Octopus Heat Pumps

matt_drummer

stripling said:

smallblueplanet said:

Spies said:

BG wanted around £7k via their instant website quote and Heatgeek was £5.5k with a maximum of 3 radiator changes.

Octopus cannot be beaten for whatever reason, maybe the easier installs subsidise the more expensive ones?

I'm not convinced of that either when you read (on the FB forum) some people's deals. I'd say it's more likely down to labour costs, but how can they know that either? 
It is what it is and a bit like the cost of plane tickets or similar being 'variable' if you are happy with your quote then that's all you should concentrate on.

I think it's swings and roundabouts.. I don't think it's labour costs in my case because I'm a quick install - they've said this. I really can't work out their logic. I asked right at the beginning after the online fixed quote and all I got was nonsense bluster from sales. 

Plane tickets are variable only if you don't know what you are doing (ie *how* you buy them) or if you don't buy at the optimal time. These two things make a huge difference to what you pay. If you have to fly regularly you know this and factor it in if you can. 

The heat pump market is a mess.  If we want to see the switch to carbon-free heating for environmental reasons then the cost of installing heat pumps has got to come down or it won't ever happen.  And it needs to be credible - in terms of a degree of stability of pricing. Like installing gas boilers. 

Also, Mr & Mrs Jo Public aren't going to jump on the seriously steep learning curve I put myself on, for example, just to buy a heating system. The Octopus Cosy is an attempt to change that by manufacturing a plug-and-play version but unless the electricity market is also changed it will be too expensive in running costs compared to gas to run... 

Heat Geek have only had fewer than 200 installations according to Adam Chapman in the Guardian recently which is not so good although he also says there's 750 "have begun the process of connecting to an installer".  

Octopus / BG /Ovo and the like have huge buying power so are paying peanuts for kit and lower wages than the independents. Heat Geek is a brand that has its ups and downs - their training is online whereas Octopus and BG mix classroom with on-the-job training. 

Thus, as I said - the heat pump market is a bit of a mess right now. That's inevitable as it is a relatively new development in the UK but these random figures from Octopus that bear minimal relation to effective costs are just going to kill credibility. Particularly when not all the installs are so great - although Octopus mostly have a good reputation for returning to put things right at least.  

A few people on YouTube have published their entire contracts including costs and documented their installations I think the more people share and are transparent about costs and how their installation went - the better. I didn't opt for a heat pump as a lifestyle choice, my gas boiler died and it seems wrong to put another one in.  I'm an example of how most customers will likely arrive at buying a heat pump. But doing this is costing me a LOT more than a new gas boiler. 🙈

Is it?

I don't know your exact quote but I got the feeling you needed to pay around £3,000

A decent gas boiler fitted must be somewhere close to that?

For a similar cost aren't you getting a new DHW tank and your gas disconnected amongst all the other stuff?

Remind us again, what makes your install so quick, easy and obviously less costly than somebody else's?



Did you say BG and HG quoted similar amounts to Octopus?


Installing a heat pump for the first time is not like replacing a broken gas or oil boiler.

There are lots of other things that need to be done and that will lead to a variation in costs of initial installation.

Replacing a heat pump with a heat pump though is a doddle, I know because I have had it done, it took three hours and could be done in less if you were really trying.

It's a DIY job for many people unlike swapping a gas or oil boiler.

Proclaiming that heat pumps are expensive based on a comparison of initial installation to replacement of gas or oil boilers is not telling the whole story.

I dare say that fitting a gas or oil boiler for the first time will be significantly more costly than just replacing a boiler.

wrf12345

Heak Geek quote for two bed bungalow was £13500 less the govn grant, broken down to £8000 for the heat pimp, cylinder etc and £5500 for labour. A local installer was 15k minimum less the govn grant. Octopus aren't in my area yet, so don't know. I reckon there is ten grand out of that split between profit and labour cost, so these installers are actually pocketing most of the govn grant...

matt_drummer

wrf12345 said:

Heak Geek quote for two bed bungalow was £13500 less the govn grant, broken down to £8000 for the heat pimp, cylinder etc and £5500 for labour. A local installer was 15k minimum less the govn grant. Octopus aren't in my area yet, so don't know. I reckon there is ten grand out of that split between profit and labour cost, so these installers are actually pocketing most of the govn grant...

My Octopus install cost around £11,500 and I paid £6,500 after the grant

There were three Octopus employees at my house for five days with another checking in from time to time.

The lead installer was from Bristol and I live in Ipswich, so he had five nights in a hotel in Ipswich. The other two had an hour journey each way. So that's three vans to pay for. There was also a second electrician there for five days training on heat pump installation, not really a cost directly related to my installation but it still has to be paid for somehow.

There was also another Octopus employee that came in a bigger van to deliver all the stuff.

I know what the installers were earning so it is easy to work out the labour cost to Octopus and it would be over £5,000 just for my installation. 

I have ignored the cost to Octopus of all the work that went on before installation such as the office staff and the surveys plus the post installation visits.

I am an accountant and I have a sad habit of trying to work out how much stuff costs. At retail prices I worked out roughly that there was more than £10,000 in stuff delivered to my house. The big things like the heat pump and tank were £8,000. Copper pipe and fittings, lots of it. Electrical cable and fittings, two consumer units, switches and breakers, magnetic filter, three port valve, safety valves, expansion tank, volumiser, flexible connection pipes to heat pump (£150 a pair), trunking for the outside of the house, anti freeze valves, two radiators, paint, aggregate and other stuff for the base, two 1,800mm K2 radiators, pipe lagging, scaffolding, grant application, MCS documentation etc etc

And then, after all of that, they had to deal with my complaint and replace the original heat pump with another one, all free of charge to me. The original heat pump went back to the warehouse (that they have to pay for!) to be used for spares.

It just goes on and on.

@wrf12345, you think everything is too much money by the sounds of it, it's all you ever seem to post about and you resent businesses making a profit.

What sort of profit do you think Octopus made on my installation?

How much did they `pocket'


I am assuming you could do it for much less?

How much do you think it should cost to install a Daikin 9kW heat pump in a detached four bedroom house that needs a gas boiler replacing and currently has a vented hot water tank?

How much do you think the greedy so and so's pocketed?

FreeBear

matt_drummer said: How much do you think the greedy so and so's pocketed?

Probably made a loss on your installation. But Octopus will make a (modest) profit on the energy they supply you with for as long as you are a customer.

matt_drummer

FreeBear said:

matt_drummer said: How much do you think the greedy so and so's pocketed?

Probably made a loss on your installation. But Octopus will make a (modest) profit on the energy they supply you with for as long as you are a customer.

Not according to some posters here, they are making billions and billions!!!!!!!!

It's obvious they made a loss on my installation but the point was to address why some people keep posting about how much these are installers are `pocketing' to feed their fat bellies.

Why some people think that taking out a gas boiler and replacing it with a heat pump is a quick job requiring little labour, a few common hand tools and little more than a heat pump picked up from a discount plumbing supplier is beyond me.

FreeBear

matt_drummer said: Why some people think that taking out a gas boiler and replacing it with a heat pump is a quick job requiring little labour, a few common hand tools and little more than a heat pump picked up from a discount plumbing supplier is beyond me.

They (often) fail to factor in the cost of the DHW cylinder, buffer tank (if required), along with copper pipe and ancillaries. Then there are the hidden costs of MCS compliance, planning applications if needed, and Building Regulation sign-off. The paperwork can quite easily eat up £1000 of the "profit".

matt_drummer

There are quite a lot of ancillaries!

MCS require flexible connectors between the house and the heat pump, £150 a pair. It's stuff like this that soon adds up. Little things like pipe and cable fixings. Hole cutters that don't last forever.

The amount of stuff required is quite astonishing when you see it all laid out on your driveway.

The heat pump itself is the cheap bit!

NedS

It was the same here @matt_drummer with our ECO4 installation. The heat pump has a retail cost of around £3200, and the DHW cylinder retails for around £2500. In addition to that there were 12 new K2 radiators and a full re-plumb in 22mm copper, plus the flexi-hoses, 6m of plastic trunking for the outside pipework run and insulation, and all the other ancillary bits and pieces, not to mention one days labour for an electrician and 3 days each for the two installers (7 days total labour costs). Before that, there were two big surveys and numerous phone calls in the planning stages. If they told me the total costs were £20k I would not be surprised.

Contrast that with a simpler boiler swap out with a high temp heat pump, retaining all the current rads and plumbing, and a new drop in DHW cylinder, and the materials costs may come in around £6-7k for a small installation plus labour.

stripling

@matt_drummer

Is it?
I don't know your exact quote but I got the feeling you needed to pay around £3,000
A decent gas boiler fitted must be somewhere close to that?
For a similar cost aren't you getting a new DHW tank and your gas disconnected amongst all the other stuff?
Remind us again, what makes your install so quick, easy and obviously less costly than somebody else's?


Did you say BG and HG quoted similar amounts to Octopus?

Installing a heat pump for the first time is not like replacing a broken gas or oil boiler.
There are lots of other things that need to be done and that will lead to a variation in costs of initial installation.
Replacing a heat pump with a heat pump though is a doddle, I know because I have had it done, it took three hours and could be done in less if you were really trying.
It's a DIY job for many people unlike swapping a gas or oil boiler.
Proclaiming that heat pumps are expensive based on a comparison of initial installation to replacement of gas or oil boilers is not telling the whole story.
I dare say that fitting a gas or oil boiler for the first time will be significantly more costly than just replacing a boiler.

Yikes, that sounds a tad condescending even if you didn't mean it to be....  

Remind "us" or remind "you" ? No problem here goes: 

I know what a heat pump install involves - not only does a family member have a heat pump as I mentioned, I have researched it. They are not rare in my neck of the woods. There's also numerous videos on YouTube that have filmed day-to-day install diaries AND physically show their Octopus/ BG quotes. That's without all the other videos available. I highly recommend them for anyone thinking about a heat pump. Glyn Hudson, one of the co-founders of OEM is on there too with his two Samsung self-installs. (He's on Twitter too). 

I'm in two groups for heat pumps which include some experts including one who writes on the subject and one who has just been hired as a consultant for a major company to redesign their install process. I also joined OEM which is how I followed your over-sized HP journey - amongst other things in that polite, and helpful forum.  

These various amazing people have taken time and patience to teach me how to calculate Delta Ts and relate it to system design and gave me a simple piece of home made software to play with flow temps and radiator sizes and so on. I've discussed my project and shared my quotes with people who know what they're talking about including other people who have had Octopus installs. I then did my own heat loss assessment on Heat Punk. (That was a bit tedious to set-up, I admit).

I had to choose between 3 quotes with relatively small variations in install prices but potentially higher running costs if I chose the wrong one. I HAVE to get this design decision right. In my research I've encountered endless kindness, patience & technical support. Thus my comments are not 'proclamations' they are evidence-based...

Plus I went to visit a nearby new(ish) install under the Visit a Heat Pump Scheme. Does that count? 
I've got heat pumps rising right now. 😁 

Interestingly today I have just had a discussion with my install team who talked me through the work plan (right down to the size of the Euro-sized delivery pallets) and agree that I am one of the easiest installs on their books. Everyone except you (and one somewhat hard core sales person who is probably on commission) agrees I seem to have drawn a bit of a short straw compared to others. 🙈

I am in a bungalow literally up the road from the installers, they are local. I have no pipework AT ALL apart from linking tank to pump a few inches and tank to water pipes - the heat pump is going back-to-back on the same wall as the water tank and the very few radiator changes are slot-ins. Plus I have a all my pipes at head height in the cellar anyway - no floors to lift. The cellar is cavity wall insulated, well-lit, has power outlets and easy access at ground level because my home is built into a hill. It's a 3-4 day install max, including commissioning and testing, I'm told.  For this very reason I have now been put on the 'vulnerable' list to try fit me in early between other jobs. 

BG quoted the same as 🐙 give or take a hundred quid or so for the same Daikin heat pump. They designed for 45º but their maintenance costs are a lot higher + I don't trust their after care in general. Plus, more importantly, they still insist on buffer tanks & I don't want one. I like the lead 🐙 installer - he came to visit straight after the heat loss survey. He knows his stuff. It was staff that first suggested I push back. 

HG will quote online for a Vaillant but also offer Daikins . One of their registered installers offered Medea or Mitsu too which surprised me (the former). Maybe that's why they've only done 200 installations nationally so far which is very low. Who knows? They're a platform brand that has invested a lot in brand promotion thus it's wise for customers to keep that in mind. Also HG online quotes are not the same thing as their HG trained installers list. 

If I merely replaced the gas boiler it would cost me a lot less than this Octopus (or any other) HP install quote. It has, at times, been tempting. 

Octopus don't quote for bathrooms as MCS guidelines classify bathrooms as exempt if installers wish because 'they are not habitable rooms' [🤦🏻‍♀️]. Thus that's another expense. BG offer it. Octopus installers get paid less than independents but as one told me they accept it in return for: 'better work/life balance, great training and career progression'.  

Their buying power, just like BG and Ovo, is huge and they buy their HP kit at vastly reduced cost compared to anyone else. Meanwhile, slap bang in the middle of the 🐙 heat pump sign-up page it still says: "Heat Pump Installs From £500".

It is widely accepted by installers and others in the business that the BUS (& other schemes) has inflated prices - plus a shortage of competently trained installers doesn't help. I've heard endless discussions by people in the trade including by people doing advisory and policy work that the entire business, from MCS onwards, is a mess. Some of that is to be expected because as I said before, it's a relatively new field for the UK but it needs sorting and saying that is fine.

As is me questioning, from an informed perspective, my own quote. 

Interestingly, this house has been in my family for 🫏 🫏 years. Thus my family had the entire gas central heating installed with one of the first ever gas condensing boilers. Before that it had an antiquated hot air system and open fire that seems to have been very local. Funny how the wheel turns...

No worries, I hope it helps. 

matt_drummer

So, why is the quote so high then compared to others when you feel/know it should be lower?

You do seem to think your quote is higher than it should be, or have I misunderstood?