By Danny Williams, managing director, Pioneer Trading.
As I one-fingered tap away to create this latest masterpiece, every few minutes out from the wireless pops the government’s (awful) ads extolling the virtues of heat pumps. And although Starmer apparently had no idea at all about Trump’s intended bombardment of Iran, perhaps Ed Miliband did.
Because the simultaneous news reports of huge hikes in the cost of energy (including of course, our home heating bills) that punctuate the heat pump ads, must be driving sales through the roof (pun intended).
According to the government’s massive ad campaign, all homeowners need to do is install a heat pump and their heating problems will quietly disappear. Chummy actors with questionable regional accents chirp away explaining how delighted they are with their new heat pump and the generous government grant they received, that are resulting in tiny energy bills.
The message is simple: heat pumps good, gas boilers bad. Job done.
Except, of course, the real world is not quite so obliging.
The UK has some of the oldest housing stock in Europe. Millions of homes were built long before modern insulation standards existed. Solid walls, patchy loft insulation, ageing radiators designed for high-temperature gas boilers and — as anyone in the glazing sector knows perfectly well — windows and doors that allow even more expensive heat to escape far too easily.
Heat pumps do work. But only in homes that retain heat effectively. They operate at lower temperatures and depend on buildings having strong thermal performance. Put one into a poorly insulated property – and most are – and you are effectively heating the outdoors. It’s like fitting a Formula One engine to a car with the handbrake on and three flat tyres.
Across the industry there are already examples of homeowners discovering the gap between the political dogma and the practical reality. Heat pumps installed into poorly insulated homes struggling to maintain comfortable temperatures during cold weather. Radiators that feel lukewarm rather than properly hot.
Systems that require electric heaters or other ‘top-ups’ when winter bites.
Those are not the ‘homeowners’ appearing in the government adverts.
Global events are reminding us just how fragile energy markets really are. The ongoing conflict in the Middle East continues to push volatility into global energy prices, reinforcing a very simple point: energy security and energy efficiency matter more than ever.
In that environment, reducing the amount of energy our homes waste should be an absolute national priority, and the most effective way to do that is not complicated. Start with the basics of better insulation to provide improved thermal performance of the building fabric, including modern, energy-efficient windows and doors.
Upgrade those and you immediately reduce energy demand across hundreds of thousands of homes. Houses become warmer, energy bills fall and the country becomes less exposed to global energy shocks. Only once the house retains heat properly does it make sense to start installing sophisticated heating technologies.
Britain used to install over two million insulation upgrades a year. Today we barely manage a tenth of that. Meanwhile heat pumps still heat only about 1% of homes. Yet ministers behave as if the heat pump is the miracle solution when the reality is much simpler — Britain’s homes leak heat like sieves.
Instead, we appear to be pursuing a policy driven less by engineering reality and more by political enthusiasm — particularly Miliband’s long-standing heat pump crusade.
The campaign to install heat pumps smacks of the gung-ho drive towards electric vehicles. It is not that heat pumps, or electric propulsion are wrong. But the narrow minded, dogma and headline driven crusade to pursue and create these single solutions excludes the development and implementation of other highly effective alternatives.
Before Westminster installs millions of heat pumps, but it might be wiser to fix the 19 million houses that can’t hold the heat in the first place.
Ends
