Paul Homewood has called it a Gerald Ratner moment!
A major heat pump supplier has attacked SNP-Green plans to use them to replace gas boilers in Scotland, warning parts of the country are too cold for them to work.
Lord Willie Haughey, the business tycoon, said the heating system is unsuitable for the Scottish climate as its performance declines markedly in freezing weather.
The Labour peer said some units can stop working properly at temperatures of -5C (23F), or require more electricity to function properly, resulting in higher bills.
The Scottish government plans to make it hard to sell your home if you’ve got an efficient gas boiler fitted, as opposed to an inefficient, noisy, ugly air source heat pump:
His intervention came after Patrick Harvie, a Scottish Green minister, last week unveiled plans for homes to receive lower environmental ratings if they are heated using gas boilers.
From 2025, homes will need to achieve an EPC rating of C or above at certain trigger points, including a sale, meaning some properties with boilers will be barred from being put on the market.
Lord Haughey, who made his millions through a global refrigeration business, said:”I have a heat pump company and following Patrick Harvie’s announcement, I should really be jumping for joy.
“But the truth of the matter is that heat pumps don’t work as efficiently in Scotland as they do in other countries.”
He said this was because of the colder climate and warned “legionnaires’ disease can thrive in lower temperatures in hot water systems”.
Lord Haughey added: “My staff are always telling me I should not criticise our core business but this is eco nonsense being peddled by the Greens. I’d like to challenge Patrick Harvie to a debate on the science of it.”
The tycoon also said the heat pumps are so noisy, that if eight or ten neighbouring homes had one, the resulting sound would “rattle your windows”.
He described them as “ugly and cumbersome” and said they created a bigger scar on a home than a satellite dish.
The thing is though, air source heat pumps will work just fine to keep you warm in the Scottish summer. Here’s today’s forecast from the Met Office:
Perhaps not such a Gerald Ratner moment after all!
Addendum
For those interested in how the coefficient of performance of an air source to water heat pump varies with outside temperature, here is a very useful graph:
The shockingly unkempt Patrick Harvie has been voted “Zoomer of the Week” on The Majority Show for his looney green policies on heat pumps, starts at 59:30 on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lFMle3rJV8.
It’s an amusing take-down, with interesting comments from the Delvins who have experience of heat pumps from living abroad, confirming that heat pumps are very noisy and saying that they had to have two because one wasn't enough to heat the house.
From a purely economic point of view ignoring the capital cost of supply and installation the COP is still above 1 even at -15C. So, if you were using electricity for heating the running cost of the heat pump still comes out ahead. Depending on the cost of gas it may or may not be cheaper to run depending on the cost of gas. If you’ve got cheap gas it’s a no brainer, you use gas, it’s simple and effective for heating, using fire to heat stuff was mastered a long time ago but always has a “COP” <= 1. With heat pumps the problem isn't so much that it’s inefficient at low temperature it’s still more efficient than gas as long as the COP > 1, it’s more a capacity issue. If you’re happy spending the money on a larger unit (greater capacity) it’s not a problem, it’s will probably be oversized but that essentially only effects the initial purchase price and installation i.e if you size the unit for -15C to deliver say 2.6kW of heating to raise the water to 65C it will use 2kW of electrical power. The same unit will only use about half (1.3/2.3) to do the same job when it’s 7C outside. I’m not sure how they size the units in the UK, here in Australia it’s not such a big deal as the temperature difference between summer and winter is not as extreme. From the chart a 2.7kW “water heater” rated to produce hot water at 55C with an outside air temp of 7C will only heat the water to 35C when it’s -2C outside. I’ve just used the easiest example as it’s the only bars with the same COP. This assumes you can actually get units that go down to -15C, I have no practical experience using heat pumps operating at such a low outside air temperature, I assume they use electrical de-icing or hot gas by-pass to prevent the coils freezing and it’s part of the COP calculation that’s why the COP is so bad at -15C. If the COP is only being calculated using the refrigerant cycle (ignoring the de-icing) then it gets even worse. I’m a big fan of heat pumps but they won’t work as expected if they’re sized wrong and the end user will be disappointed with the result if it’s not explained them properly.