It is ironic that heat pumps have just had a truly awful piece of publicity just when it seems the industry has finally won its battle with the Government to have air-source heat pumps (ASHPs) included in the commercial Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI).
The technology has been battling for credibility since the Energy Saving Trust’s less than flattering field trials in 2010 and the latest bad news – courtesy of last week’s ‘Rip Off Britain’ programme on the BBC – could not have come at a worse time.
Sadly, the wider public will not see the subtlety of this. They will simply hear about families in social housing ending up with electricity bills four times higher than anticipated. They will see the headlines about mothers having to choose between paying for food or their energy bill and assume this ‘new fangled’ green technology is a failure.
Yet the manufacturer – in this case NIBE, which strongly rejects the implication on the show that their products are at fault (read the company's statement here) – has successfully supplied 15,000 ASHPs to UK projects, so they must be doing something right!
The truth is that, yet again, it is not the technology, but how it has been deployed that has caused the problem. Rip Off Britain highlighted the poor performance of the NIBE units on a number of housing estates across England. The Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs) for the properties in question stated that annual electricity costs for heating and hot water should be between £400 to £500. However, the programme reported that ‘hundreds of families’ were paying three or four times that amount.
Demanding
One family interviewed for the programme said their electricity bill for the first two months alone was £252. One housing association was reported to have paid more than £45,000 to support residents under siege from electricity suppliers demanding payment.
One family interviewed for the programme said their electricity bill for the first two months alone was £252. One housing association was reported to have paid more than £45,000 to support residents under siege from electricity suppliers demanding payment.
A heating engineer, who surveyed the systems for the BBC, told the programme that the particular heat pumps used in these homes were undersized – possibly because they are designed for the Scandinavian market, which has much higher insulation standards. It appears that the heat pumps were running almost continually in back-up electric immersion mode due the higher heat losses in our social housing – hence the horrifying bills.
The response from the local authorities concerned was, not surprisingly, to rip out the heat pumps and replace them with gas boilers. It’s a tragedy. Air source heat pumps could do a perfectly good job in this country, but it is going to get harder and harder as all this adverse publicity piles up.
It seems obvious, even from a distance, that the undersizing of the systems was probably done to save money and the EPC rating was based on a best possible scenario. You will only achieve that if the heat pump system is properly sized, rated, installed and commissioned – and, vitally, the end user is shown exactly how to operate it.
A number of social housing groups now have renewable liaison officers to help residents understand the systems installed in their homes and, equally importantly, manage their expectations – shouldn’t every social landlord be doing this?
No comments:
Post a Comment