New heat pump installation

[Dave2002]

Heat pumps may gain a slight push from this news - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-27505207

The National Trust is to operate a fairly large scale heat pump using the nearby sea as the heat source in one of its properties.

[Flay]

I hope it works well, but it may take a good 15 years to recover the costs. One wonders about maintenance costs and for how long it will continue to function efficiently.

I believe that domestic heat pumps can be noisy, so this may limit their practicality.

I propose fracking, then when all the gas is exhausted pump water through the drilled channels to bring up ground heat (Flay runs to hide from anticipated vituperation).

[Dave2002]

I hope it works well, but it may take a good 15 years to recover the costs. One wonders about maintenance costs and for how long it will continue to function efficiently.

I believe that domestic heat pumps can be noisy, so this may limit their practicality.

I propose fracking, then when all the gas is exhausted pump water through the drilled channels to bring up ground heat (Flay runs to hide from anticipated vituperation).

Maintenance costs may be an issue, though as awareness of these systems and experience and expertise increase in this country I would hope that this will gradually become less of a problem.

Ground source heat pumps for domestic purposes shouldn't be particularly noisy, though probably require digging up the garden for installation. Also, if run hard in the winter they can have interesting effects on the soil.

Air source heat pumps can be relatively noisy, and may also not work well at really low temperatures. It would depend on the siting of some of the major components (evaporator coil, and compressor - though some systems are reversible).

I fancy geothermal, but they require a very deep hole.

[ahinton]

Maintenance costs may be an issue, though as awareness of these systems and experience and expertise increase in this country I would hope that this will gradually become less of a problem.

Ground source heat pumps for domestic purposes shouldn't be particularly noisy, though probably require digging up the garden for installation. Also, if run hard in the winter they can have interesting effects on the soil.

Air source heat pumps can be relatively noisy, and may also not work well at really low temperatures. It would depend on the siting of some of the major components (evaporator coil, and compressor - though some systems are reversible).

I fancy geothermal, but they require a very deep hole.

Geothermal used to be substantially more efficient than aerothermal but requiring of rather more maintenance and much more inconvenience and expense to install; these days, however, the efficiency differential between the two has narrowed whereas the installation cost and inconvenience differential has not. Also, the noise emitted by the best quality air source heat pumps is consierably lower than once it was and,m in any case, such noise as they do emit should be a consideration affecting (as far as possible) the decision as to where exactly to install them. A friend in France bought a property with a ground source heat pump already installed and it failed after a year or so because it had not been correctly sheathed to protect it from chemical reaction from the limestone soil in which it had been installed and was a write-off. He's now had a brand new air source heat pump installed that has the capacity to service the whole of a house with a floor space of of just over 300m² and, although I don't know its precise decibel level at full tilt, I have stood within a metre of it and noticed only a hum that is almost inaudible from 10m distant; he finds the difference in efficiency between the two negligible, although for all that they can cut energy bills by up to around 70%, both ground and air source heat pumps are still fairly greedy with the amount of electricity that they use.