I'm lucky to live in Spain where it's not that cold so I just have one little plug in radiator I use a few months a year lol.
Gas is relatively cheap, and a replacement boiler is £1,500 to £3,000 and will last ~10 years and there'll be no doubt about whether it can sufficiently heat the home or produce enough hot water etc .
Lucky you living in Spain though lol
Norway is really a different kind of rich compared to the rest of europe, they have tons of oil rights all over the world (and as such they still contribute a lot to global warming even though they have a lot of money for 'green' tech at home).
PS yeah Spain is good for heating but not for AC though (which I don't have, sadly). But I do enjoy life here a lot more even though I would make much more money in Holland.
Are the boilers typically connected to water-radiators?.. I assume so based on the word "boiler".
There are heatpumps that are used to heat water so it would be a slot in replacement..
You don't see them on new builds, I think, probably because the pipe going from inside to outside would reduce insulation effectiveness.
Otherwise people try to retrofit narrow drain pipes in the walls which are prone to clogging or give you poor flushing performance. Or outside big enough pipes outside interior walls where you get to hear every flush/shower unless you build a box around that. Easier to just run it outside if you can configure your bathrooms that way.
The pump is a drop in replacement unless you have 8mm "microbore" piping, at which point the lower temperature times restricted flow rate becomes a problem in terms of getting enough heat through.
And a dirty tank of water in the attic to act as a "in-house water tower" because only one tap may be connected directly to the mains. Really archaic.
Would you say modern (i.e. <10 years) are properly insulated and built or are there still... shortcuts?
and that house still has the sewage stacks on the outside of the house, as do almost all homes in Bath and environs.
I had a quote for a heat pump - £20k, plus the cost to replace 13 radiators, plus cost to replace pipework to support heat pump rads.
Pretty sure the government ‘incentive’ was £3k at the time. Doesn’t come remotely close!
Modern condensing combis I think are designed to be more complex and not last as long. I'm not sure all the complexity and fancy modulation etc is really worth it myself. I'd rather have a boiler that lasts 20 years and that any half-competent gas engineer can fix with a spanner and some spare parts.
£20k, jesus!
Far from ideal solution, but it is mostly green, somewhat offset by the solar panels, and actually more comfortable than the old system because of the more even heating. Set to 20C and forget about it for the season. I'm hoping that it will last until the actual gas phaseout when a solution compatible with 8mm piping will exist.
This is why they need to be mandated on new houses, because it's so much better than trying to retrofit it.
It was £2500 to replace the oil tank, or I could opt for £2250 to install a heat pump with the government grant. This included all plumbing, electrical work, installation, and 6 new radiators all over my house.
Honestly to me it seemed like a no-brainer. It’s a tad more expensive to run, but it works really quite well and is a lot less invasive than a big smelly tank of kerosene. I gained another 90cm of width in my garden, it’s actually quieter than the oil boiler, and it doesn’t stink in the summer- win win.
Otherwise the heatpump just can't catch up.
And currently I have the opposite problem. The house is too well insulated for the heater (or the heater is too powerful). The heater only runs for a couple of minutes and huts off.
There have been a few cold snaps here where the weather has been down to -2 some days, but it’s been fine. I had a couple of minor installation issues (eg 3 way valve set incorrectly) but once those were fixed my house hasn’t dropped below 19C.
Nothing to do with a heat source.
In that regard, an air-to-water heat pump is much lower temperature than a gas or oil boiler can efficiently produce.
That can cause a need for larger radiators to compensate and sometimes for insulation if the radiators can’t be further increased in size. (Or if the heat loss at design temp is too high for available or sensible sized equipment.)
This means that people now really need to improve insulation of their homes big time, before even being able to consider switching to a heat pump.
My house has a 30kW gas heater. When I switched to a heat pump, first I had to replace the entire roof with PIR insulation. It was previously just uninsulated wood. Now I can easily heat my home with a 7kW heat pump (which most of the time doesn't even need to produce 7kW of heat).
I was lucky, my house already had insulated walls and floors, and used floor heating (low temperature heating). Most homes here use high temperature radiators, which become way less efficient when used with low temperatures produced by heat pumps.
So for many people here, it is cost prohibitive to switch to a heat pump, as they first need to improve isolation and replace their radiators for a heat pump to even work.
Switching to a heat pump can be anywhere from 10-25k depending on the existing plumbing, size of heat pump etc.
You might need other radiators if your current radiators are very small. But you also might not in a recent house, or in a recently renovated house (e.g. the radiator are still sized on single-glazing-glass when having double glazing installed).
You can also choose in-foor heating with the next renovation, a lot of homes already have in-floor heating and it's very comfortable. You can probably also boost existing radiators with small fans on the bottom or choose an electronic back-up module which boost the temperature a bit on the coldest days.
Tldr: it really isn't that hard. The focus on hybrid systems in NL is purely thanks to a lobby from gas-boiler installers and manufacturers. Air/water heatpumps are a drop-in replacement in a lot of cases.
Why is this ? (Sorry if it's a stupid question.)