Home central heating & hot water needs to be upgraded - what should we be thinking about moving to?

BUFF

macman said:

It's not a ban on 'new oil boilers'. It's a proposed ban on the installation of oil or gas boilers in new build properties. No restriction whatsoever on replacements in existing properties, which will still be happening decades from now.

Afaik whilst not yet law there are plans to ban off gas grid homes from replacing oil/lpg boilers with another hydrocarbon burning one from 2026 (unlike on grid where a ban won't come until ~2035).
e.g. https://www.chardandilminsternews.co.uk/news/chard_news/23339984.deadline-draws-near-off-gas-grid-boiler-ban/
https://www.theecoexperts.co.uk/boilers/oil-boiler-ban#

thrope

Modern oil boilers are easily and cheaply converted to run on carbon-neutral liquid fuels like HVO. So I think it's likely that in the future this will provide a domestic heating liquid fuel option, although no idea about costs relative to electric in the future.

Wouldn't be put off getting oil now because it will be banned in future. You should chose now based on what's available and costs over the lifespan of the appliance. The majority of homes in Northern Ireland and many in Scotland are heated with oil currently.

matelodave

My take on this, for what its worth.

They cant ban oil boilers on a whim any more than they'll ban gas boilers or even diesel and petrol cars. They'll still be around for a long long time after they stop making them them, although I guess they can make life difficult as supplies of fuel may become less plentiful, available or more costly. However its still going to take a long time for a transition to other forms of heating.

As said above HVO will become more available and probably cheaper and TBH I cant see 20 million gas boilers being scrapped in the next few years although the holy grail of hydrogen is still some way off IMO.

As @Reed_Richards says, a heatpump produces heat, so providing you size it and the radiators and other stuff to suit its characteristics then there's no reason that it cant heat any sort of property (I've been in some really ancient places, made of stone, with stone floors etc that have been heated with heatpumps). So the type of property shouldn't make a lot of difference.

What is more of a consideration is the cost, both of the installation and running costs.

Heatpumps are more expensive than a boiler although possibly not as much as you might think if you've got the cost of a boiler, water tank, oil tanks etc to take into consideration. A lot of the cost is in the replacement of radiators and some of the pipework, so if you are doing that as well the differential cost between oil and a heatpump begins to narrow. So it's worth getting quotes for both oil and a heatpump (making sure that any radiators and hot water tank are sized to be "heatpump ready "for the future)

The big difference is probably in the running costs - ignoring all the hype and misinformation around heatpumps, its likely that a decent installation, properly set up and operated correctly could achieve an SCOP or around 3 (you might get more or a bit less, but three is a good figure to work from). Which means that with the present EPG, 1kwh of heat will cost you 35p/3 = 11.6p/kwh which is a bit more than gas and possibly a lot more than oil (dunno what oil costs but you get around 9.5kwh from a litre with a 90% efficient boiler), so if oil cost £1 litre 1kwh will cost 10.5pkwh

You can do some simple sums, check your EPC or failing that do some heat calculations yourself to determine roughly how much energy you need to heat your home and hot water in kwh and multiply it by the cost of a kwh. Who knows what is going to happen with the price of leccy, oil, wood, gas or anything else you need to burn to make heat in the future so that's a guess or a gamble.

I've had a heatpump for 13 years and until leccy prices went through the roof it was a lot cheaper to run than any of my neighbours who have oil, LPG or storage heaters (I also benefitted from cheap but ultimately failed energy companies)

I dont know how it compares at the moment but if I was starting out from scratch or replacing a complete system (boiler, tank, rads, oil tank etc) I'd still have a heatpump unless mains gas was available.

If I was replacing an oil installation that just needed a new boiler, then I'd just get a new boiler and worry about the future when it comes.

FreeBear

matelodave said: As said above HVO will become more available and probably cheaper and TBH I cant see 20 million gas boilers being scrapped in the next few years although the holy grail of hydrogen is still some way off IMO.

Producing feedstock for HVO reduces the amount of ground for cultivating food - We are already getting to the point where there is insufficient food for a global population, adding crops for fuel to the mix is not the answer.

Hydrogen is not a holy grail - Much of it is produced from oil/gas (so not green), and I doubt there is sufficient spare electricity generation capacity to produce enough hydrogen to supply current heating demand. On top of that, massive changes are going to be needed to the distribution infrastructure as well as wholesale modifications to boilers - Have a look at "hydrogen embrittlement".

matelodave

FreeBear said:

matelodave said: As said above HVO will become more available and probably cheaper and TBH I cant see 20 million gas boilers being scrapped in the next few years although the holy grail of hydrogen is still some way off IMO.

Producing feedstock for HVO reduces the amount of ground for cultivating food - We are already getting to the point where there is insufficient food for a global population, adding crops for fuel to the mix is not the answer.

Hydrogen is not a holy grail - Much of it is produced from oil/gas (so not green), and I doubt there is sufficient spare electricity generation capacity to produce enough hydrogen to supply current heating demand. On top of that, massive changes are going to be needed to the distribution infrastructure as well as wholesale modifications to boilers - Have a look at "hydrogen embrittlement".

Totally agree, but it will take a few more years of daft ideas before these are considered non-viable

Ectophile

I thought that embrittlement would be a problem.  But then it was pointed out to me that the old town gas (coal gas) was a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen.  And the pipes survived that.

The main problem with hydrogen is that you need to burn a lot more of it, by volume, to get the same amount of heat.

thrope

HVO can be made from waste materials from food production eg waste sludge palm oil, used cooking oil etc. so doesn't necessarily mean crops grown just for that.

You can find different views on anything. It's my understanding that the wood pellet industry is responsible for some of the most destructive land management, often made from old growth, wood burning makes the worst local air pollution of any home heating, and yet that is eligible for renewable incentives.

HVO to me seems a promising avenue to decarbonise rural homes at reasonable cost and in an environmentally friendly way.

70sbudgie

Sorry if this is a daft question, but what is HVO?

BUFF

hydrotreated vegetable oil

Apodemus

thrope said:

HVO can be made from waste materials from food production eg waste sludge palm oil, used cooking oil etc. so doesn't necessarily mean crops grown just for that.

You can find different views on anything.... 

HVO to me seems a promising avenue to decarbonise rural homes at reasonable cost and in an environmentally friendly way.

The relationships between food production, energy production and land-use are complex and I really don't think we can predict  how changes in our use of one technology might feed through to changes in our use of another.

When we fractionate crude oil, the amounts of each fraction are more or less fixed, so changing the demand (or price) for one fraction changes the price (and hence demand) for another.  Changing demand for petrol and diesel, changes the economics of the plastics we use in the clothing industry.  Changing the economics of polyester manufacture impacts the demand for cotton for clothing, which changes the amount of cotton-seed oil looking for a use on the world market.  Before the advent of the modern fossil-fuel industries, plant (and animal) oils were the only readily available oils.   Can that happen again?

We also need to bear in mind that in the past we had about a third of Britain's cultivatable land dedicated to growing crops for transport - in the form of horse-feed.  Of course, both our population and our energy consumption per head have grown hugely since then, but growing our "fuel" really is not new.