How Developers Are Ruining The Heat Pump Market 

Yeah. Szymon and Adam are way too nice. And the problem is that $people can't avoid outfits like this if they don't know the names. I guess they are hoping that getting these designers to actually learn how to do it right will be more effective in the long run than naming and shaming. But _in the meantime_ people would like to know. Maybe someone on the development will tell us?

Im pretty certain its Alto Energy - they do installs like this with Mitsibushi heat pumps all the time and have been for years.

@@BristolHeatPumps I had alto design for me, did the day course and that, sounded good if I install the commission and take over. Did the install for a pal developer and now 6 months on we have realised there running shit. Done this a few times different companies designing and still the same issues. All new builds and expect a much better performance. Now I can’t trust anyone to do it and doing the knowledge with heat geek myself. That saying you want something done properly you do it yourself. That’s my mindset now.

@@stixstonesinvestors5413 yep they are shocking, tbf i would say most umbrellas are very poor quality, if only MCS had some backbone eh! We are a heat geek ourselves and do all our design in house, its really not difficult to do it properly

@@BristolHeatPumps so true. It really needs to be regulated and rules tightened up. I know a lot gas engineers who think they know it all and just have that mindset of it’s just a unvented system. They don’t take it serious and if they have someone design it and it don’t work, there attitude is I didn’t design it, it’s there thought. It’s such a challenge out there ain’t it. I truly believe the way forward is through heat geek. It’s bloody hard for me but im determined to finish this. Love your apart of it as well. Good to speak to likeminded people

UK power cost almost triple the Polish price. I am assuming 500 zlotys ($123) per megawatt-hour (MWh) for the second half of 2024.

When it gets a lot colder than -1, then the air gets very dry and the heat pump will only need to defrost every 2-3 hours. Between 0 and 3 degrees is the worst ambient condition for a heat pump, because the evaporator can freeze shut every 45 minutes to an hour depending on the operating point and this requires very regular defrosts. Therefore heat pumps can deliver more power and efficiency at -2 degrees then at 2 degrees. UK and the Netherlands have the worst possible climate for air source heat pumps, yet they make it work great anyway. The colder climate in Poland can actualy make it work better in some aspects.

Do you have videos from your installations?

@@andrewstafford-jones4291 The price you've quoted is more of a wholesale electricity price, without distribution costs, additional charges and taxes. As of now, polish households pay about $210 per MWh for the first 1500 kWh they consume this year, anything above that cap is in the area of $330-340 per MWh (and since that cap is quite low, anyone with a heat pump basically runs it on the more expensive electricity only). It is expected that as of July, electricity prices for households will be set at around $280, with no consumption caps.

@@andrewstafford-jones4291 oh please.. I'm paying ~0.25p kWh in Surrey, my mom in Warsaw ~1.15zl kWh (0.23p) Comparing prices to monthly wages, the cost per kWh in the UK is significantly lower.

The builders are Trivselhus and the largest houses on that development are nearly a £1m so that performance is pretty outragious considering the claims they make, perhaps a class action is required.

@@tonydaddario4706 a court action should be a shoe in

@@tonydaddario4706 On the contrary, I suspect these systems were deliberately over engineered to avoid possibility of complaints of poor heating from demanding wealthy customers. Some people can be very unreasonable, and we all suffer from people covering themselves as a result.

People in other countries besides the us are much more in tune with what a heat pump is. It's mainly the us that is ignorant enough not to learn it.

@@FlyinghookHeat pumps are quite common in the USA - mainly the air-to-air variety. But in the UK they seem to be considered new unproven technology. Boggles the mind.

As a retired heating engineer from uk, i am not surprised at all by what you found, it is the usual situation of designers who dont understand the physics,installers who just follow drawings and may realise its not right but dont get listened too or dont care. And finally commissioning of the system, done by agents who probably dont understand how to set it up,or cant because the installation is wrong. THEN NOBODY IS INTERESTED BECAUSE OF THE MONEY NEEDED TO PUT IT RIGHT.

There should be some penalty for the builders.

I didn't get the impression that these builders were doing the bare minimum to be honest. It seems like they just aren't aware of the best practices when installing heat pumps. They could probably increase their profit by installing lower output heat pumps, a single circulating pump, and not bothering with buffers, zones, e.t.c. Most people probably wouldn't even consider these things when buying a house so I doubt they would expect to pay more for them. Something that seems like madness to me is I've noticed a lot of new builds have high levels of insulation and air tightness, but then they just core 4 inch diameter holes in every room and fit hit and miss vents. At least this house has MVHR. Retrofitting MVHR is not worth it in most cases so most people will just have to live with that. If the builders can still hit the desired building energy rating without MVHR then it is easy to see why that is happening.

Also according to the video from UK radiators some sellers are not using the accredited verified heat outputs and quoting much higher outputs for their rads. If you are putting in radiators and heat emitters and they are not outputting enough heat you’re going to get issues. The industry as a whole needs not make sure there is top to bottom regulation and really heavy financially punitive fines if they get it wrong.

It's not just that most house-builders do the bare minimum, it's that they have been lobbying government for decades to keep those standards low. We should have had better building regs 20 years ago - the issue has been well-understood for that long, but the housebuilders keep whispering on govts ear 'if you make us build decent housing it will be 'too expensive' and we won't build so many'. It's not actually more expensive of course, for the householder. You save a lot more on energy costs over the building lifetime than it costs to build a passivehouse _and_ you get much more comfortable, less-allergic, quieter housing. And in places where they legislated for it (e.g Brussels from 2017), it hasn't actually cost any extra. Once it's standard a well-insulated airtight building (with a much smaller, cheaper, simpler, heating system) costs the same to build as a crappy one with a big heating system.

@xxwookey 👏

Maybe it's the Englishman house buyers? Just Google: 'false chimneys' - we have a house building program where fake chimneys get glued onto new houses where there could be solar panels!!! This year a new estate went up in our town where half the houses have pretend chimneys. Fake period features sell houses - not insulation or MVHR.

email me please

It's down to the installers to specify equirement from manufacturers who care about this stuff. Bear in mind that a buffer might have been necessary in your property due to system volume. A buffer isn't automatically wrong, but they are often included when they aren't necessary, or where a small change might eliminate them.

The difference is, poor quality boiler installations for the most part work, they are just inefficient. Poor quality heat pump installs, in the worst instances, do not work at all. And all costing 10x the price of an equivalent gas boiler. It's been a long time coming for all these poorly technically educated installers to get caught out!

Well, they work but they’re just outputting way too high witch causes them to short cycle which doesn’t work for an heat pump, where a gas boiler can vary gas level down to 1 out of 16 levels

Not sure 'The government' is wasting billions here. It's people buying houses (which could have been cheaper) then spending more moeny to heat them than they should be. So it's individuals/families wasting money (and installers who could do a better job much more cheaply if they actually knew what they were doing).

@@xxwookey regulation is needed, so it is the government's fault imo.

@@defragsbin Sure, the last 20 years of failure to set decent buildings standards has been a huge contributor to the current cost of living crisis and has wasted a great deal of people's money (on expensive heating) and government money on the poor health that poor housing generates. I actually blame mass housebuilders as much as the government - it is they they have been campaigning to keep standards low for decades (and the govt is too innumerate to just ignore them and do the right thing for the populace anyway)

@@xxwookey true, but I believe they also are happy to take their political donations too :(

It’s a pretty safe bet to avoid all large outfits

​@@UrbanPlumbersAhh, interesting. I'm considering getting a heat pump installed because I qualify for ECO4.

Ohhh - those are almost guaranteed to have an atrocious install

@@UrbanPlumbers oh!

you don't get 1kWh of heat for 1kWh of gas. average gas boiler efficiency achieved (rather than the badge efficiency) is about 83%. so you only need a SCOP of about 2.5 to break even on running costs at gas costing 1/3 of electricity

They’re not even trained in installing efficient gas systems, The gas safe qualification is just that and nothing else I’d say 80% of guys are of the “Fit a 40kw combi mate” mentality.

@hufartd yea that’s the reality - most only understand how to install a gas pipe - that’s all there is.

The gas central heating systems in the UK are absolute cack too. A typical gas boiler is big enough to heat more than five houses, and runs much less efficiently because of this- the return flow temperatures end up much too high, and so they don't condense properly.

@BooBaddyBig they never condense in the Uk and they fail on average after 8 years making UK a cash cow for boiler manufacturers and a haven for cowboy combi slingers - couldn’t make it up

This model is an 11kw unit, they're marked on their actual output not input. So it's an 11kw heat pump (which should be about ~3kw input). Still this is hugely oversized, should be

@@velianlodestone1249 11kw ecodans modulate to 4kw, it shouldn't be too bad in theory.

@Etacovda63 if it’s 5c outside and the house is zoned it may only need 500watts, so even at min modulation it’s going to be 8x too big

@@UrbanPlumbers yep, so he shouldnt be doing any zoning (and this assumes he wants the entire house at the same temp, of course) I mean, what, 100L + volumiser to reduce cycling, even with the open zoning... were your calculations at -2c?

This is the case with all "new" technologies that have government funding, the price charged by approved installers becomes the open market price plus the government grant rather than minus the grant. It happened with solar panels and EVs in the UK, and now it's the same with heat pumps.

@@garysmith5025 We are now signing a contract with a company that seems competent but is located 300 km away from us. Let's see how they fulfill their service contract...

BTW, my problem isn't with ASHPs ; it's with the UK bureaucratic and regulatory framework. I have a house designed to take a ~ 3kW ASHP for slab heating only; a buffer tank would be entirely redundant. The water flow/return + supply were installed when the house was built, but this approach falls outside permitted development scope as MCS registered installers will only consider a complete replacement which is again totally unnecessary, I am ineligible for a BUS grant and also need full planning permission to install a very simple ASHP solution. Absolute nonsense.

Storage heaters? Ugh.

@@rogerphelps9939 Not sure why the channel owner deleted my response to this; poss because I linked to another RU-vidr that did a timelapse of a build like mine to explain the slab construction.. No storage heaters. The entire 17t slab and the internal fabric of the build is inside the thermal envelope and acts as a heat battery. Last Jan, I had a bug on my control S/W after a change on the UFH heating and it was out for a couple of days, because by then we noticed that the house had lost about 1½°C -- enough to notice.

and then you will not have any choice to get those - even worse: the smaller houses will have an even lower demand which the modulation can barely cover except turning the compressor on and off and cycle

Isn't heat loss dependent on outside temperature?

Where do you get 20-22? All the documentation I can find says ≤ 10W/m2 passipedia.org/basics/building_physics_-_basics/heating_load www.passivhaustrust.org.uk/UserFiles/File/PH%20Intro%20Guide%20update%202013.pdf

@@VanyaYani Yep, they needed to give us a design temperatures. Odd no one has mentioned this. 😕

yes - Michael is very good. Buying a heat pump requires customers do the homework.

Don't fit North of Manchester..the ambient temperature is way too low plus winters are long and very cold...have loads of experience with this..​@@UrbanPlumbers

Interesting info, thanks! Would make sense that the 11.2kW and 14 are the same internally just the 14kW has a larger evaporator coil and 2 fans.

Mitsubishi has a big problem with truth when we talk data. The units do not deliver what is on the data book. My 8.5kw does no modulate below 4.5kw when it should go to 3. The energy and cop data displayed on the unit are also completely made up.

@@aymerichousez1005 Not defending Mitsubishi but I think if you were to take away all the supporting hardware and do the testing in a controlled environment, I'm sure you'll get good results that match the book. My 11.2kW is returning about SCOP 4.1 and I think it's just down to running 1 circulator, no hydraulic separation, no 3rd party controls, no TRVs, good emitters, good system balance, no glycol and fairly low flow rates as it's oversized and never needs the full output. Internally these units are 90% the same as the best performing ones from Vaillant, Viessman etc, it's all the pre-plumbed and 3rd party nonsense that drags it all down. And Glycol!

@@Loopyengineeringco I would say that unless you use a 3rd party monitor, you don't know what your cop is. I was at first impressed with the COp shown on my ecodan but when I started to monitor temperature and electrical power independently, I realized that these values can't be trusted. The temperatures are rounded and the power is corrected somehow to makes things looks good. Whatever they claim from test conditions, the competition performs better. I don't believe that these units are all the same. A Vaillant 7kw weight 190kg, a Mitsubishi 8.5kW is barely 100kg...

@@aymerichousez1005 Yeah definitely don't trust the estimates, I'm using a ultrasonic flow meter (ofgem supplied calibrated unit as part of the MMSP package) and 3rd party CT on the consumer unit to do the calculations. I think you're comparing different chassis sizes - the twin fan ones are naturally heavier. But like for like, you're right in that there's still a bit of difference. Vaillant use piston compressors vs scroll compressors on the Mitsubishi, maybe they have more ballast for damping, or thicker casings? Not sure! The Mitsubishi is definitely a lower quality product though for sure, although I do like the controls, AA mode is really good, external API and hackability etc

Pretty disappointing when you buy a high end home for a premium over standard new build to have such a poor set up. Manufacturers are at fault here too - some pre plumbed “fits all” system are awful and also more expensive - more education needed for manus and installers but also for developers, so they can chose batter subbies

@@UrbanPlumbers totally agree 👍

If the developers had to pay the customer the excess that the poor install was costing the customer, they would soon change.

what issues with ecodan are you talking about?

What's the issue with Mitsubishi? I have an old R410A one, so I'm interested in what data you think is false.

@@jeffhenderson9595 that's called consumer protection and fair competition. I though that what I was paying tax for!

I do confirm what Adam says, for my country. Here in Belgium the old chaps', in the trade for 40 years, are totally unable to design a system. They just eyeball it and reproduce what they have learned 40 years ago. Your old (atmospheric high-temperature) gas boiler was 25 kW ? "I'll put you a 30 kW so you're sure you won't be cold in the winter." And the said new boiler is a condensation gas boiler, triggered by a stupid on/off thermostat, barely modulating its power, almost never condensating because the flow temp is set on 75°C, and the thing breaks down after 4 years because it cycles 3500 times a year... The owner did invest into insulation and eventually the house had a heat loss of 4 kW. And that happens ALL THE TIME with the old' chaps, the "very experienced" ones. The young boys who learned to *effectively*¨apply the EN 12831 standard and *really* use the method, they do a great job. I've been training to design heating systems and in the room there were two old' chaps which were there because, they said, they didn't understand anymore why the new boilers fail and the suppliers told them repeatedly to get a training to learn to design. The others trainees were design engineers from design companies which were asked by their bosses to review their design methodologies to get less failing installations and less unhappy customers, and make the company ready for the heat pump revolution.

It's almost impossible not to oversize the unit because you can't actually buy 2 and 3kW heat pumps yet. (fx:checks) Actually I see Vaillant have a 3.5kW ASHP now (and the old 3kW Geotherm).

@@xxwookey Panasonic has 3 kW without capacity loss down to -7 C

@@HVACEducationHub OK. Good to know. And of course the Air-Air models go lower power too.

Yes Libtek are good!

it should be lifted up as oterwsie it can be flooded easily or if it snows it can restirct the airflow. There is no effiency gain by lifting it up I am afraid.

In the UK, you'd expect it to have to run in three coldest months for heating, but for the rest of the time, it would only be needed for heating domestic hot water. (The heat loss from the humans, electrical devices and DHW storage and pipe work would keep the house warm the rest of the time)

😂 true

There is no requirement for mcs certification in this scenario. No grant money to claim back .

@@persona250 Agreed, but the boys tell us this was a large installer, so would expect them to have MCS so they can pick up other work. That aside architects are seen as competent professionals by PAS2035, so why would they specify a badly designed system, or contract out same? We seem to be supporting HG's comment that a challenging mind is better than an experienced mind :-)

Video on improving those houses coming later this year

@@UrbanPlumbers One solution would be for the residents to share heat pumps! Keep the 11kW ASHP and run three homes from it.

@tlangdon12 or 5 🤣

A bit of DIY is a reasonably-priced solution. What's really annoying is that all the grant schemes explicitly exclude homeowners so after you've worked out how to do things properly by taking an interest in channels like this and other fora, and worked out that you can a better job for half the money, you are excluded from incentives. They are trying to keep the cowboys out with these schemes, but as we observe it doesn't really work very well. There is also a strong tendency in government to _actually_ only care about the job-creation part, not the _outcome_ of better, lower carbon housing, which could be provided dramatically more cheaply if we let people help themselves. I DIYed my MVHR for example. It cost about £1300 total for a 3-bed detached (and 9-days in the landing cupboard and loft over Xmas cutting tiresome spiral pipe :-), oh and quite some time making a nice 1st-principles design spreadsheet). Plenty of people could fit their own MVHR and would make a neat job of it. It's not rocket science, and even the design is easy if you use a manifold system. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-OVcvk9Wnyw4.html

Next time maybe

Both those companies sub-contract, so you can't generalise. But they are installing for very low costs, so are driving down standards.

How have they solved the outdoor heat pump drainage and ice sheet in the winter being sat on the floor?

Unfortunately, in our litigious blame culture, naming the developer & installer is more likely to generate legal action instead of a cry for help and support.

After watching Technology Connections about heat pumps, I thought around 4 kW.

It's very bad for the customer as they are paying 5% interest on the cost of the bad install for the next 30 years! Plus all the extra fuel!

Same guys used to say that about oversized boilers - ohh they just modulate down

@@UrbanPlumbers My 12kw boiler can only modulate down to about 8kw. I only need 5-6kw so it cycles a lot. I've had to replace the ignitor several times since moving in, as it bends out of shape from heating and cooling constantly. Very annoying.

@@UrbanPlumbers Adam said in the film they don't even make heatpumps small enough for that installation (3kw). Wouldn't you have to rely on oversizing and some modulation?

Yeah, I'm getting the same in Ireland. "Oh it modulates"

@@tonydaddario4706 There is a minimum output that the units can run constantly at, any lower demand and it’ll start cycling (i.e. running too high for part of the time, switching off for a while, and repeat). A 5kW unit should be able to run at 3kW, but an 11kW unit like in the video probably just won’t be able to…

Are you serious? You get lower modulation with the auto adaptive than with the WC? Every time I tried the AA, it was running the temperature so high that I thought there was no point. The general feeling I had when talking to people on FB groups was that the scop on AA was very poor.

@@aymerichousez1005 Yeah, the trick is in getting it to 'learn' correctly which can be difficult to do. AA is basically extra smart WC, so using the wireless sensor for feedback it will build it's own flow vs outdoor temp curve (internally, not accessible to the user). But to get it to build this curve you need the wireless sensor/stat in a good place and as open loop as possible, rads, underfloor, everything on max flow and this isn't documented very well, so most people give up when they see the system going full out. It will massively overshoot to start with, then on subsequent runs it will use less and less compressor to achieve the same internal temp but with longer runs at lower flow temps. Once it settles after a few days, I found it generally allows the compressor to run slightly slower than on WC, and for longer periods. WC also seems to have a massive overshoot to begin with, which AA mode doesn't exhibit. I did question Mitsubishi about this but they're not interested. I think a lot of development went into the AA side of the firmware and less for WC. AA is a closed loop control system with feedback, WC is simple open loop

@@Loopyengineeringco Interesting that Mitsubushi were not interested. I think this happens when the local support office feels that they cannot influence the engineers who actually write the software. It's actually a very common attitude in the UK.

That's insane. Not even the basic plumbing bits are correct, nevermind the heatpump side of things.

Yes, that is likely. In a house at PH level hot water load can be quite similar to space heating load. It might even be higher. And COP is typically lower on DHW than space heating, so you are correct. But it's a slightly lower SCOP on a much lower total heat/energy load, so it's still all good.

If it was me, I would size the unit to exactly to meet 80-95% of optional heating requirements and then an auxiliary electric small boiler for the rear moment the heat pump falls short

his point was that If they really thought it was a 11kW heat loss 22mm pipework had no place there at all, as pressure loss would have been 1600pa per meter, and velocity over 1.5m/s - but because the heat loss is much less they got it right by accident

@@UrbanPlumbers Apologies! - It wouldn't suprise me that with that sort of (very low) heat losses, does one actually need a heat pump? - as the exchange heat between the water tank & CH circuit would suffice - I'm thinking here of cheap overnight direct immersion heating here (Mixergy?) : I'm thinking here of a small heating element @ (say) 200W running 24/7 into the HW tank - or these 150w Hybrid Radiator Heating Elements?

that is the idea. We are tyring to get manufacturers on board to help with the cost of putting this right.

@@UrbanPlumbers What is the smallest a2w heat pump you can buy??

Around 4kW, but there are exhaust air units that can be below 3kW

I can't see how you'd do a follow up video this year - there's no way the heating should be needed before November at the earliest. Even in winter the occupants, TV, fridge, lighting, phone chargers etc should be enough to keep the house warm.

@@UrbanPlumbersCould one of these exhaust air units be configured for houses with low heat demand ?

Not a bad idea at all.

The systems apparently have enough zones to do it too! The major sticking point would be billing.

Tbh they probably could just have put a tiny reversible air conditioner into the ventilation system and just not do all the plumbing.

At least close enough to not cause any cycling. 🤣

Yes should I’ve been a completely different set up for those houses. Very good guess on the HL

@@UrbanPlumbers But the 3kW heat loss is calculated at what outside temp (-2°C?) which it hasn't been in England for some time, so clearly this house hardly needs any heating at all at the moment. It will be getting enough from the appliances and people inside. Which means the heat pump is probably only doing DHW and for a High Temp ASHP a COP of 2.2 is about right for hot water. If you put a heat pump of any available size into a house that barely needs heating but still requires hot water, you're going to get a poor COP.

@johnhunter4181 scops for heating is 2 and for hot water 2.8 I think - all figures are in the video for all house types. They all have heating scop of around or below 2 and DHW scops of around 2.5

I hear Heat Transformers are popular over there?

@@patrickwheeler2646thank you. I looked them up and looks like they are also a big box company. They give an advice based on data given from the customer. There is no heat loss calculation......

@@patrickwheeler2646 They are somewhat, but education of design or more likely retrofitting is not very good. There's also people who do it themselves with a air to water system and just dump heat in the normal radiator system. Some people will replace wall radiators with fancoils (they have active low noise fans that move the air across the coils)

Noticed that too .

care to explain?

@@normanboyes4983 Adam notes a COP of 4, the current system has a COP of 2, hence from £1 to £2 a day, at 4kw heat loss.

@@EverydayLife621 It makes you wonder if the proposed remedial works will pay back (eg will they swap the unit to avoid cycling?)

@@normanboyes4983 These are super well insulated houses built to higher standards than even the current building regs. They really don't need much heating. The whole idea of a 'passive' house is that the heating demand can be supplied from the waste heat from cooking, lights, hot water and just living in the house. I imagine that they only need to turn on their heating in the middle of winter.

The cover isnt gonna make it any worse 🤣🤣🤣. They could cascade 4 x 11 kW units and run the whole estate on that

@@UrbanPlumbers That’s for sure.🤣

It might save them £250 a year, but over the life of the building, which is going to be at least 100 years, and given the inflation that mightbe expected in energy prices that saving will probably be about £30,000!

in theory yes - in practice the original installer and specifer lack the skill set to do it right

You are right that DHW can be about the same load as heating once your house is efficient, but unless the heat load is such that the heating is running al 24-hours there should be enough time in the day to heat some hot water as well without actually increasing pump power. I don't think anyone tries to do both at once do they (except maybe Atmos gas boilers)? How does a bigger cyclinder let you store lower-temp water? The minimum temp for a useful shower/bath doesn't change by cylinder size. It's ~40C/45C respectively. And 10-60l (people vary wildly here). Do you mean that if you are in danger of using all your hot water in one day then you could raise the temp so less hot water volume gets used by each shower/bath (and more supplied by cold)? That's the same as saying 'your tank needs to be big enough for daily usage'.

Mitsubishi make them like that be they expect them to go into homes with higher heat losses. Mitsubishi seem to be dreadfully behind the curve.

You could just suppliment the heat pump with electric heating. The heat pump will be correctly sized for 355 days of the year - for the two weeks of really cold weather, you can just apply some local heat. Fixing the insulation would be the best action, as the losses will continue for the next 100 years or so.

It’s also rare that the heat pump is perfectly sized for the stated heat loss, e.g my heat loss is about 4kW but there are few ASHPs that are rated at 4, most are 5kW. So even if something wasn’t quite right, there’s another 1kW to play with too.

Better to bung up the holes - that's a permanent fix with no ongoing cost or emissions.