24 THE CLIMATE CHALLENGE Pump down the volume
THE GOVERNMENT’S EXPRESSED AIM IS TO INSTALL 600,000 HEAT PUMPS A YEAR BY 2028
With heat pumps becoming adopted as the realistic low carbon solution by more housebuilders as the Future Homes Standard looms, lower noise and sleeker aesthetics are coming to the fore as the goals to aim for. James Parker reports
T
he Future Homes Standard (FHS) 2025 may have been somewhat confusingly subsumed into the Government’s conjoined Future Homes and Buildings Standard, but one thing is absolutely clear, it’s full steam ahead for heat pumps to meet the provisions of the FHS.
The Department of Levelling Up, Housing & Communities has stopped short of explicitly pushing the whole housebuilding sector to adopt heat pumps, given the unlikeliness of being able to identify appropriately green sources of hydrogen by 2025 to put in adapted gas boilers or new hybrid options. However, the centre has certainly made very warm noises about heat
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pumps, given their ability to cheaply, greenly, and relatively easily produce space heating for homes using electricity alone; Government’s expressed aim is to install 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028.
The Heat Pump Ready scheme is the embodiment of this, a £60m package of funding for manufacturers and the industry to boost innovation in developing heat pumps for UK properties. However by September, only 24 ‘innovation projects’ had received funding (of £15m in total), for projects such as making heat pumps cheaper and easier to install. Alongside this, the £5K Boiler Upgrade Scheme grant for homeowners towards their heat pump installation is providing strong leverage for retrofits, but the picture for new build is somewhat murky when it comes to incentives for housebuilders; it seems to be more ‘stick’ than ‘carrot.’
The Government fudged a complete ban of gas boilers in its Heat and Buildings Strategy, which was expected to ban the traditional standard home heating solution from 2035. Instead it just expressed an ambition to phase out all fossil fuel heating by that point, which
has led to head-scratching in the market. Housebuilders legally obliged to create homes which emit 31% fewer carbon emissions by 2025 are however turning to air source heat pumps as an obvious cost- effective solution for most homes, aware of the constraints they can still pose. Heat pumps in themselves may not be the eco heating panacea – they tend to produce a lower C Coefficient of Performance) at colder external temperatures, and having a large fan, they do emit a hum. Also although their size is being brought down all the time for domestic properties, it’s hard to see where many urban terraced homes will be able to place them, apart from somewhere on the roof, if they don’t want to compromise their limited back garden spaces. But they do appear to be the most realistic solution on offer currently, given the challenges of hydrogen.
MAKING LESS NOISE IN THE MARKET Samsung recently launched a high temperature, low noise heat pump to try and make a major move to counter industry assumptions that the technology wouldn’t be able to supply the normal C-and-over water which radiators
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