couple of grand. These things around three times that. Not every house is suitable. Older properties that don’t have the necessary level of insulation are a waste of time and money. Not all properties have a suitable placement area either. As a bribe, £340 is a paltry insult. I’m not an OVO customer, but if I was, I’d need a damned sight more than that to downgrade my heating from something that works to something that doesn’t.
They really are getting desperate, aren’t they?
But according to OVO, just 16 percent of UK households are currently considering switching to a heat pump, despite the fact that 62 percent would be more likely to install one if they were offered some kind of incentive.
If they were any good, incentives wouldn’t be needed. See also the white elephants that are EVs.
“Heat pumps are a relatively new type of home heating which run off electricity rather than fossil fuels like gas.”
As if electricity is just magic and not generated by burning fossil fuels like gas at all.
The other thing to remember is that heat pumps supply water at a significantly lower temperature than gas boilers do: therefore, you are likely to need an entire new upgraded central heating system as well.
Not forgetting that a gas boiler and circulating pump can be run from a small generator or battery/inverter setup, when the power cuts (C/O Ed Millibrain’s barmy policies) start rolling in. Heat pumps, on the other hand, need a LOT of power for several hours to provide any useful output…
When the “power cuts (C/O Ed Millibrain’s barmy policies) start rolling in” we’re all screwed anyway. That was the death knell of Heath’s government in 1974 and it will be the death knell of Labour when it happens come 2026 (my guestimate).
We’ve been lucky so far that incidents such as the Norwegian Interconnector failures haven’t already lead to blackouts (or at least brownouts), but with Crazy Ed’s NetZero bollocks, it’s just a matter of time.
I’ve already purchased additional 12volt batteries for the inverter and alternate gas cooking and heating capability to last for up to 20 days.
At a pinch, I could probably get the gas working off the inverter, but it would require some emergency rewiring, but only a matter of 10 minutes or so. The batteries I’ve already got would give LED lighting for a couple of days, maybe as much as a week. If there was an easy way of recharging them efficiently from a heat source, I’d probably be able to run indefinitely.
I’ve got 120 watts of Solar, but this being Scotland, only much use in the sunnier times of the year. Not much good for overcast winters.