Yes, I remember the gas explosion that destroyed a block of low rise flats on an estate in Putney. Friends lived there at the time but luckily for them, it wasn't their block!
The danger of a gas leak is not entirely removed, there's just too much unmapped infrastructure around, particularly underground Victorian & Edwardian lead pipes.
Someone i know was working for a construction company doing new building in the Oxford Street area. When they dug out they found a solid concrete structure (bunker) that wasn't on the plans. It also wasn't only under their plot, it went under next door and even next door didn't know what it was. Mystery structure under the buildings. They didn't know what to do with it, so they just attached the new building to the concrete and left it in-situ.
Living here in Canada I can't imagine the amount of Red Tape and building permits that would be required to put in this kind of ground source system. Kudo's to the engineering team on this project for making it happen.
Putting a heat pump in the London Underground would be a great way of sucking the heat out of there and put it to use warming folks homes and hot water.
We retrofitted a GSHP to our 17th century cottage here in the UK 17 years ago with boreholes, it feeds all of our space heating and hot water. It works great!
I work in data centres in the Docklands and elsewhere. Unfortunately it's low grade heat. Provided they use chilled water for cooling, the returning water temperature from the data halls is somewhere around 30⁰C. Include the losses in district heating, the increased complexity and cost and I'm not sure it'd be financially worth it for a data centre operator to implement it.
@@Ratgibbonheat-pump based heating systems often circulate water at 30°C & modern insulation is pretty good, maybe not as good as an 1892 Dewar Flask but pretty good. Water at 30°C is plenty usable, the system in the video is using 14°C supply temperature effectively.
Heat pumps are designed specifically for apartment buildings. These kinds of upgrades are very common across Europe. My apartment block 7 floors high was upgraded 2 years ago. It took 2 months from start to finish. Change over of systems took 90 minutes.
This is exactly what has to be shown very publicly to debunk all the naysayers who say it's not possible ! It's a fine example of a solution that can have wide applications, far beyond retrofit/refurbs.
@@StuartJ sure wiseass. What does it cost to bury gas piping? How many people die from gas leaks? What about all that hideous gas infrastructure fouling inner cities?
It wasn't fully shown, but you'd need a forced air system for that to work ideally. These flats likely have radiators which can't really 'do' cooling by themselves.
Love the commitment and execution to prove it can be done. Awesome! - Can you find out please how much the install was per unit? - Any chance of a (short) Interview with Clarion to see how they're budgeting this bold and apparently socially minded endeavour across their portfolio? How they're convincing tenants to take part? Whether they are actively championing this amongst their peer organisations so we can see how much housing stock might be due this ethical push? - Any short interviews with residents to find out how their bills have changed over a month/quarter/season? It's all well and good talking about a utility deploying all the boreholes and to the premises infrastructure but this smacks of making a killing on a very fixed, possibly very low maintenance, infrastructure. Will they charge the same level of standing charge as they did for a gas network despite not having any of the hazard of leaking gas mains (if they're protecting revenue rather than profits they would)? Much better to find a way for the cost to be met by the properties with the Government capping/fixing what the annual charge can amount to perhaps like a mortage across a 25 yr term after which it is frozen so no subsequent residents are screwed over by unethical landlords milking an amortised feature for unreasonable profit.
The sort of response I was hoping to hear. No mention of figures. Lots of councils and housing associatians are claiming to be losing money or breaking even and don't have the luxury of this project.
@@shifty277 I agree, I'm all for a clean energy transition but this project looks like it took a huge multi-million pound up front investment and isn't in any way realistic for the vast majority of privately owned apartment blocks in the UK (many with residents already in dire financial difficulty because of increased charges to replace flammable cladding). Even for tiny minority of councils and housing associations with the money to do something like this the housing crisis means they have nowhere to move residents while a retrofit happens, so simply building new housing that meets modern energy standards and gradually demolishing the old builidngs makes more sense.
There are a lot of people who would like to have a ground sourced heat pump, but don't have to disposable income to pay £10,000 or more to have it installed. They're in a Catch 22 situation, where they don't have the money to pay for the equipment which will save them money. And government grants don't cover enough of the costs for those people.
Great episode. Love seeing the "It can't be done" crowd shown that actually it can. Interesting to see Duracell getting more heavily involved in home decarbonizing systems. As usual this all seems to be happening in a big way everywhere but here in North America. As I don't live in the UK, and so are not eligible, I won't bother to clog up your Bunny Giveaway. But what I will do wait until after our up coming Canadian elections before I contact Duracell Canada and ask how far along they are on bringing these residential systems to us over here.
If you have a fridge that has a heat pump working in reverse so that a noise you may hear, and another pump to cycle the water in the central heating or hot water coil, basically the same as a normal central heating system I would of thought.
An excellent system. And given no gas in the building significant reduction in fire risk too. This should be a standard that the government are keen to promote and provide funds to help make happen, especially for the ground works.
@michaelvaughan8522 hardly! The chancellor is going on and on about growth and this is a green industry. And what's more expensive, this or damaging through environment and everything that goes with that. We have seen enough severe weather already this year surely?
There would need to be legislation to stop private equity from buying up the ground infrastructure and incrementally raising standing charges, as has been the case for, say, freehold and ground rents or water supply. We need to stop these scandals before they happen. The householders will be beholden to the ground infrastructure rights holder with this system.
I think it's a bad idea getting a gas boiler at this point, but builders keep installing them in new builds when it would be so easy to do heat pumps. The future of gas in the UK is still up for debate and we don't really know what will be coming along with that. The electric grid isn't going anywhere though.
@@Ben-fr8gi There's several new build estates going up in Sussex currently, some are gas, some were supposed to be heat pumps but are now being changed to gas - some of the gas sites are being partially changed to heat pumps. The issue is grid supply in the area, we have plenty of gas but we're operating on a local/national grid that hasn't really seen upgrades since the 1960s. It's one of the reasons that Pease Pottage took so long to get their EV chargers up and running after installation - lack of grid supply capable of coping with the amount of EV charging points required.
Robert, get the Heat Geeks to heat loss your house for a ASHP...you'll love it, it will amaze you and you'll be able to run it very efficiently with your batteries and solar, maybe have the tepeo as a hybrid set up but I bet you'll hardly need it, The Tepeo is 85% efficient wheres a ASHP GSHP will be 350% efficient...go on it would be fascinating to see Adam Chapman at yours...
Yep it's been great you demonstrating all these eclectic tech works like tepeo and IR panels but I think you've also demonstrated its more expensive than ASHP too. Perhaps it's time to swap. Amusingly I was hit with a bloody IR advert too whilst watching this.
@@Lewis_Standing If the Tepeo is the system I think it is, Robert charges is from his excess solar (and given the sheer number of panels he's got, in 3+ separate arrays, excess solar is something he's not short of, even at this time of year)
Looks like a big project, with a lot of retrofit internal wall insulation, new double glazing in addition to the new heating system and probably upgrade to ventilation/heat recovery system. Can you advise an estimate of the cost per dwelling for such a scheme?
For the ones I have worked on it was estimated at £15k per flat it came in at around £35k. Some of it was blatantly a tax write off but initial projections were undoubtedly low balling deliberately.
Crazy that a densely populated area like central london doesn't have district heating, but then again if I was a resident in these buildings I'd quite like having the choice of energy suppiler for the electric and being able to shop around and price fix. So there's benefits to this system. Not having a standing charge for gas is nice too, in fact those standing charges are a fairly large bit of our bill now.
Well done exactly the approach that should be adopted. Would have been interesting to also know if the flats had improved insulation as originally they would have had none.
Ground source heat pumps can also provide cooling, but you would need to fit equipment to transfer the heat from the air in the flat to the water loop. These are common in forced-air climate control systems. Typically you just have a heat exchanger and a fan blowing air over it. In larger systems that air is hooked up to ducts. In smaller ones it could just be a box on a wall with a condensate drain and vents. We have a neighbour who has such a system in their central HVAC setup. In places that have hot water radiators and no forced air, like the buildings in this video, you would need to install a forced air system since just running cold water through the radiators wouldn't work. You would just get condensation dripping from them and anything above them wouldn't really cool down. Presumably the scope of the design brief was just for hot water and space heating so they didn't include cooling functionality. As for installing individual mini-split air source heat pumps for each flat - that can be an option in the right climates and also where there isn't community opposition to having external units taking up space, being visible, and making noise. I believe that this is being done in New York in some buildings where they're replacing units that just do cooling with ones that do both heating and cooling. Obviously they can be less energy and money efficient than ground source depending on the temperature ranges and airflow around the building(s). Anyone doing such a project would want to have a knowledgeable firm do the necessary calculations to figure out the cost differences. Installation cost is generally going to be higher for ground source than air source, but air source isn't always an option, and in the right circumstances the operating costs can make up the difference over the life of the system. Some of the reasons for which were covered in the video.
I do love how he suggests terraced housing is applicable for ground source where it isn't as you can't get the drilling equipment in and there's access and installation issues for air source. The technology is more than capable of providing the heat but laws and private ownership are our biggest stumbling factors as an industry.
The video suggested running costs are similar or slightly lower compared with the existing gas setup, obviously this is much cheaper than straight electric.
Becuase they will be targeting councils and housing associations for scale as opposed to trying to convince 30 homeowners in a block individually to have it done. We won't (presumably) whether you are a social tenant or not be bearing the cost? Just an assumption seeing as Robert doesn't have the time to reply to decent comments perhaps highlighted first by the team on the computers.
Per unit I doubt it was as high as an individual installation. Don’t forget this country pay American a fortune for gas we import, when we could be producing our own energy. It will take time but we can’t bury our heads in the sand change is needed and sooner the better.
My niece has a house with a nice quiet garden with mature trees. Or it was quiet, until the next-door neighbour installed an air-source heat pump, mounted high up on the wall. Now the noise can be heard everywhere in the garden, ruining it as a place you can sit outside. I have no intention of installing a heat pump, as I have more consideration for my neighbours (quite apart fro the cost of installing and running it).
I feel like this could've been more efficient in many ways if they fitted a large central heat pump and hot water storage instead of many small distributed ones. I'm talking about cost (efficiency, hardware and install) and space efficiency.
You've then got a much bigger problem sorting out costs etc. This keeps each flat 'self contained' (bar the electricity and heat-pipe connection - which replaces the previous gas-pipe connection), and each person is free to use as much - or little - as they want, and pay accordingly. Personally, I think it could have been a lot cheaper to operate if they'd *also* fitted a home-battery, that charges off cheap-rate at night, and then powers the heat pump etc during the day (or the rest of the house)... this would cut the electricity price by ~75%, slashing operating costs (for the system, and the house). My terraced house used just under 20kWh-equivalent of gas per day during the recent sub-zero cold snap... at a COP of ~3, that's ~7kWh of electricity... add that to e.g. ~10kWh of general home energy use (I used 12kWh, but work from home which pushes the consumption up), and it suggests a 20kWh battery would be sufficient to run everything during winter (and recharge at cheap rate). Savings would be ~18p / kWh, x20 = 3.60 / day (in winter)... and as a bonus, your heating keeps working even if there's a power outage, etc :p
@logicalChimp I don't know about the UK but central heat/ hot water is quite common in Germany. How much everyone pays is typically distributed through measuring devices placed on the radiators + individual water meters on the separate hot water lines. Concerning your second point: a hot water tank is essentially a battery. You can just run the heat pump at night unless you have really high heat demand during a cold snap. You might not want that if it's in your flat making noise but that's another benefit of a central pump. Home batteries right now often make very little financial sense unless they are paired with solar.
Great stuff! I struggled with the concept & economics of heat pumps until I watched this. A heat pump is on our agenda here in Australia in 2025. We'll be using the Everything Electric Show in Sydney in March 2025 to ask questions. Thanks.
good job. with plasma vitrification drills, its possible to go much deeper, with a bore hole of vitrified rock. the deeper you go, the hotter it gets. earth energy at 1km would heat a whole neighbourhood... 10km would be as powerful as a nuclear power station.
True but I doubt people want a tube line, sewer or unmapped water/gas line vitrified if it goes even slightly off line, plus it's incredibly expensive in a dense city to build the power station needed to run it.
Affordable: median rent for a 1-bed flat in SW3 is £2817 pcm, so affordable is up to 80%of this or £2254 pcm... which is 'only' 75% of the median London single person's salary after tax/NIC of £3015. Yep, affordable.
Excelent video. Do the heat pumps also provide summer air conditioning? Direct heat pump kitchen refrigerator? Integrated heat pump cloths dryer? Dehumidication? Direct solar power to heat pump (Hotspot energy)? Chest freezer?
Thinking aloud, on a bit of a tangent (the relevance is retrofitting apartment blocks).... all these hundreds(?) of buildings that are waiting, post-Grenfell, for their flammable cladding to be replaced - what if they were clad top to bottom in solar panels on the sunnier sides? I imagine the initial cost would be pretty eye-watering, but no worse than installing a solar farm in a field, and it would undoubtedly generate far more than the flats would use. Cheap/free electricity for those low-income tenants and maybe nearby neighbours, and a big help towards the country's green targets and further cleaning up the grid? On the other hand, I suppose cynics would say solar panels are likely to be more of a fire risk than the old cladding 🤷🏼♂
we use split airconditioning/heating (basically air source heat pumps) to heat our house and night rate electricity to run our immersion heater for hot water. all in a 1930s semi.
Wow electricity 3 times cost of gas in uk. The situation is reversed in Australia! Problem is the capital cost to switch gas to electricity appliances.
This proves its possible and over time just as over time central heating became the norm so will heatpumps. I’ve no doubt the naysayer will say at what cost? To that I would say my dad said some 55 year ago when I first started installing central heating, “At What Cost” why would anyone spent all that money installing central heating when there’s a perfectly good coal fire keeping up warm.
Still wondering about a heat pump sucking in air down the chimney, mostly to get the heat from condensing the water vapour. Always damp in the west, just remember to add a drain, or a box to take the ice cubes to the ice house. Not so easy, a leaf blower is very noisy. A basic dehumidifier is about 140% efficient in theory, and should be better with further work on dew point, air velocity and pressure etc
It is not a mystery at all. The Nordic countries like Sweden and Norway have been using heat pumps for ages (cause they’ve had cheap hydroelectric electricity for a long time). The technology has been used for ages also as it is basically similar to what you have in every fridge. Heat pumps have a life expectancy similar to gas boilers pretty much.
My flat is 25 years old. There is no point fitting a heat pump, the heat loss is so low. 2kw oil filled electric radiator. Only heat one room at a time. Fit a home storage battery and it all runs on cheap, green electricity.
Heat pumps remain SUBSTANTIALLY more expensive to install, maintain and fix compared to gas boilers. So the pay back on a system like this will probably outlast its life span.
How do these water based heat pumps compare in price and efficiency to ACs that can do both heating and cooling ? Obviously the ACs have a higher minimum outside temperature that they can operate effectively in, but how about effectiveness in heating when outside temperatures are in the 5-15 *C range ? With summer temperatures the way they are in Europe it might make more sense to get the AC. Easier to install too unless some sort of permission is required to put up a stand with the outdoor unit ? At lower temps maybe they could be supplemented by another smaller heat source or a small heating element could improve the effectiveness of the outdoor unit at minimal extra operating cost. I do know that individual bathroom sized gas water heaters are available but if I'm not mistaken they need to be mounted in a ventilated space for safety reasons in case of a gas leak
All that waste heat in the tube system is screaming out to be used in this way in London. Of course, drilling down to the tube and dangling a pipe down there is not exact the way to go about it but there must be ways.
Yes. There are water based cooling systems. If you took the water heated during the process of cooling the tube, stored it in a sand battery and used it to provide heat for housing that would be wonderful.
Nice to get away from burning fuels in city centers, but: what's the cost for the users (home buyer/renter)? As a user you're locked in with a serious maintenance cost and a fixed monthly user fee ... Is one 'allowed' to consume a very little energy (15C room temp. 1 short shower/week) and paying only for what you consume? probably the 'cost/ pay-system doesn't allow this... Would be nice to have a view on the "real life" user cost.
What maintenance do you envisage? The black plastic ground pipe is likely to last more than a century & the rest is century-old tech (albeit repackaged) connected to existing radiators.
180m bore holes. I bet that ain't cheap and it must cause a huge amount of disturbance to install. Possible as shown and impressive, but can anyone seriously think this will be usable at any scale at all?
Boreholes are the default installation in Scandinavia, I doubt they're overly expensive there. If they're too expensive here just use Scandinavian contractors till the local price comes down!
The issue is Electric prices is too expensive compared to gas, he even mentioned it, we need to get that fixed... I have a GSHP and Oil is cheaper to run than it. My cheapest off peak in UK (NI) is 16p....
@ No gas is significantly cheaper than electricity. Add on a 15K+ heat pump install and thats a lot of gas in one’s lifetime. Going green should have never come at such a cost to people literally the green transition is forcing people into poverty and ramping up the price of electricity. For this countries total Co2 output the cost on its people is insanity and economy crashing.
Good review. Excellent restoration work. But i think the video was about 8 minutes too long. Having listened to the mansplaining of heat pumps..... I recon most people watching this channel wouldn't of needed the re-education.
Shame on the middlemen, a.k.a. the energy companies, they are just speculating on the prices, but they have never made or installed a wind turbine in their entire life. You stopped your rants, so I will do it for you.
In a high density location like that removing the danger of a gas leak is big.
Especially when you think that some of the underground gas infrastructure can be as much as 100 years old if not more.
Was told the gas board have an access all areas pass for gas safety. More rights of entry than the police.
Yes, I remember the gas explosion that destroyed a block of low rise flats on an estate in Putney. Friends lived there at the time but luckily for them, it wasn't their block!
@@michaelbacon561Ronan Point is the famous example, it's why towerblocks built since generally don't have gas on site.
The danger of a gas leak is not entirely removed, there's just too much unmapped infrastructure around, particularly underground Victorian & Edwardian lead pipes.
A fantastic solution for older high density buildings.
I'm amazed that when drilling 180m holes in London they managed to avoid so much infrastructure - like water, gas, sewers and tube trains!
Someone i know was working for a construction company doing new building in the Oxford Street area.
When they dug out they found a solid concrete structure (bunker) that wasn't on the plans. It also wasn't only under their plot, it went under next door and even next door didn't know what it was. Mystery structure under the buildings.
They didn't know what to do with it, so they just attached the new building to the concrete and left it in-situ.
Living here in Canada I can't imagine the amount of Red Tape and building permits that would be required to put in this kind of ground source system. Kudo's to the engineering team on this project for making it happen.
It’s called planning. Fortunately we’re pretty good at recording stuff we do in the UK so doing the research pays off.
Putting a heat pump in the London Underground would be a great way of sucking the heat out of there and put it to use warming folks homes and hot water.
They are 100 years old. So they were probably here first. So it's the other way round. Newer infrastructure needs to avoid this area
We retrofitted a GSHP to our 17th century cottage here in the UK 17 years ago with boreholes, it feeds all of our space heating and hot water. It works great!
In Docklands, social housing should be tying up with all the data centers that are currently paying to cool the equipment they have.
London underground suck out of some of that heat from the tube.
I work in data centres in the Docklands and elsewhere. Unfortunately it's low grade heat. Provided they use chilled water for cooling, the returning water temperature from the data halls is somewhere around 30⁰C. Include the losses in district heating, the increased complexity and cost and I'm not sure it'd be financially worth it for a data centre operator to implement it.
They tried it with Telehouse West and it was never plumbed in as far as I’m aware
@@Giftedmike359that's sad 😢
@@Ratgibbonheat-pump based heating systems often circulate water at 30°C & modern insulation is pretty good, maybe not as good as an 1892 Dewar Flask but pretty good.
Water at 30°C is plenty usable, the system in the video is using 14°C supply temperature effectively.
I live in this apartment, woop woop and so far all good
Did the promised lowering of the bills happen? What sort of percentage/numbers?
It's good to get feedback from actual customers, thank you. Many of us are disappointed you weren't interviewed in the video.
@ have only been here for a month so will let you know in a few months :)
Brilliant !!
Heat pumps are designed specifically for apartment buildings. These kinds of upgrades are very common across Europe. My apartment block 7 floors high was upgraded 2 years ago. It took 2 months from start to finish. Change over of systems took 90 minutes.
A great solution to offer a smart heating method without relying on gas.
We need this kind of solutions more for updating old buildings
This is exactly what has to be shown very publicly to debunk all the naysayers who say it's not possible ! It's a fine example of a solution that can have wide applications, far beyond retrofit/refurbs.
What about the £20K to drill the bore hole?
@@StuartJ troll
@@alex.velasco heh, let's not get in the way of a dream solution.
Now the most expensive 'social' housing in the UK.
@@StuartJ sure wiseass. What does it cost to bury gas piping? How many people die from gas leaks? What about all that hideous gas infrastructure fouling inner cities?
This is brilliant engineering and shuts up the nay sayers. Well done. 👏🏻
Can you lend this nay sayer £20K to drill a bore hole?
Wait for tenant satisfaction ratings first.
This is bloody amazing! Maybe the heat pumps could run in reverse too to cool apartments.
It's possible. But cooling with radiators is tricky as you can get condensation on the radiators and uninsulated pipe work which could cause issues.
Technicly yes, but they could just tap in to the cold water from the hole so no need to run the compressor, just water pump and a fan.
It wasn't fully shown, but you'd need a forced air system for that to work ideally. These flats likely have radiators which can't really 'do' cooling by themselves.
Love the commitment and execution to prove it can be done. Awesome!
- Can you find out please how much the install was per unit?
- Any chance of a (short) Interview with Clarion to see how they're budgeting this bold and apparently socially minded endeavour across their portfolio? How they're convincing tenants to take part? Whether they are actively championing this amongst their peer organisations so we can see how much housing stock might be due this ethical push?
- Any short interviews with residents to find out how their bills have changed over a month/quarter/season?
It's all well and good talking about a utility deploying all the boreholes and to the premises infrastructure but this smacks of making a killing on a very fixed, possibly very low maintenance, infrastructure. Will they charge the same level of standing charge as they did for a gas network despite not having any of the hazard of leaking gas mains (if they're protecting revenue rather than profits they would)?
Much better to find a way for the cost to be met by the properties with the Government capping/fixing what the annual charge can amount to perhaps like a mortage across a 25 yr term after which it is frozen so no subsequent residents are screwed over by unethical landlords milking an amortised feature for unreasonable profit.
The sort of response I was hoping to hear. No mention of figures. Lots of councils and housing associatians are claiming to be losing money or breaking even and don't have the luxury of this project.
@@shifty277 I agree, I'm all for a clean energy transition but this project looks like it took a huge multi-million pound up front investment and isn't in any way realistic for the vast majority of privately owned apartment blocks in the UK (many with residents already in dire financial difficulty because of increased charges to replace flammable cladding). Even for tiny minority of councils and housing associations with the money to do something like this the housing crisis means they have nowhere to move residents while a retrofit happens, so simply building new housing that meets modern energy standards and gradually demolishing the old builidngs makes more sense.
excellent work!
There are a lot of people who would like to have a ground sourced heat pump, but don't have to disposable income to pay £10,000 or more to have it installed. They're in a Catch 22 situation, where they don't have the money to pay for the equipment which will save them money. And government grants don't cover enough of the costs for those people.
Thanks Robert. Inspiring video.
Great episode. Love seeing the "It can't be done" crowd shown that actually it can.
Interesting to see Duracell getting more heavily involved in home decarbonizing systems.
As usual this all seems to be happening in a big way everywhere but here in North America.
As I don't live in the UK, and so are not eligible, I won't bother to clog up your Bunny Giveaway.
But what I will do wait until after our up coming Canadian elections before I contact Duracell Canada and ask how far along they are on bringing these residential systems to us over here.
Do THIS Now everywhere!!🎉
I have been enjoyed, so thank you for sharing.
No mention of sound presumably quiet? SOme numbers would be helpful for the message
very quiet
Stand next to a gas boiler at full tilt. Not quiet in the least.
If you have a fridge that has a heat pump working in reverse so that a noise you may hear, and another pump to cycle the water in the central heating or hot water coil, basically the same as a normal central heating system I would of thought.
An excellent system. And given no gas in the building significant reduction in fire risk too.
This should be a standard that the government are keen to promote and provide funds to help make happen, especially for the ground works.
That would Bankrupt the country, any transition should be organic and because it makes financial sense.
@michaelvaughan8522 hardly! The chancellor is going on and on about growth and this is a green industry. And what's more expensive, this or damaging through environment and everything that goes with that. We have seen enough severe weather already this year surely?
Great but doesn't mention what insulation and cladding was installed
Just brilliant. Period!
There would need to be legislation to stop private equity from buying up the ground infrastructure and incrementally raising standing charges, as has been the case for, say, freehold and ground rents or water supply. We need to stop these scandals before they happen. The householders will be beholden to the ground infrastructure rights holder with this system.
You'd best be thinking about who to vote for, the traditional 3 parties aren't likely to support you in their current incarnations 😢
Should have drilled down next to a tube line. All the heat you could ever want. 😁
Where we live the developers are still installing gas boilers, the difference here is that the Housing associations are usually not for profit .
I think it's a bad idea getting a gas boiler at this point, but builders keep installing them in new builds when it would be so easy to do heat pumps. The future of gas in the UK is still up for debate and we don't really know what will be coming along with that. The electric grid isn't going anywhere though.
@@Ben-fr8gi There's several new build estates going up in Sussex currently, some are gas, some were supposed to be heat pumps but are now being changed to gas - some of the gas sites are being partially changed to heat pumps. The issue is grid supply in the area, we have plenty of gas but we're operating on a local/national grid that hasn't really seen upgrades since the 1960s.
It's one of the reasons that Pease Pottage took so long to get their EV chargers up and running after installation - lack of grid supply capable of coping with the amount of EV charging points required.
Brilliant 👏🏻 👍🏻
Robert, get the Heat Geeks to heat loss your house for a ASHP...you'll love it, it will amaze you and you'll be able to run it very efficiently with your batteries and solar, maybe have the tepeo as a hybrid set up but I bet you'll hardly need it, The Tepeo is 85% efficient wheres a ASHP GSHP will be 350% efficient...go on it would be fascinating to see Adam Chapman at yours...
Yep it's been great you demonstrating all these eclectic tech works like tepeo and IR panels but I think you've also demonstrated its more expensive than ASHP too.
Perhaps it's time to swap.
Amusingly I was hit with a bloody IR advert too whilst watching this.
@@Lewis_Standing If the Tepeo is the system I think it is, Robert charges is from his excess solar (and given the sheer number of panels he's got, in 3+ separate arrays, excess solar is something he's not short of, even at this time of year)
@@logicalChimp He has to be near 100% off grid.
With home ownership getting harder and harder for many, I’m really glad to see anything to help offer better options to renters.
Looks like a big project, with a lot of retrofit internal wall insulation, new double glazing in addition to the new heating system and probably upgrade to ventilation/heat recovery system. Can you advise an estimate of the cost per dwelling for such a scheme?
For the ones I have worked on it was estimated at £15k per flat it came in at around £35k. Some of it was blatantly a tax write off but initial projections were undoubtedly low balling deliberately.
I love seeing this.
Crazy that a densely populated area like central london doesn't have district heating, but then again if I was a resident in these buildings I'd quite like having the choice of energy suppiler for the electric and being able to shop around and price fix. So there's benefits to this system. Not having a standing charge for gas is nice too, in fact those standing charges are a fairly large bit of our bill now.
Fantastic video. Great explanation, deals with common hurdles amongst resistant or hesitant groups. Good effort team!
Great video, thanks!
Well done exactly the approach that should be adopted. Would have been interesting to also know if the flats had improved insulation as originally they would have had none.
They would have used the thermal mass of the walls which actually works quite well if you maintain a fairly steady heat indoors.
Ground source heat pumps can also provide cooling, but you would need to fit equipment to transfer the heat from the air in the flat to the water loop. These are common in forced-air climate control systems. Typically you just have a heat exchanger and a fan blowing air over it. In larger systems that air is hooked up to ducts. In smaller ones it could just be a box on a wall with a condensate drain and vents. We have a neighbour who has such a system in their central HVAC setup. In places that have hot water radiators and no forced air, like the buildings in this video, you would need to install a forced air system since just running cold water through the radiators wouldn't work. You would just get condensation dripping from them and anything above them wouldn't really cool down. Presumably the scope of the design brief was just for hot water and space heating so they didn't include cooling functionality.
As for installing individual mini-split air source heat pumps for each flat - that can be an option in the right climates and also where there isn't community opposition to having external units taking up space, being visible, and making noise. I believe that this is being done in New York in some buildings where they're replacing units that just do cooling with ones that do both heating and cooling. Obviously they can be less energy and money efficient than ground source depending on the temperature ranges and airflow around the building(s). Anyone doing such a project would want to have a knowledgeable firm do the necessary calculations to figure out the cost differences. Installation cost is generally going to be higher for ground source than air source, but air source isn't always an option, and in the right circumstances the operating costs can make up the difference over the life of the system. Some of the reasons for which were covered in the video.
I do love how he suggests terraced housing is applicable for ground source where it isn't as you can't get the drilling equipment in and there's access and installation issues for air source. The technology is more than capable of providing the heat but laws and private ownership are our biggest stumbling factors as an industry.
Why can't you get drilling equipment in?
🤗 THANKS ROBERT ,DAVID ⚡️⚡️⚡️
Ooo I'm in a Clarion Housing home.
They've done this in Sunderland too
A good video, but it would be interesting with some cost values, installation and running.
The video suggested running costs are similar or slightly lower compared with the existing gas setup, obviously this is much cheaper than straight electric.
@@alanhat5252 Yes, but some real numbers would be interesting.
No cost breakdown, why?
Becuase they will be targeting councils and housing associations for scale as opposed to trying to convince 30 homeowners in a block individually to have it done.
We won't (presumably) whether you are a social tenant or not be bearing the cost?
Just an assumption seeing as Robert doesn't have the time to reply to decent comments perhaps highlighted first by the team on the computers.
Per unit I doubt it was as high as an individual installation. Don’t forget this country pay American a fortune for gas we import, when we could be producing our own energy. It will take time but we can’t bury our heads in the sand change is needed and sooner the better.
@@wobby1516when I looked last night 22% of our electricity was being generated from gas. We are being stiffed on electricity prices.
You are missing the point.social housing providers are given massive grants by the government to build the houses !
That was 15 years ago! 😮
District Heating or Centralized heating with heat pumps, industrial low enthalpy heat recovery and cogeneration from trash is the way to go!
Yes but not the _only_ way!
My niece has a house with a nice quiet garden with mature trees. Or it was quiet, until the next-door neighbour installed an air-source heat pump, mounted high up on the wall. Now the noise can be heard everywhere in the garden, ruining it as a place you can sit outside. I have no intention of installing a heat pump, as I have more consideration for my neighbours (quite apart fro the cost of installing and running it).
As you say, that's *__air-sourced__* this is ground-sourced -- no fans.
Are you sure it's not an airconditioning unit?
I feel like this could've been more efficient in many ways if they fitted a large central heat pump and hot water storage instead of many small distributed ones. I'm talking about cost (efficiency, hardware and install) and space efficiency.
You've then got a much bigger problem sorting out costs etc. This keeps each flat 'self contained' (bar the electricity and heat-pipe connection - which replaces the previous gas-pipe connection), and each person is free to use as much - or little - as they want, and pay accordingly.
Personally, I think it could have been a lot cheaper to operate if they'd *also* fitted a home-battery, that charges off cheap-rate at night, and then powers the heat pump etc during the day (or the rest of the house)... this would cut the electricity price by ~75%, slashing operating costs (for the system, and the house). My terraced house used just under 20kWh-equivalent of gas per day during the recent sub-zero cold snap... at a COP of ~3, that's ~7kWh of electricity... add that to e.g. ~10kWh of general home energy use (I used 12kWh, but work from home which pushes the consumption up), and it suggests a 20kWh battery would be sufficient to run everything during winter (and recharge at cheap rate).
Savings would be ~18p / kWh, x20 = 3.60 / day (in winter)... and as a bonus, your heating keeps working even if there's a power outage, etc :p
@logicalChimp I don't know about the UK but central heat/ hot water is quite common in Germany. How much everyone pays is typically distributed through measuring devices placed on the radiators + individual water meters on the separate hot water lines.
Concerning your second point: a hot water tank is essentially a battery. You can just run the heat pump at night unless you have really high heat demand during a cold snap. You might not want that if it's in your flat making noise but that's another benefit of a central pump. Home batteries right now often make very little financial sense unless they are paired with solar.
No loses at all in shifting low temp ground water. Hard to beat that for efficiency
I'd love to know what kind of insulation the flats have, have they added extra/new insulation?
as an apartment-dweller in San Francisco, this is the sort of thing I'm interested in
A communal project? Are you sure it's not too socialist for _The Land of The Free?_
@@alanhat5252 I didn't even get to that part of my lottery fantasy!
Great stuff! I struggled with the concept & economics of heat pumps until I watched this. A heat pump is on our agenda here in Australia in 2025. We'll be using the Everything Electric Show in Sydney in March 2025 to ask questions. Thanks.
Our reverse cycle air conditioners are air source heat pumps.
Great, also be great if you can heat geek on again, but with their mini store ❤
good job. with plasma vitrification drills, its possible to go much deeper, with a bore hole of vitrified rock. the deeper you go, the hotter it gets. earth energy at 1km would heat a whole neighbourhood... 10km would be as powerful as a nuclear power station.
True but I doubt people want a tube line, sewer or unmapped water/gas line vitrified if it goes even slightly off line, plus it's incredibly expensive in a dense city to build the power station needed to run it.
Affordable: median rent for a 1-bed flat in SW3 is £2817 pcm, so affordable is up to 80%of this or £2254 pcm... which is 'only' 75% of the median London single person's salary after tax/NIC of £3015. Yep, affordable.
It would have been nice to know how much this system cost to install, especially on a per-flat basis.
Great thing, Kensa!
So I wondered more than once, with no stuff burned, why not also eliminate the chimneys and have perfect roofs for solar energy?
Aesthetics & potential future-proofing (& the buildings may be Listed). Plus it's very expensive messing about with chimneys.
Excelent video. Do the heat pumps also provide summer air conditioning? Direct heat pump kitchen refrigerator? Integrated heat pump cloths dryer? Dehumidication? Direct solar power to heat pump (Hotspot energy)? Chest freezer?
Just don't accidentally hit any tube line/gas main/sewer line when you drill in the middle of town 🙂
great stuff
Thinking aloud, on a bit of a tangent (the relevance is retrofitting apartment blocks).... all these hundreds(?) of buildings that are waiting, post-Grenfell, for their flammable cladding to be replaced - what if they were clad top to bottom in solar panels on the sunnier sides? I imagine the initial cost would be pretty eye-watering, but no worse than installing a solar farm in a field, and it would undoubtedly generate far more than the flats would use. Cheap/free electricity for those low-income tenants and maybe nearby neighbours, and a big help towards the country's green targets and further cleaning up the grid? On the other hand, I suppose cynics would say solar panels are likely to be more of a fire risk than the old cladding 🤷🏼♂
Solar panels work on all sides, they just work better on the south.
Excellent use of low carbon energy, whilst maintaining comfort and affordability, and could be expanded to district heating relatively easily
I've been confused by all the "can't be done" claims, I'm glad to see I was right to be confused.
Almost like there are some incumbents with deep pockets that could fund that kind of misinformation...
I have a wall mounted air source heat pump in my social housing apartment. Simples.
It's a huge site with massive budget. Show them doing it in a normal terraced house I will volunteer.
And it’ll become cheaper if we can get the price of electricity not linked to gas and as grid becomes more renewables, etc… 😊
I hope you’ve shared this with our Green MP in Bristol West!
we use split airconditioning/heating (basically air source heat pumps) to heat our house and night rate electricity to run our immersion heater for hot water. all in a 1930s semi.
Wow electricity 3 times cost of gas in uk. The situation is reversed in Australia! Problem is the capital cost to switch gas to electricity appliances.
These prices are all set by governments
Would would b very useful here in the Southern Aus states
This was great, but I was expecting to hear something about insulation.
Can they come and fit that to my house please :-)
This proves its possible and over time just as over time central heating became the norm so will heatpumps. I’ve no doubt the naysayer will say at what cost? To that I would say my dad said some 55 year ago when I first started installing central heating, “At What Cost” why would anyone spent all that money installing central heating when there’s a perfectly good coal fire keeping up warm.
Just use the regular overhead units instead of heat pump to water systems, so you can make use of the air conditioning functionality.
Still wondering about a heat pump sucking in air down the chimney, mostly to get the heat from condensing the water vapour. Always damp in the west, just remember to add a drain, or a box to take the ice cubes to the ice house. Not so easy, a leaf blower is very noisy. A basic dehumidifier is about 140% efficient in theory, and should be better with further work on dew point, air velocity and pressure etc
Why not recover heat from the underground tube system?
They do.
5:55 300-400% of efficiency doesn't seem to be much for a GSHP
If you consider that it is a retrofit with sub-optimal radiators and high temperature pipe system, it is actually not that bad
Noise and lifetime of all those motors and compressors?
It is not a mystery at all. The Nordic countries like Sweden and Norway have been using heat pumps for ages (cause they’ve had cheap hydroelectric electricity for a long time).
The technology has been used for ages also as it is basically similar to what you have in every fridge.
Heat pumps have a life expectancy similar to gas boilers pretty much.
Ground based heat pumps should become the standard heating solution globally
Who pays the £20K to drill the hole?
The property tax
@@StuartJ£20K???
Where did you get that from?
@@Rene-uz3ebboth heating & cooling in many areas though qanāts work very well elsewhere.
My flat is 25 years old. There is no point fitting a heat pump, the heat loss is so low. 2kw oil filled electric radiator. Only heat one room at a time. Fit a home storage battery and it all runs on cheap, green electricity.
Its a good start but after your heatgeek video I think they can perform better
Heat pumps remain SUBSTANTIALLY more expensive to install, maintain and fix compared to gas boilers. So the pay back on a system like this will probably outlast its life span.
Can you quote real-world numbers on that?
How do these water based heat pumps compare in price and efficiency to ACs that can do both heating and cooling ? Obviously the ACs have a higher minimum outside temperature that they can operate effectively in, but how about effectiveness in heating when outside temperatures are in the 5-15 *C range ?
With summer temperatures the way they are in Europe it might make more sense to get the AC. Easier to install too unless some sort of permission is required to put up a stand with the outdoor unit ?
At lower temps maybe they could be supplemented by another smaller heat source or a small heating element could improve the effectiveness of the outdoor unit at minimal extra operating cost.
I do know that individual bathroom sized gas water heaters are available but if I'm not mistaken they need to be mounted in a ventilated space for safety reasons in case of a gas leak
Do you have a youtube-only data contract or can you access the whole of the internet?
#stopburningstuff !!
My gas is one quarter the price of electricity not one third.
and you would still break even on the system described in the video, a system that doesn't appear to be up to current standards.
All that waste heat in the tube system is screaming out to be used in this way in London. Of course, drilling down to the tube and dangling a pipe down there is not exact the way to go about it but there must be ways.
Yes. There are water based cooling systems. If you took the water heated during the process of cooling the tube, stored it in a sand battery and used it to provide heat for housing that would be wonderful.
Plenty of tube lines have air vents and even old stair shafts that are no longer used. Plenty of opportunities to get pipes in.
Nice to get away from burning fuels in city centers, but:
what's the cost for the users (home buyer/renter)?
As a user you're locked in with a serious maintenance cost and a fixed monthly user fee ...
Is one 'allowed' to consume a very little energy (15C room temp. 1 short shower/week) and paying only for what you consume? probably the 'cost/ pay-system doesn't allow this...
Would be nice to have a view on the "real life" user cost.
What maintenance do you envisage?
The black plastic ground pipe is likely to last more than a century & the rest is century-old tech (albeit repackaged) connected to existing radiators.
Cost seems to be slightly lower than the gas it's replacing & the standing charge for gas is removed.
180m bore holes. I bet that ain't cheap and it must cause a huge amount of disturbance to install. Possible as shown and impressive, but can anyone seriously think this will be usable at any scale at all?
Why must it "cause a huge amount of disturbance to install"? It's a hole, drilled not excavated.
Boreholes are the default installation in Scandinavia, I doubt they're overly expensive there. If they're too expensive here just use Scandinavian contractors till the local price comes down!
The issue is Electric prices is too expensive compared to gas, he even mentioned it, we need to get that fixed... I have a GSHP and Oil is cheaper to run than it. My cheapest off peak in UK (NI) is 16p....
I wish you covered the extend to which the building had to be insulated. Heat pumps dont just work in a vacuum.
Be better to see actual bills and cost per Kw / time of day etc
Why would you use groundwater in the summer if you can use surface temperature water? Seems like a lot of wasted energy.
they're using a closed loop.
Economic circumstances will always dictate your path.
❤
The claim about cost has no data to back it up yet.
Until people are in and using it, they don't know the running costs.
They're guessing
Who! Is that about town Dandy 👍
Great project, more of the same. 👌
And the cost of electricity….. its wonderful technology but the people of the United Kingdom are getting ripped off for electricity.
Cost of gas is higher....
@ No gas is significantly cheaper than electricity. Add on a 15K+ heat pump install and thats a lot of gas in one’s lifetime. Going green should have never come at such a cost to people literally the green transition is forcing people into poverty and ramping up the price of electricity. For this countries total Co2 output the cost on its people is insanity and economy crashing.
Good review. Excellent restoration work.
But i think the video was about 8 minutes too long. Having listened to the mansplaining of heat pumps..... I recon most people watching this channel wouldn't of needed the re-education.
There will be people who have never watched a video on ground source heat pumps before and this will be great for them
Drill baby drill.
😂
The world needs more CO2, not less.
Not according to the consensus of scientists -- you know, the people who *_actually_* know what they're talking about.
Shame on the middlemen, a.k.a. the energy companies, they are just speculating on the prices, but they have never made or installed a wind turbine in their entire life. You stopped your rants, so I will do it for you.
Just stick with verified facts, it makes life so much easier. 😢