In the nordics we love heat-pumps! Something like 70% of houses are heated by heat-pumps, and 90% of apartment buildings are heated by district heating and that is often generated by huge heatpumps.
Heatpumps have been heating nordic homes for decades. Even in the countryside where many houses have small woodland attached, people I know have moved to heatpumps for convenience and because its affordable.
PS: shoutout to to the JRC, found their reports when doing a super quick dig for stats. Those reports were super easy to read :D
> Something like 70% of houses are heated by heat-pumps
To me, living in US Northeast, this is astounding. I've read heat pumps lose efficacy below 25F. My family would never forgive me if I made our house cold. But then I see 70% of the Nordics's house are "warm enough", or dealing colder than room temperature houses.
I've asked half-dozen contractors and HVAC people in my area, and none of them have recommended a heat pump. But, I'm just as suspicious of their motives as I am of the science and environmental populizers on YouTube.
That's old heat pumps. Mitsubishi introduced their "Hyper-Heating Inverter" heat pumps designed to work well in cold weather in 2007, with Fujitsu and Daikin adopting similar technology by 2012, and others following within a few years.
These remain 200% efficient down to -4℉ and 150% efficient down to -22℉. Their capacity starts dropping at 23℉ going down to 76% capacity at -13℉.
There's only a few towns in the continental US that cold enough for long enough that it can't be heated well by one of these. You just need an installer that will size it properly for the climate in your area.
Don’t let the 15 degree+ differences in latitudes fool you, a lot of the Nordic population lives near the sea, so low altitude and plenty of sea current temperature moderation.
January temps in Oslo aren’t much different than Boston. Absolute record low temps are similar too.
Coldest temp ever in Oslo is -30C in the 1800s.
Coldest in Boston was -28C in 1934.
Still doesn’t explain the poor adoption in USA but helps explain why they still work so far up north. The nordics can be relatively balmy to Wisconsin or upstate New York.
A lot of the Nordic heat pumps are ground source, that is to say you drill a hole a couple of hundred feet down into the bedrock where it's always a bit above freezing and you circulate your heat exchange fluid down there and back up again. Air-source heat pumps are mostly a thing in the southern parts where the climate is relatively mild.
Air-source heat pumps are also somewhat common in retrofits where the remaining expected lifetime of the building isn't big enough to be worth spending some 20-30k€ (?) that installing a ground source heat pump costs. A significant part of the cost being drilling the hole.
Similarly for small houses the cost of the hole drilling might not be worth the reduction in electricity consumption.
In theory peltier elements are more efficient heaters than resistive heating but if the temp delta are big enough, you lose more heat through conduction than you pump in.
A poorly optimized fireplace may vacuum more warm air out than it radiates in.
"Heat pumps are more efficient than gas boilers and become competitive when the electricity price is lower than around three times the gas or oil price"
Sweden seems to have quite high domestic gas rates (highest in EU I think?), around £0.18/kWh, with electricity at £0.23/kWh so I can definitely understand the adoption of heat pumps with gas being so high.
In the UK we have lower heat pump adoption, which could largely be explained by gas being ~£0.06/kWh (and electricity is ~£0.27/kWh). There is also the barrier that many houses are draughty and would require significant expensive upgrades
Heating with gas is absolutely not a thing in Sweden, I don't think even a single percentage point of homes use that. Firewood is way more common (it's relatively commonplace in the countryside still). Gas is used for stoves in some older buildings in a few specific cities but is almost extinct in that application too. Heating with gas hasn't really been a thing historically either - at first it was mostly wood, then coal and wood, and then district heating and fuel oil completely took over from the 1950's. For a while in the 1970's resistive electric heaters were popular because electricity was cheap with the then-new nuclear plants, while the oil crisis made oil expensive. That didn't last very long.
Electricity prices are certainly a factor, and retro-fitting can be very expensive to nigh on impossible.
The real scandal in the UK is how the updates to building regulations to bring in higher energy efficiency have been delayed and delayed - presumably due to lobbying by UK house-builders.
Given the big push to build large numbers of new houses it seems madness not to have the higher standards in place.
Planning rules conflict with building regs in the UK. Planning means that most new houses are little boxes made of little more than ticky-tacky. So adding insulation to the walls makes them even smaller inside.
Unclear what this means - both of these sets of rules apply, so the planning system couldn't force people to not comply with building regs? The new approach appears to be prefab foil coated insulation board in the walls, under brick or breezeblock skin, given what I can see being built nearby.
This is exactly the thing. In UK electricity price is set by the cost of generating it from natural gas. After losses, etc, you get about 1/3 of power in electricity compared to heat in the gas. And the heat pump has an efficiency factor of about 3. So you get back to unity.
While electricity is priced off gas, current heat pumps do not have a strong economic case.
I live in a post-Soviet city with district heating, and I'm not really sure it's worth it. Our network is government run, and they don't do a bad job, but it is more expensive per kWh (8c) than if you were to heat with gas or an electric heat pump (both 6c).
The heat source of the network is gas or various oil fuels, so it makes sense that it's cheaper to do it yourself - gas infrastructure is very optimised, and there are very little network losses in comparison. I think it only makes sense if the network has a cheap energy source, for example by using waste energy from industrial processes or utility-scale geothermal.
In USSR it was common to use waste heat from a thermal (gas/coal) power stations for district heating. Heat itself in such system is basically free - instead of sending hot water to cooling towers it first used to heat homes. But a pipeline network is not cheap in maintain (pipelines were usually not well maintained and leaks were common but with modern materials corrosion should be less of a problem).
As a German, I find the popularity of heat pumps in the nordics especially amusing. In Germany heat pumps were an incredibly political topic and people were pushed by some media outlets to really hate heat pumps. One recurring topic was that heat pumps can‘t work at German temperatures.
Nothing amusing. Germany is not really rich compared to nordics. And now let‘s do so math! Electricity: 0,3€/kWh and gas 0,1€/kWh. I need ~3x more gas to get same temperature in my room. And gas heating costs €10k while heat pump €40k without subsidies and probably raw €15k material cost if I install it by myself. So why should I pay more by €30k to install experimental thing for a decade when my low cost gas heating will last for 3 decades again. The monthly bill is the same.
I installed mini splits (small heat pumps) in each of our rooms. Everyone gets their own temperature and they were only 800$ a piece. Did installation myself and it was pretty easy. Hardest thing was pulling a vacuum in the lines before releasing the freon (or whatever it's called) but all I did was watch a youtube video. They've been going strong for several years. I looked at the prices and they are still the same.
BTW, in Germany you're not allowed to install it yourself. At least that's what I read some time ago. I guess nobody checks, of course, but in case things go bad and you need insurance, probably they can invalidate it due to the fact you did something illegal.
i installed mine myself and probably illegaly. But its super easy and those people who install it do a shit job sometimes. I watched professionell people flushing those pipes with compressed air....
And the fine is nonexistent so everyone should do it themself.
What is the calculus behind 40k? I just checked some Swedish vendors and here they calculate 12k for hardware and installation of a fairly large heat pump.
Yeah small air-air pumps - which are the most common for single houses - are easily under 2000EUR including installation; if you keep eyes out for special offers it'd be about 1500EUR in Swedish prices.
No. Everything in Germany has been three-phase since forever.
But especially with old houses, with any "not insignificant change" to your electrical setup, you have to bring everything up to modern standards.
Also, and connected with that, metering is weird in Germany. If your consumption rises above a certain amount (I think 10MWh for a single-family home) you are required to get a "smart meter", meaning a digital meter which includes the possibility (just the possibility, not actually the real thing) of online reporting and minute-by-minute pricing. In the rest of the world, that would just be swapping the meter or slapping some Wifi-to-IR-interface on it, but not so in Germany. You need to install a new metering cabinet that provides space for at least one digital meter (but better provide more than one...), one remote control receiver (for old-style night/day tariff switches, obsoleted by smart meters but still required nonetheless) and a smart meter gateway. That new metering cabinet needs to conform to standards set by your local electricity supplier (which can be as small as a city), so there is no nation-wide standards, more like 50 of them. And the metering cabinet is huge, not someting like the 30x40cm thing you see on sidewalks in spain or something, no. More like 200x140cm in the smallest(!) version. So those are really expensive just because the market is tiny and the requirements are completely crazy: Even though most smart meter gateways are wireless nowadays (UMTS or GSM) and usually such a gateway won't be installed anyways (because just the possibility of installing one is required), you also need to provide for cabled internet uplink to the metering cabinet. That uplink is a Cat6 cable to the gateway, but it crosses through the electrical uplink part of the cabinet. So the insulation of that cable has to be certified for at least 10kV insulation voltage, at least 80A current on the shielding and more stuff like that. So e.g. just that one stupid half-meter Cat6 cable will set you back 50Eur. Installation isn't any less crazy. You definitely cannot do anything yourself. Even your licensed electrician can only do the menial preparations. When your licensed electrician is done with the prep, you request an appointment with the local supplier's meter installer, who, after a typical wait time of 2 months, will install and seal the meter in the presence of your licensed electrician (who is there to receive complaints about incorrect prep, followed by another 2 months wait time for another appointment...).
That's why it's 4kEur...
And if you want your power to be a few cents cheaper (28ct/kWh instead of the usual 35ct/kWh), you need an extra meter for your heat pump. Have solar? Another extra meter. Want to charge your electrical car? You guessed right. And you cannot bring your own. Each of those "smart" meters has to be rented from your local supplier at around 20 to 120Eur/year.
Ok.
For once, I’m glad to be Italian :-D Here the national grid operator has installed smart meters. They support remote management of limits (maximum power in watts, tariffs, time-of-use tariffs), remote meter reading by the operator or local access plus an app, remote diagnostics, and simplified installation (strict rules and operator intervention, but in the end nothing particularly complex).
OK, but what about the rest of the price difference? Once the electrical is taken care of it should just be a matter of replacing the furnace and pulling some tubes and wires to the outer unit? You said 40k, but the heat pump itself isn’t even 10k.
The biggest factor is almost certainly the subsidy for switching to a heatpump.
But there are other factors as well. Air to Air heatpumps are uncommon in Germany, we usually install Air to Water ones, which are more complex. Unlike other countries, our heat pumps are usually mounted on a concrete slab and not on the wall. Then there are some norms for quality of the water, etc. they aim to increase the lifespan of the system, but increase upfront costs
AFAIK we do all of that in Sweden. The 12k I mentioned above is if a large air to water pump suitable for the northernmost of Sweden. It includes a water heater and direct electric heating element for when temperature go below -15.
And why do subsidies INCREASE the price in Germany compared to Sweden?
In the US, the subsidy is paid only when the heat pump is installed by a certified contractor. Unshockingly, the certified contractors are able to capture the vast majority of the subsidy as additional profit.
Here the upgrades for meters are paid for by the grid operators. No changes to the cabinets are required, old analog meters were replaced by them for smart meters, at no extra cost to the consumer, and now they will replace them with new meters capable of metering by 15 minute interval.
This cost in germany is really only created by overregulation and insane bureaucrats creating work for them.
I first heard that in Germany there is much resistance to smart meters and I thought they were just silly people, but if it costs so much..
no people are stupid. Smart meters are paid by the grid operator like everywhere else. Friends of mine got one and it was 25€ a year for it.
Yes germans are very stupid. we fight everything new because we think this country worked rly well in the 80s and thats where we want to be 1980
Digital and Smart thats for othet countries.
I got air air heatpumps for 3 rooms 1000€ a room and it slashed my heating cost to 1/3. And I have to explain that its not foor cooling but for heating and then the response is " heatpumps are like 20k plus you liar" or " heatpumps dont work in the cold" ... germans
Still many people dont switch because the read somewhere about magic costs that dont exist. Russian Gas propaganda is big here
smart meters are paid by the grid operator and you have to pay maximum 50€ a year for a smartmeter. I honestly dont know where you get your numbers. a friend with a big house and 3 children switched to air water heatpump with floor heating etc and it was 18k€ and half of that paif by the state and the smart meter was mostly free( he pais 25€ a year for it).
and this is a hugeeee house. No solar but he is working on it.
could you link some proof of this smartmeters I have to pay? Or some calculations from firms it whatever that proof your point.
40k for heat pumps is wildly overkill here if that’s what you where quoted someone is trying to scam you. More critically, those prices aren’t set in stone over the next 30 years.
Home PV for example is way less than 0,3€/kWh and rather dramatically changes these comparisons.
that doesnt even make sense. if gas is 3x of electricity it should be the same cost but for every watt of electricity you get 3 watt of heating. so by your math if I pay 1w gas but need 3w for 1w of electricity and heatpumps give 3w on every watt of electricity heatpumps are 300% more effective then gas. sooo your point is also heatpumps ftw ;)
Well Norway (Hydro), Sweden (hydro and nuclear) and Finland (Nuclear Wind Hydro) all have cheap electricity which seems to be the main driver for adoption.
Well in the south you might need to factor the gas cost in (vs Germany) and also the network effects of heat pump being the main form of heating in sweden.
The south of Sweden is expensive because Sweden did away with the previous single energy market and split into zones with sales abroad. Often Swedish producers sell to Germany at the same time Swedish consumers are forced to buy from German producers. It was a big thing about 'free market' and iirc Denmark was upset that Danish manufacturing could not compete with the price of energy across the straights in Sweden. The solution was to make energy more expensive in Sweden.
I know I paid about 1000EUR for an air-air heat-pump with install in Sweden, but that was a decade ago and they cost 1500-2000EUR total these days. I also have a fancy big ground-source heat-pump bigger than most residential ones and that cost under 10000EUR total. So not sure what makes them so expensive in other countries; you'd hope competition kept prices competitive.
In Germany you have very strict laws for construction of water heating. For example the need to install thermostat on any heater even for floor heating. But this implies a lot of complexity for the heat pump installation. Cheap DIY community basically removes all the thermostats and soley controls heating through water temp and flow control to the radiators.
Sweden used to have very cheap electricity. That's why there are so many houses with electric radiators. Far more expensive now.
That is why so many houses here now have air-to-air heat pumps. That is by far the cheapest way to improve heating in an old house with only electric radiators and no existing water heat pipes.
Imagine if things were the other way around. That we already had heat pumps and someone suggests we should pipe this toxic and explosive gas into our homes and burn it. That would be an insane idea.
A lot of buildings in Austrian cities are still heated by burning oil or wood and the whole city smells like a bonfire.
Probably gonna have my lifespan shortened by at least a decade from all that fossil fuel pollution, but at least we banned that dirty nuclear from killing us.
Yes heat pumps are expensive and you need different radiators and more insulation than with traditional gas central heating. That's why it's an issue in Holland too. Not many people have the investment for all that. It's mainly worth it when you have solar panels but that requires another big investment.
I'm lucky to live in Spain where it's not that cold so I just have one little plug in radiator I use a few months a year lol.
Gas is relatively cheap, and a replacement boiler is £1,500 to £3,000 and will last ~10 years and there'll be no doubt about whether it can sufficiently heat the home or produce enough hot water etc .
Yes, it's just a lot of money for a lot of people.
Norway is really a different kind of rich compared to the rest of europe, they have tons of oil rights all over the world (and as such they still contribute a lot to global warming even though they have a lot of money for 'green' tech at home).
PS yeah Spain is good for heating but not for AC though (which I don't have, sadly). But I do enjoy life here a lot more even though I would make much more money in Holland.
I was recently in a situation where I had to replace my oil-fired heating system’s oil tank (it wasn’t double skinned and no longer safe).
It was £2500 to replace the oil tank, or I could opt for £2250 to install a heat pump with the government grant. This included all plumbing, electrical work, installation, and 6 new radiators all over my house.
Honestly to me it seemed like a no-brainer. It’s a tad more expensive to run, but it works really quite well and is a lot less invasive than a big smelly tank of kerosene. I gained another 90cm of width in my garden, it’s actually quieter than the oil boiler, and it doesn’t stink in the summer- win win.
Did you add extra insulation to your house (or was it already more modern?).
Otherwise the heatpump just can't catch up.
And currently I have the opposite problem. The house is too well insulated for the heater (or the heater is too powerful). The heater only runs for a couple of minutes and huts off.
Hah, no my house was built in the 1750s or something like that - single glazing on the front and with fairly minimal insulation, plus it has no cavity wall (a mixture of wattle and daub and brick). It is a mid-terrace though so I benefit from neighbours being either side.
There have been a few cold snaps here where the weather has been down to -2 some days, but it’s been fine. I had a couple of minor installation issues (eg 3 way valve set incorrectly) but once those were fixed my house hasn’t dropped below 19C.
A boiler should actually be lasting more like 20 years. I recently replaced my 20 year old one purely because if anything went wrong, it’d become an expensive/long job to fix as parts were hard to find, otherwise it was still running perfectly at its manufacture specified efficiency. Running them for 20 years isn’t uncommon.
I had a quote for a heat pump - £20k, plus the cost to replace 13 radiators, plus cost to replace pipework to support heat pump rads.
Pretty sure the government ‘incentive’ was £3k at the time. Doesn’t come remotely close!
I managed £15k minus £7k of Scottish government incentives, and I managed to avoid replacing all my radiators by .. getting a "hybrid" system which also includes a boiler for HW :/
Far from ideal solution, but it is mostly green, somewhat offset by the solar panels, and actually more comfortable than the old system because of the more even heating. Set to 20C and forget about it for the season. I'm hoping that it will last until the actual gas phaseout when a solution compatible with 8mm piping will exist.
This is why they need to be mandated on new houses, because it's so much better than trying to retrofit it.
Modern condensing combis I think are designed to be more complex and not last as long. I'm not sure all the complexity and fancy modulation etc is really worth it myself. I'd rather have a boiler that lasts 20 years and that any half-competent gas engineer can fix with a spanner and some spare parts.
Ye olde non-condensing boiler is usually about 70% efficient (that is, 70% of the heat from burning the gas goes into your house vs out the exhaust), sometimes worse (60% wouldn't be that out there for old ones). A condensing boiler, _if set up correctly_, will do 90% (95% for the newest models, allegedly). Now, the catch is that it'll only hit 90% if the return water is within a fairly narrow temperature range, so some system balancing is required, and in practice a lot of them end up more like 80%. But given how expensive gas is these days (at least in Europe) that 10-20% saving will handily pay for the cost of the boiler.
Not many people left with single glazing unless they've been trapped by historic building rules. "Outdoor plumbing" is not a thing.
The pump is a drop in replacement unless you have 8mm "microbore" piping, at which point the lower temperature times restricted flow rate becomes a problem in terms of getting enough heat through.
Not sure about the UK. I've seen a lot of outdoor plumbing in Ireland. I lived in a place that had that. They were literally running on the outside. Our maintenance guy said they did that to make maintenance easier, but it also makes wear & tear a lot easier obiously (not to mention frost). And chipboard floors that would crack with heavy furniture. It was terrible quality. These houses were built in the mid 80s.
And a dirty tank of water in the attic to act as a "in-house water tower" because only one tap may be connected directly to the mains. Really archaic.
My parents' house in Bath is not "trapped by historic building rules" but there is no way in hell they are ever going to replace 3-4 stories of single pane glass double hungs ...
and that house still has the sewage stacks on the outside of the house, as do almost all homes in Bath and environs.
Brit here. Your first pragraph describes older housing stock, not anything built in decades. Not that the quality of our quality of our stock couldn't be improved, or that our (very real) energy standards for new builds couldn't be stricter, but things aren't quite as grim everywhere as the picture you paint.
I’ve lived in the UK for 35 years and lived in various properties built in every decade from 70s-10s. Some much older and less loved ones did have single pane windows but have never seen plumbing on the outside. Maybe on much older houses? Certainly not on anything remotely new. A lot of new builds here have solar, heat pumps and insulation has been excellent for at least 20 years.
You do relatively commonly see wastewater piping on the outside of a house in the UK, especially older stock (soil stack from the toilet, waste pipe from sink or bath running into it). This is fine in the UK climate where a normally empty pipe doesn't need insulation. I hear that it won't work in places that get extreme low winter temperatures, but the UK doesn't have winters that cold.
You don't see them on new builds, I think, probably because the pipe going from inside to outside would reduce insulation effectiveness.
Yeah it makes sense for buildings where plumbing was retrofitted.
Otherwise people try to retrofit narrow drain pipes in the walls which are prone to clogging or give you poor flushing performance. Or outside big enough pipes outside interior walls where you get to hear every flush/shower unless you build a box around that. Easier to just run it outside if you can configure your bathrooms that way.
It isn't more interesting with solar panels because they won't generate nearly enough electricity in the winter. You should see both as entirely separate energy saving investments, not dependent on one another. (I'm however very happy with "free" cooling in summer)
You might need other radiators if your current radiators are very small. But you also might not in a recent house, or in a recently renovated house (e.g. the radiator are still sized on single-glazing-glass when having double glazing installed).
You can also choose in-foor heating with the next renovation, a lot of homes already have in-floor heating and it's very comfortable. You can probably also boost existing radiators with small fans on the bottom or choose an electronic back-up module which boost the temperature a bit on the coldest days.
Tldr: it really isn't that hard. The focus on hybrid systems in NL is purely thanks to a lobby from gas-boiler installers and manufacturers. Air/water heatpumps are a drop-in replacement in a lot of cases.
In the netherlands we were used to really cheap gas (groningen gas field). This meant that, instead of adding more insulation, it was cheaper to just install a bigger gas powered heater to heat our homes.
This means that people now really need to improve insulation of their homes big time, before even being able to consider switching to a heat pump.
My house has a 30kW gas heater. When I switched to a heat pump, first I had to replace the entire roof with PIR insulation. It was previously just uninsulated wood. Now I can easily heat my home with a 7kW heat pump (which most of the time doesn't even need to produce 7kW of heat).
I was lucky, my house already had insulated walls and floors, and used floor heating (low temperature heating). Most homes here use high temperature radiators, which become way less efficient when used with low temperatures produced by heat pumps.
So for many people here, it is cost prohibitive to switch to a heat pump, as they first need to improve isolation and replace their radiators for a heat pump to even work.
You can switch to a heatpump before insulating your house; you just need a bigger one. Which isn't really great thanks to our struggeling energy grid but its still cheaper than a gas heater.
Not directly with the heat source, but with the output flow temperature that the heat source can create.
In that regard, an air-to-water heat pump is much lower temperature than a gas or oil boiler can efficiently produce.
That can cause a need for larger radiators to compensate and sometimes for insulation if the radiators can’t be further increased in size. (Or if the heat loss at design temp is too high for available or sensible sized equipment.)
A misunderstanding. A lot of people (at least here in the Netherlands) believe that heat-pumps just actively refuse to heat a home when it's not up to spec, isolation wise. That of course isn't true, you'll just need a bigger heatpump.
Air-to-Air heat pumps can be quite affordable. Or even cheap if you find no name deals. There is install, but even that is not really that significant. This is at least in Nordics.
> There is install, but even that is not really that significant.
The install itself isn't that hard they come pre-charged with refrigerant. I have installed a few of the air-to air myself and had no issues. All you need is a vacuum pump and proper refrigerant manifold or adapters. Vacuum out the lines for at least an hour to draw out all the air and moisture, close valve and let sit for an hour, if the gauge shows no leak, open the heat pump zone valves and you're in business.
A friend did it and had all the refrigerant leak out after a year but he realized the flared end that came from factory was malformed so he cut and re-flared the end, vacuumed out the system, left it overnight, saw no leak, and had an AC tech do the charge. Was solid after that. A from zero charge requires some knowledge of the systems capacity and a scale to weigh the charge so he hired someone to do it.
There is now an even easier way than vacuuming. Instead of pulling the unwanted air and moisture from the lines, you can push it out with another gas, which itself can somehow coexist with the refrigerant. I haven't tried it because I already have the pump and gauges, but if I were installing my first mini split, I'd consider it.
It's so ridiculously easy to vacuum and charge a heat pump it's kind of unnecessary.
I think I spent $200 in parts on Amazon and have done 4 heat pumps now. It's a vacuum pump, a scale, and a digital manifold/guage. Punch the numbers for subcool/superheat into a calculator and use the temp probes on the lines where they connect to the condenser and you can even skip the scale.
Isn't the problem having access to the gas in the end ?
They are tightly regulated, and this is why installers can charge a lot of money, I believe.
How did you manage to locate a source?
For a typical new install, the outdoor unit contains the charge and unless your lineset is unusually long, you just use that, releasing it with the valves after installing and leak-checking the lines.
In the US, you can get your EPA 508 cert online in a couple hours and buy the refrigerant online. (You need the cert to be legal, but it’s not really checked just to buy.) Tightly regulated is not true in practice. You could buy some in 3 minutes online and have it Monday.
Yes, in the US I think it's fine; you have a lot more freedom.
In France, access to the gas technically requires a certification that is not available to regular people. You need to be professional and bow to the bureaucracy.
I know somebody who was required to pay the full installation price for a heat pump he installed himself because there was no professional that was willing to charge and launch the installation for the small fee it should require.
This is the hypocrisy and value-destroying behavior of EU collectivist governments. They tout ecological solutions, but you need to pay far more than is reasonable for those modern solutions. Predictably, people chose things that are worse but cheaper, like wood-burning stoves or pellet stoves.
Those things are made artificially expensive for no good reason, and that's because they get built overseas mostly, and this happened because of regulations in the first place.
Then they wonder why the EU is losing ground economically…
For your friend’s new install, the refrigerant was in the outdoor unit when shipped from the factory. Accessing that gas just takes an ordinary hex key/Allen wrench. Only if they’d made a mistake and let the refrigerant leak out (or had a ridiculously uncommon length of lineset) would they need access to additional refrigerant.
Yeah, I know they come pre-charged now. But I can't remember what his problem was back then. Maybe he didn't know, or he fucked up…
From what I understand, self-install should be fine up to a 12m run, but if you let too much gas leak, you may have issues because of low pressure.
At least now you can buy them for relatively cheap. Mine required a swap of the control board on the inside unit, and it was ridiculously expensive (almost as much as buying a new unit).
I am not sure why it fried, but probably bad solder from old age (it's about 15 years old at this point).
It's an excellent technology, but the surrounding business feels extremely shady.
Probably not for entire apartment buildings since most of them run on oil or gas burning here. I only saw heat pumps on apartment buildings built after 2020 or the single family homes in the affluent areas.
Yeah, here they are used for AC in apartments. Unless for some weird reason they are electric heating... And even then for some reason we do not like them visible so they need to be hidden on balconies and like.
That's another problem in Holland too. The government mandates people moving to heat pumps for new houses (and existing ones in the longer term) because they don't want Russian gas dependencies and they want to close the national gas fields (they cause earthquakes).
But then neighbours start complaining about the look of the outdoor units and causing hassle with court orders etc. Really if they want people to move they should make it easy and cheap, so invalidate cosmetic complaints automatically.
Longer term this shouldn’t be the case though - a fridge is just a heat pump, and an air-to-air or air-to-water heat pumps aren’t that much more complicated, nor should they be any less reliable.
It’s something that will become more of a commodity and eventually won’t be any more sign of wealth than owning a fridge.
I mean, we can see it already in air-to-air systems - I’ve had mini-splits supplied and installed here in Australia for something like 20% of the cost I’ve heard quoted for equally sized units in the US, for example - just because basically every electrician has a license to install them here because they are so incredibly common (for cooling even more than heating, but they can basically all so both here). Air-to-water I expect will be the same in cold climates - in 15 years basically any plumber will be able to do it and they’ll be far cheaper than today.
these are slightly odd, however: they either need an external air intake set up, or they require that the water (tank/heater) be located in a space that you don't mind being cooled down (often quite significantly) AND that isn't thermally connected to the space you're heating via other means.
still great technology, but deployment can be a little more challenging that space heating/cooling.
They are weird in the way that their utility varies.
IIRC Dave Jones of EEVBlog fame has shown a air-to-water heat exchanger that he has at his home. It's outside. And the climate in Sydney is generally warm(ish), so it makes perfect sense there.
I can also see them being useful in parts of the American South where big garages being common and the weather gets hot: Take some of the heat from the garage and convert it into hot water for showering and cleaning. Win-win.
But they're not so hot, per se, in my part of Ohio, where unfinished basements are commonly used as utility spaces.
My own basement, for instance: As unfinished basements go, it's pretty good. It's not a bad place to hang out and work on stuff any time of year. But it's a big space, and it's cold down there in the winter because I don't want to pay to warm it up. Despite being cold, that's really the most-suitable place for a conventional water heater for this house -- and it's where the house was designed to have it, too.
But if I were to "upgrade" to a heat-exchanger water heater, then as a practical matter I'd be making my already-cold basement even colder.
If it ever got cold-enough down there to make supplemental heat desirable (or worse: necessary), then it'd be an absolute loss: Burn energy over here in one place in the basement to try to keep it warm, and use that energy down the way a bit to concentrate into a tank full of hot water, while the basement stays cold.
Even if it I had a nice modern mini-split down there to provide that supplemental heat: That would mean having air-to-water heat exchanger that is backed up by an air-to-air heat exchanger that is already at the edge of its efficiency curve because it's cold outside. The combination would be reprehensibly dumb: A complicated Rube Goldberg system that costs more to buy, more to maintain, and more to run than approximately anything else would. (I might even be better off just burning my dollars directly.)
(The smarter move for my own home, in Ohio, would probably be a gas-fired tankless water heater, since they leak almost no heat while not being used.)
I have the same air to water heat pump HWS that Dave has - it's a split system so you can put the tank inside the basement and the heat pump outside. You just need to run two insulated water pipes between them and a temperature probe cable. There are of course systems where the heat pump is attached directly on top of the tank but lots are split. They should easily work at -10 °C so no issue having the heat pump outside.
> I can also see them being useful in parts of the American South where big garages being common and the weather gets hot: Take some of the heat from the garage and convert it into hot water for showering and cleaning. Win-win.
Uhhh, better to put the unit inside the home where it provides a bit of a/c. Double win if you cool the compressor with incoming water.
Not in the south myself, but with trad water heaters, I find it dumb that I’m heating incoming 5-10C municipal water in summer time when I could have a tempering tank/loop letting the interior air warm it up (and getting a tad of “free” AC) to 20-25C first before paying to apply heat to it. Would improve “capacity” of the heater too.
Even in winter time, my home heating is more efficient than most water heaters (even if they’re both gas, water heaters are typically non-condensing, and actively pump out warmed interior air for combustion), so it makes sense all year round.
Sure. It's better to start with an excellent home design that most-effectively uses every iota of modern tech to optimize efficiency. And sure, even more efficiency can be eeked out if one is willing to layer on their own productive infrastructure hacks.
But not everybody has those opportunities. Not every home has an existing conditioned space within which to put a water heater. Not every person is equipped (mentally or physically) to engineer and use tempering loops and/or water-cooling compressor motors.
As a practical matter: In a warm-climate home that already has a water heater in the garage (which is very common in the American south, from my limited direct observation), replacing a traditional water heater with one that uses a heat pump can make a lot of sense.
This replacement is something that any person and a friend with minimal plumbing and electrical experience can accomplish on their own in one afternoon, without incurring the expense and inconvenience of relocating their water heater somewhere else. There will be no drywall dust, and no paint.
It's a natural fit.
---
And don't take any of this the wrong way. You've got some great ideas there.
But not all environments are the same. During the warmer months in my own city, I've measured incoming water at 76F/24C -- warmer than the house, and also warmer than the basement where the plumbing lives. A tempering loop may make sense for you in your environment, but it would be the opposite of useful in my environment: "Oh neat! A thing that makes my home harder to cool in the summer!" (Unusual? Perhaps. But it's my reality anyway. I've never run out of hot water in this city during the summer. Not even close. But things do change in the winter -- maybe I'll measure the input temperature again when I get home tonight.)
It's fun to think about niche concepts that don't have broad-scale adoption. And sometimes, it makes sense to set forth and make them a reality.
But it's always important to remember that there's often very real reasons for them to remain niche concepts that aren't broadly utilized.
Same house, same tap, same thermometer as the previous summer reading. It went from ~room temperature to ~60F/16C in a hurry. That's about the temperature of the basement right now.
It then dropped to about 48F/9C as water from the pipe under the street was introduced, and it stayed at that temperature. That'd be great for an incidental cooling loop, except: It's rather cold outside and it will remain cold for months. :)
Long term I'll be dead anyway. To me the the actions taken in the present is most important that what maybe might happen 30 years from now since that's why everything is fucked in Europe, because everyone coasts on hopium for the long term instead of fixing the present.
You got downvoted, but I share the sentiment. It seems we coasted on hope for better solutions that never really get there and are largely unaffordable for most people.
A heat pump would make a lot more sense if electricity were cheap; alas, we went all in for renewables while ignoring nuclear for political reasons. The result is expensive electricity while still having a dependency on fossil fuel and even importing the renewable tech.
That makes no sense in the short run, and I very much doubt it will make any sense eventually.
Get an ERV - it will most likely have air filter. Such a life improvement to a point I'm actually waiting for winter now (in summer you have a problem of mosquitoes, house doesn't cool quickly enough by itself and if you close shades for sleeping - you don't get adequate ventilation).
air conditioning is also a heat pump. they cost way less then the air/water heatpumps and are easy and cheap to install. Since two years I heat with air conditioning and its super effective and cheap.
edit// Hot water is generated by electric solar panels. 1200w are sufficent to have enough hot water for two persons
So yeah, Denmark and particularly Norway are a bit richer than the others, but the others are in the same ballpark.
If I had to bring up some particular reason, gas grids are more or less non-existent in the Nordics, and electricity is cheaper than in central Europe or UK.
Those are some big heatpumps, but in terms of installed capacity at a single location they have yet to beat the Stockholm municipal heating utility's installation at Hammarbyverket, which since its most recent expansion in 2013 has a total of 7 heat pumps capable of extracting up to 225 MW of heat energy from treated sewage. The utility claims it is (still) the world's largest heat pump installation. Notably it actually uses both the hot and the cold side of the heat pumps; the cold side is sent into the district cooling network.
Looks like the expansion to 300 MW will have Stockholm beat soon if it hasn't already happened! Or is that in a different plant? Wasn't entirely clear to me, but great progress nonetheless!
My understanding is that at the moment there's no expansion happening at the Katri Vala plant (the 160MW mentioned in the link above), the 300 MW is the total heat pump capacity spread out over half a dozen locations.
Maybe. I guess it's easier to handle in treated form though. At the point where it gets to the facility it's actually not really sewage anymore, it's just clean water, so after passing the heat pumps it's just released into a nearby lake via a small turbine (both the sewage treatment plant and the heating plant ar located above the water level of the lake).
A bit OT, but since this article also mentions district heating: Are there any efforts to attach any of the recently built AI data centers (and their power plants) to district heating networks?
It not warm as in ”warmer than the typical living space”, but it is warmer than zero Kelvin, so heat can be extracted from it.
Doing that takes energy, that’s why it is called a heat pump. That moves heat from the water to an already warmer place, against a heat gradient, just as a water pump moves water against a gravity gradient.
If the water were warmer than your typical living space, they wouldn’t need a heat pump; a water pump to pump the water closer to where heat is needed would be sufficient.
Practically, the water would need to be somewhat warmer than 0℃ because you don't want it to freeze and clog the plumbing after you have extracted a useful amount of thermal energy. :)
Depending on the contaminants, it's more likely a few degrees below 0C but you point still stands. Fish are removed as contaminant but minerals and pollution likely is not.
And normal water takes quite a bit of heat extraction to actually freeze if at 0C, maybe the device does not even extract enough. But you want to be on the safe side of course since clogging up your heat exchanger with ice (which expands) is not great.
(edit: and as noted in other reply pressure is a thing)
Why do I have a feeling this is one of those "green" ideas that has some horrible environmental consequence. One that could have been solved with a way simpler technology for far less money in exchange for a bit of efficiency loss.
Moving water will get much colder than 0℃ before turning solid. -10℃ or even -25℃ are easily possible. If the water is also under pressure, it can get even colder.
The river is not warm or warmer than the air. Heat pumps are amazing at extracting thermal energy. I think water is very dense compared to air, thus making the processes more efficient in such a large scale.
The best thing about using watercourses as your heat source for heat-pumps - the water flow naturally takes away your "colder" output and brings you more "warmer".
Ground source heat pumps are limited because the ground they have chilled stays stubbornly in the same place, so the only way you can extract more heat from it is to make it even colder, which gets less efficient. Watercourses don;t have that problem.
The opposite effect is also why thermal stations (including but not only nuclear) are usually on the coast or near large rivers: you can dump a lot of water heat into water and have it carried away.
Not always good for the local ecosystem without mitigation, but at least one Japanese reactor allowed local colonisation by tropical fish and local legend said the same about Sizewell.
Sizewell C claims to plan recover waste heat and use it for carbon capture somehow, about which all I can say is a big old hmmmmm.
> always good for the local ecosystem without mitigation, but at least one Japanese reactor allowed local colonisation by tropical fish and local legend said the same about Sizewell.
Not quite the same thing, but there is a tropical greenhouse in the south of France that used to be heated by cooling water from a nearby uranium enrichment facility: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_ferme_aux_crocodiles (unfortunately not available in English).
It has a decent bunch of thermal mass, so it takes quite a long time for it to reach air temperature during a cold snap or heat wave. This makes it a decent heat source during the winter and cold source during the summer - especially for short-term peaks.
You could get an even better result using the earth itself, but that is way harder to scale.
It is, since the obvious alternative to taking the heat from water would be taking the heat from the air or from the ground.
The air is colder in winter than the water, and the ground only provides a limited amount of heat before you can't extract any more. So water beats both.
Heh came here to post the same comment, I was somewhat shocked by the alleged power of the almighty dollar ... but it's just a typo of course. Phew. :)
According to Google's built-in exchange rate calculator it should say $235m.
I've lived in a couple houses built in the 80s that had heat pumps. why do people keep acting like heat pumps are a new thing? i feel like i'm taking crazy pills.
I keep wondering if instead of moving water they could use "solid state" heat pipes instead. Especially for geothermal where you could just drive them into ground, no need to actually drill or circulate water.
Pipes moving water are cheaper than heat pipes, which are not "solid state", typically heat pipes contain a lot of water in liquid and vapour form under low pressure. If you wanted to move a lot of heat, you would need bigger pipes, which would need to withstand more force, so thicker. It's cheaper to just move that water with pump and if you place your inlet in proper place (higher than your machinery), you could even get some energy from flow of water.
I am unsurprised that the big heat pumps are in Germany, because Germany as a country seems to be really into heat. As far as I can see, what is considered normal room temperature is about five degrees higher there than anywhere else.
> ... modelling suggests the system will affect the average temperature of the river by less than 0.1C.
Okay, so that clears up the question I had, then. Not enough to make any appreciable difference.
There used to be a coal-fired power station on the east coast of Scotland, a little south of Edinburgh, Cockenzie, where the cooling loops dumped a huge plume of warm water into the sea. It was well-known as a local fishing spot, with surprisingly clean water flow detectable even a mile or so out from shore. That was several degrees warmer and definitely had a (possibly positive) influence on the ecology of the area - there were certainly a lot of interesting things swimming around there.
The heat pump generates 162MWt, at the cost of around 50MWe.
The nuclear reactor produces 1.6GWe alongside 4.5GWt.
Furthermore the listed costs are also unrelated: the 235 millions are for the bare units (and an estimate for something a few years out), while the 8bn are turnkey (of what exactly I’m not sure: the beleaguered Olkiluoto 3 and flamanville 3 cost 11~12bn, while Taishan is estimated at under 8 for two reactors).
I'm just comparing the magnitudes here. A nuclear reactor powering dumb cheap resistive heaters is just several times more expensive than the heat pumps.
But unlike these heat pumps, the reactor doesn't need electricity.
Sure, but if you build a nuclear reactor suitably close to your city (!) it produces hot water directly in addition to electricity. It's just a much bigger pain to ship hot water over long distances than electricity.
Sweden's first commercial nuclear plant[0] was built right next to a newly constructed suburb precisely so that it could be used for district heating too. And also for producing small quantities of weapons grade plutonium, for... research purposes. Waste not, want not!
(It didn't last very long and was shut down in the mid 1970's, for somewhat obvious reasons.)
Germany at its best, instead of keeping its 20GW+ nuclear power running and get district heating pipes installed to them, they engineer this solution at x times the cost. In this case a 30km pipe from Philippsburg NPP would have done the trick.
It's the year 2135. Discussions about energy anywhere in Europe begin with the customary lament for Germany's shortsighted decision to cease nuclear energy production sometime in the 20th century. Nobody knows where this tradition originates from but it is rigorously upheld.
At this rate by 2135 Europe will have returned to feudal society, most people will be living without electricity, and the primary source of heating will be wood and coal.
Guess who supplies all the nuclear fuel? Russia, and we don't want to buy from them anymore.
The same is true for pretty much all nuclear power plants.
Even Germany had Uranium mines in the Erzgebirge. They just were closed due to environmental concerns and the iron curtain falling, which is also why there are no more "official" reserves. There was no exploration done after 1990, so known exploitable reserves in Germany are low. But that's just because nobody went looking.
Uranium isn't rare and it isn't really expensive. We just need so little of it that there are not a lot of running mines.
They not only developed it, but actually built it to completion, with the liquid Natrium circulating. It was ultimately stopped for political reasons by the SPD state government, and the usual cowardice of CDU/FDP.
And no Uranium ore does not stem from Russia, they might still produce some of the UF6, but this can be much more easily shifted because unclear fuel cost are only a small fraction of the total cost!
In the nordics we love heat-pumps! Something like 70% of houses are heated by heat-pumps, and 90% of apartment buildings are heated by district heating and that is often generated by huge heatpumps.
Apparently 95% of new heating installations in Swedish houses are heat-pumps these days: https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC1...
Heatpumps have been heating nordic homes for decades. Even in the countryside where many houses have small woodland attached, people I know have moved to heatpumps for convenience and because its affordable.
PS: shoutout to to the JRC, found their reports when doing a super quick dig for stats. Those reports were super easy to read :D
> Something like 70% of houses are heated by heat-pumps
To me, living in US Northeast, this is astounding. I've read heat pumps lose efficacy below 25F. My family would never forgive me if I made our house cold. But then I see 70% of the Nordics's house are "warm enough", or dealing colder than room temperature houses.
I've asked half-dozen contractors and HVAC people in my area, and none of them have recommended a heat pump. But, I'm just as suspicious of their motives as I am of the science and environmental populizers on YouTube.
That's old heat pumps. Mitsubishi introduced their "Hyper-Heating Inverter" heat pumps designed to work well in cold weather in 2007, with Fujitsu and Daikin adopting similar technology by 2012, and others following within a few years.
These remain 200% efficient down to -4℉ and 150% efficient down to -22℉. Their capacity starts dropping at 23℉ going down to 76% capacity at -13℉.
There's only a few towns in the continental US that cold enough for long enough that it can't be heated well by one of these. You just need an installer that will size it properly for the climate in your area.
Don’t let the 15 degree+ differences in latitudes fool you, a lot of the Nordic population lives near the sea, so low altitude and plenty of sea current temperature moderation.
January temps in Oslo aren’t much different than Boston. Absolute record low temps are similar too.
Coldest temp ever in Oslo is -30C in the 1800s.
Coldest in Boston was -28C in 1934.
Still doesn’t explain the poor adoption in USA but helps explain why they still work so far up north. The nordics can be relatively balmy to Wisconsin or upstate New York.
A lot of the Nordic heat pumps are ground source, that is to say you drill a hole a couple of hundred feet down into the bedrock where it's always a bit above freezing and you circulate your heat exchange fluid down there and back up again. Air-source heat pumps are mostly a thing in the southern parts where the climate is relatively mild.
Air-source heat pumps are also somewhat common in retrofits where the remaining expected lifetime of the building isn't big enough to be worth spending some 20-30k€ (?) that installing a ground source heat pump costs. A significant part of the cost being drilling the hole.
Similarly for small houses the cost of the hole drilling might not be worth the reduction in electricity consumption.
You never go below 1 in efficiency. Worst case the water is heated directly with electricity.
You shouldn’t but you could.
In theory peltier elements are more efficient heaters than resistive heating but if the temp delta are big enough, you lose more heat through conduction than you pump in.
A poorly optimized fireplace may vacuum more warm air out than it radiates in.
From the PDF at your link:
"Heat pumps are more efficient than gas boilers and become competitive when the electricity price is lower than around three times the gas or oil price"
Sweden seems to have quite high domestic gas rates (highest in EU I think?), around £0.18/kWh, with electricity at £0.23/kWh so I can definitely understand the adoption of heat pumps with gas being so high.
In the UK we have lower heat pump adoption, which could largely be explained by gas being ~£0.06/kWh (and electricity is ~£0.27/kWh). There is also the barrier that many houses are draughty and would require significant expensive upgrades
Heating with gas is absolutely not a thing in Sweden, I don't think even a single percentage point of homes use that. Firewood is way more common (it's relatively commonplace in the countryside still). Gas is used for stoves in some older buildings in a few specific cities but is almost extinct in that application too. Heating with gas hasn't really been a thing historically either - at first it was mostly wood, then coal and wood, and then district heating and fuel oil completely took over from the 1950's. For a while in the 1970's resistive electric heaters were popular because electricity was cheap with the then-new nuclear plants, while the oil crisis made oil expensive. That didn't last very long.
Electricity prices are certainly a factor, and retro-fitting can be very expensive to nigh on impossible.
The real scandal in the UK is how the updates to building regulations to bring in higher energy efficiency have been delayed and delayed - presumably due to lobbying by UK house-builders.
Given the big push to build large numbers of new houses it seems madness not to have the higher standards in place.
Planning rules conflict with building regs in the UK. Planning means that most new houses are little boxes made of little more than ticky-tacky. So adding insulation to the walls makes them even smaller inside.
Unclear what this means - both of these sets of rules apply, so the planning system couldn't force people to not comply with building regs? The new approach appears to be prefab foil coated insulation board in the walls, under brick or breezeblock skin, given what I can see being built nearby.
This is exactly the thing. In UK electricity price is set by the cost of generating it from natural gas. After losses, etc, you get about 1/3 of power in electricity compared to heat in the gas. And the heat pump has an efficiency factor of about 3. So you get back to unity.
While electricity is priced off gas, current heat pumps do not have a strong economic case.
Interesting that district heating is so popular there.
IIRC in the Netherlands people don't like it, because it because it means that there is a single company supplying my heat, with
I live in a post-Soviet city with district heating, and I'm not really sure it's worth it. Our network is government run, and they don't do a bad job, but it is more expensive per kWh (8c) than if you were to heat with gas or an electric heat pump (both 6c).
The heat source of the network is gas or various oil fuels, so it makes sense that it's cheaper to do it yourself - gas infrastructure is very optimised, and there are very little network losses in comparison. I think it only makes sense if the network has a cheap energy source, for example by using waste energy from industrial processes or utility-scale geothermal.
In USSR it was common to use waste heat from a thermal (gas/coal) power stations for district heating. Heat itself in such system is basically free - instead of sending hot water to cooling towers it first used to heat homes. But a pipeline network is not cheap in maintain (pipelines were usually not well maintained and leaks were common but with modern materials corrosion should be less of a problem).
Most district heating systems in the Nordics are publicly owned, in part or in full. There are also price controls for the privately owned ones.
As a German, I find the popularity of heat pumps in the nordics especially amusing. In Germany heat pumps were an incredibly political topic and people were pushed by some media outlets to really hate heat pumps. One recurring topic was that heat pumps can‘t work at German temperatures.
Nothing amusing. Germany is not really rich compared to nordics. And now let‘s do so math! Electricity: 0,3€/kWh and gas 0,1€/kWh. I need ~3x more gas to get same temperature in my room. And gas heating costs €10k while heat pump €40k without subsidies and probably raw €15k material cost if I install it by myself. So why should I pay more by €30k to install experimental thing for a decade when my low cost gas heating will last for 3 decades again. The monthly bill is the same.
I installed mini splits (small heat pumps) in each of our rooms. Everyone gets their own temperature and they were only 800$ a piece. Did installation myself and it was pretty easy. Hardest thing was pulling a vacuum in the lines before releasing the freon (or whatever it's called) but all I did was watch a youtube video. They've been going strong for several years. I looked at the prices and they are still the same.
Did the same. air air is cheap and works like a charm. this 40k for heatpump is for the most luxury version every salesmen trys to sell
Yeah if 40k is the go to amount of heat pumps, the entire country has lost the plot
BTW, in Germany you're not allowed to install it yourself. At least that's what I read some time ago. I guess nobody checks, of course, but in case things go bad and you need insurance, probably they can invalidate it due to the fact you did something illegal.
Not saying it makes sense, though.
i installed mine myself and probably illegaly. But its super easy and those people who install it do a shit job sometimes. I watched professionell people flushing those pipes with compressed air....
And the fine is nonexistent so everyone should do it themself.
I also don't think it's that hard, at least by looking at the YouTube videos.
Do you risk to lose house insurance in case of issues?
This is one of the reasons why sometimes I am even afraid of thinking about such DIY projects.
What is the calculus behind 40k? I just checked some Swedish vendors and here they calculate 12k for hardware and installation of a fairly large heat pump.
https://www.polarpumpen.se/kunskapsbanken/varmepump-kunskaps...
Octopus and a German University did a report on costs.
UK heat pumps are half the cost of German installs 14k Vs 28k euros.
Theres multiple reasons given:
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/03/13/heat-pumps-in-germany...
Also, I believe Octopus have nearly halved the UK price since that report by optimising installs.
Yeah small air-air pumps - which are the most common for single houses - are easily under 2000EUR including installation; if you keep eyes out for special offers it'd be about 1500EUR in Swedish prices.
State subsidies and insane overregulation. Think about replacing the cabinet for electricity meters (+4000€) for heat pump installation.
Why is that required? Switch to three phase? Wasn't required for me in the UK.
No. Everything in Germany has been three-phase since forever.
But especially with old houses, with any "not insignificant change" to your electrical setup, you have to bring everything up to modern standards.
Also, and connected with that, metering is weird in Germany. If your consumption rises above a certain amount (I think 10MWh for a single-family home) you are required to get a "smart meter", meaning a digital meter which includes the possibility (just the possibility, not actually the real thing) of online reporting and minute-by-minute pricing. In the rest of the world, that would just be swapping the meter or slapping some Wifi-to-IR-interface on it, but not so in Germany. You need to install a new metering cabinet that provides space for at least one digital meter (but better provide more than one...), one remote control receiver (for old-style night/day tariff switches, obsoleted by smart meters but still required nonetheless) and a smart meter gateway. That new metering cabinet needs to conform to standards set by your local electricity supplier (which can be as small as a city), so there is no nation-wide standards, more like 50 of them. And the metering cabinet is huge, not someting like the 30x40cm thing you see on sidewalks in spain or something, no. More like 200x140cm in the smallest(!) version. So those are really expensive just because the market is tiny and the requirements are completely crazy: Even though most smart meter gateways are wireless nowadays (UMTS or GSM) and usually such a gateway won't be installed anyways (because just the possibility of installing one is required), you also need to provide for cabled internet uplink to the metering cabinet. That uplink is a Cat6 cable to the gateway, but it crosses through the electrical uplink part of the cabinet. So the insulation of that cable has to be certified for at least 10kV insulation voltage, at least 80A current on the shielding and more stuff like that. So e.g. just that one stupid half-meter Cat6 cable will set you back 50Eur. Installation isn't any less crazy. You definitely cannot do anything yourself. Even your licensed electrician can only do the menial preparations. When your licensed electrician is done with the prep, you request an appointment with the local supplier's meter installer, who, after a typical wait time of 2 months, will install and seal the meter in the presence of your licensed electrician (who is there to receive complaints about incorrect prep, followed by another 2 months wait time for another appointment...).
That's why it's 4kEur...
And if you want your power to be a few cents cheaper (28ct/kWh instead of the usual 35ct/kWh), you need an extra meter for your heat pump. Have solar? Another extra meter. Want to charge your electrical car? You guessed right. And you cannot bring your own. Each of those "smart" meters has to be rented from your local supplier at around 20 to 120Eur/year.
Ok. For once, I’m glad to be Italian :-D Here the national grid operator has installed smart meters. They support remote management of limits (maximum power in watts, tariffs, time-of-use tariffs), remote meter reading by the operator or local access plus an app, remote diagnostics, and simplified installation (strict rules and operator intervention, but in the end nothing particularly complex).
OK, but what about the rest of the price difference? Once the electrical is taken care of it should just be a matter of replacing the furnace and pulling some tubes and wires to the outer unit? You said 40k, but the heat pump itself isn’t even 10k.
I didn't say that, but it is true that in Germany it is extremely expensive, mostly due to installers being greedy.
German article, but some translation tool might help: https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/verbraucher/waermepumpe...
The biggest factor is almost certainly the subsidy for switching to a heatpump.
But there are other factors as well. Air to Air heatpumps are uncommon in Germany, we usually install Air to Water ones, which are more complex. Unlike other countries, our heat pumps are usually mounted on a concrete slab and not on the wall. Then there are some norms for quality of the water, etc. they aim to increase the lifespan of the system, but increase upfront costs
AFAIK we do all of that in Sweden. The 12k I mentioned above is if a large air to water pump suitable for the northernmost of Sweden. It includes a water heater and direct electric heating element for when temperature go below -15.
And why do subsidies INCREASE the price in Germany compared to Sweden?
In the US, the subsidy is paid only when the heat pump is installed by a certified contractor. Unshockingly, the certified contractors are able to capture the vast majority of the subsidy as additional profit.
wtf, this is totally insane.
Here the upgrades for meters are paid for by the grid operators. No changes to the cabinets are required, old analog meters were replaced by them for smart meters, at no extra cost to the consumer, and now they will replace them with new meters capable of metering by 15 minute interval.
This cost in germany is really only created by overregulation and insane bureaucrats creating work for them.
I first heard that in Germany there is much resistance to smart meters and I thought they were just silly people, but if it costs so much..
no people are stupid. Smart meters are paid by the grid operator like everywhere else. Friends of mine got one and it was 25€ a year for it. Yes germans are very stupid. we fight everything new because we think this country worked rly well in the 80s and thats where we want to be 1980
Digital and Smart thats for othet countries.
I got air air heatpumps for 3 rooms 1000€ a room and it slashed my heating cost to 1/3. And I have to explain that its not foor cooling but for heating and then the response is " heatpumps are like 20k plus you liar" or " heatpumps dont work in the cold" ... germans
Still many people dont switch because the read somewhere about magic costs that dont exist. Russian Gas propaganda is big here
I know the electricity situation is pretty bad in Germany, but come on, can't they manage to make an equivalent to the French Linky?
smart meters are paid by the grid operator and you have to pay maximum 50€ a year for a smartmeter. I honestly dont know where you get your numbers. a friend with a big house and 3 children switched to air water heatpump with floor heating etc and it was 18k€ and half of that paif by the state and the smart meter was mostly free( he pais 25€ a year for it).
and this is a hugeeee house. No solar but he is working on it.
could you link some proof of this smartmeters I have to pay? Or some calculations from firms it whatever that proof your point.
> So why should I pay more by €30k to install experimental thing for a decade when my low cost gas heating will last for 3 decades again.
Because:
It is not experimental (it is no longer 1992)
Your gas comes from Russia, and they hate you - roughly speaking
Your prices are miles from reality
Face it, fossil fuels are deprecated. Your gas heating will be unusable with no gas to put in it
The problem is the gas (a) emits CO2 and (b) comes from Russia.
Note that we don't have much gas infrastructure here in the nordics, since we (used to) have cheap electricity.
If you choose between heat pump and not-heat-pump electric heating, it is cheaper.
40k for heat pumps is wildly overkill here if that’s what you where quoted someone is trying to scam you. More critically, those prices aren’t set in stone over the next 30 years.
Home PV for example is way less than 0,3€/kWh and rather dramatically changes these comparisons.
If we only could get China to do for heat pumps what they did for solar panels...
I’m filling my garage with cheap heat pumps and solar panels.
Going to sell for 10x when the water wars commence.
€40k for a heat pump is insane. Even just the parts for €15k is unbelievable. Do you have a source?
> Germany is not really rich compared to nordics.
(From another post I made in this thread)
Looking at IMF 2025 GDP per capita figures (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi... ):
Norway: $92k
Denmark: $77k
Sweden: $62k
Germany: $60k
UK: $57k
Finland: $56k
So yeah, Denmark and particularly Norway are a bit richer than the others, but the others are in the same ballpark.
that doesnt even make sense. if gas is 3x of electricity it should be the same cost but for every watt of electricity you get 3 watt of heating. so by your math if I pay 1w gas but need 3w for 1w of electricity and heatpumps give 3w on every watt of electricity heatpumps are 300% more effective then gas. sooo your point is also heatpumps ftw ;)
Well Norway (Hydro), Sweden (hydro and nuclear) and Finland (Nuclear Wind Hydro) all have cheap electricity which seems to be the main driver for adoption.
Hrm. It might be cheaper than in Germany but its not cheap in Sweden except for the most nordic parts (hydro).
South Sweden - i think the prices are more on par with germany.
Well in the south you might need to factor the gas cost in (vs Germany) and also the network effects of heat pump being the main form of heating in sweden.
The south of Sweden is expensive because Sweden did away with the previous single energy market and split into zones with sales abroad. Often Swedish producers sell to Germany at the same time Swedish consumers are forced to buy from German producers. It was a big thing about 'free market' and iirc Denmark was upset that Danish manufacturing could not compete with the price of energy across the straights in Sweden. The solution was to make energy more expensive in Sweden.
I was solely talking about heat pump adoption due end user prices.
I know I paid about 1000EUR for an air-air heat-pump with install in Sweden, but that was a decade ago and they cost 1500-2000EUR total these days. I also have a fancy big ground-source heat-pump bigger than most residential ones and that cost under 10000EUR total. So not sure what makes them so expensive in other countries; you'd hope competition kept prices competitive.
It is weird, especially since Germany usually is quite a bit cheaper when it comes to tools, construction materiel etc. compared to Sweden.
In Germany you have very strict laws for construction of water heating. For example the need to install thermostat on any heater even for floor heating. But this implies a lot of complexity for the heat pump installation. Cheap DIY community basically removes all the thermostats and soley controls heating through water temp and flow control to the radiators.
Sweden used to have very cheap electricity. That's why there are so many houses with electric radiators. Far more expensive now.
That is why so many houses here now have air-to-air heat pumps. That is by far the cheapest way to improve heating in an old house with only electric radiators and no existing water heat pipes.
Imagine if things were the other way around. That we already had heat pumps and someone suggests we should pipe this toxic and explosive gas into our homes and burn it. That would be an insane idea.
Sign of a rich and very developed country.
A lot of buildings in Austrian cities are still heated by burning oil or wood and the whole city smells like a bonfire.
Probably gonna have my lifespan shortened by at least a decade from all that fossil fuel pollution, but at least we banned that dirty nuclear from killing us.
Yes heat pumps are expensive and you need different radiators and more insulation than with traditional gas central heating. That's why it's an issue in Holland too. Not many people have the investment for all that. It's mainly worth it when you have solar panels but that requires another big investment.
I'm lucky to live in Spain where it's not that cold so I just have one little plug in radiator I use a few months a year lol.
Ditto UK.
Gas is relatively cheap, and a replacement boiler is £1,500 to £3,000 and will last ~10 years and there'll be no doubt about whether it can sufficiently heat the home or produce enough hot water etc .
Lucky you living in Spain though lol
Yes, it's just a lot of money for a lot of people.
Norway is really a different kind of rich compared to the rest of europe, they have tons of oil rights all over the world (and as such they still contribute a lot to global warming even though they have a lot of money for 'green' tech at home).
PS yeah Spain is good for heating but not for AC though (which I don't have, sadly). But I do enjoy life here a lot more even though I would make much more money in Holland.
As someone who moved from Belgium to Phoenix, I agree. I prefer how dry heat over cold, windy & humid.
I was recently in a situation where I had to replace my oil-fired heating system’s oil tank (it wasn’t double skinned and no longer safe).
It was £2500 to replace the oil tank, or I could opt for £2250 to install a heat pump with the government grant. This included all plumbing, electrical work, installation, and 6 new radiators all over my house.
Honestly to me it seemed like a no-brainer. It’s a tad more expensive to run, but it works really quite well and is a lot less invasive than a big smelly tank of kerosene. I gained another 90cm of width in my garden, it’s actually quieter than the oil boiler, and it doesn’t stink in the summer- win win.
Did you add extra insulation to your house (or was it already more modern?).
Otherwise the heatpump just can't catch up.
And currently I have the opposite problem. The house is too well insulated for the heater (or the heater is too powerful). The heater only runs for a couple of minutes and huts off.
Hah, no my house was built in the 1750s or something like that - single glazing on the front and with fairly minimal insulation, plus it has no cavity wall (a mixture of wattle and daub and brick). It is a mid-terrace though so I benefit from neighbours being either side.
There have been a few cold snaps here where the weather has been down to -2 some days, but it’s been fine. I had a couple of minor installation issues (eg 3 way valve set incorrectly) but once those were fixed my house hasn’t dropped below 19C.
A boiler should actually be lasting more like 20 years. I recently replaced my 20 year old one purely because if anything went wrong, it’d become an expensive/long job to fix as parts were hard to find, otherwise it was still running perfectly at its manufacture specified efficiency. Running them for 20 years isn’t uncommon.
I had a quote for a heat pump - £20k, plus the cost to replace 13 radiators, plus cost to replace pipework to support heat pump rads.
Pretty sure the government ‘incentive’ was £3k at the time. Doesn’t come remotely close!
I managed £15k minus £7k of Scottish government incentives, and I managed to avoid replacing all my radiators by .. getting a "hybrid" system which also includes a boiler for HW :/
Far from ideal solution, but it is mostly green, somewhat offset by the solar panels, and actually more comfortable than the old system because of the more even heating. Set to 20C and forget about it for the season. I'm hoping that it will last until the actual gas phaseout when a solution compatible with 8mm piping will exist.
This is why they need to be mandated on new houses, because it's so much better than trying to retrofit it.
£15k included the solar?
Sadly no, that was a £5k => 3.8kW installation ten years previously. That has long since paid for itself in feed in tariffs.
Was your old boiler a non-combi?
Modern condensing combis I think are designed to be more complex and not last as long. I'm not sure all the complexity and fancy modulation etc is really worth it myself. I'd rather have a boiler that lasts 20 years and that any half-competent gas engineer can fix with a spanner and some spare parts.
£20k, jesus!
Condensing boilers became mandatory in UK just over 20 years ago
Whatever about a combi, you probably don't want a non-condensing boiler these days, not with gas the price that it is.
What's the cost savings? Also factoring more expensive purchase, repairs, replacements etc
Ye olde non-condensing boiler is usually about 70% efficient (that is, 70% of the heat from burning the gas goes into your house vs out the exhaust), sometimes worse (60% wouldn't be that out there for old ones). A condensing boiler, _if set up correctly_, will do 90% (95% for the newest models, allegedly). Now, the catch is that it'll only hit 90% if the return water is within a fairly narrow temperature range, so some system balancing is required, and in practice a lot of them end up more like 80%. But given how expensive gas is these days (at least in Europe) that 10-20% saving will handily pay for the cost of the boiler.
Old and new both condensing and both non-combi.
UK houses are really interesting.. Single-glass windows, poor insulation etc. And plumbing on the OUTSIDE(!) :)
Are the boilers typically connected to water-radiators?.. I assume so based on the word "boiler".
There are heatpumps that are used to heat water so it would be a slot in replacement..
Not many people left with single glazing unless they've been trapped by historic building rules. "Outdoor plumbing" is not a thing.
The pump is a drop in replacement unless you have 8mm "microbore" piping, at which point the lower temperature times restricted flow rate becomes a problem in terms of getting enough heat through.
Not sure about the UK. I've seen a lot of outdoor plumbing in Ireland. I lived in a place that had that. They were literally running on the outside. Our maintenance guy said they did that to make maintenance easier, but it also makes wear & tear a lot easier obiously (not to mention frost). And chipboard floors that would crack with heavy furniture. It was terrible quality. These houses were built in the mid 80s.
And a dirty tank of water in the attic to act as a "in-house water tower" because only one tap may be connected directly to the mains. Really archaic.
Yeah i feel like the other answers tries to gaslight me and downvoting to hide the ugly truth! :)
Would you say modern (i.e. <10 years) are properly insulated and built or are there still... shortcuts?
My parents' house in Bath is not "trapped by historic building rules" but there is no way in hell they are ever going to replace 3-4 stories of single pane glass double hungs ...
and that house still has the sewage stacks on the outside of the house, as do almost all homes in Bath and environs.
By 'outdoor plumbing' they probably mean pipes running up the outside of buildings (not, like, outhouses). This is somewhat common for waste pipes.
Yes! I was told "its easier to replace when it freezes" :) Obviously older houses.
Brit here. Your first pragraph describes older housing stock, not anything built in decades. Not that the quality of our quality of our stock couldn't be improved, or that our (very real) energy standards for new builds couldn't be stricter, but things aren't quite as grim everywhere as the picture you paint.
I’ve lived in the UK for 35 years and lived in various properties built in every decade from 70s-10s. Some much older and less loved ones did have single pane windows but have never seen plumbing on the outside. Maybe on much older houses? Certainly not on anything remotely new. A lot of new builds here have solar, heat pumps and insulation has been excellent for at least 20 years.
You do relatively commonly see wastewater piping on the outside of a house in the UK, especially older stock (soil stack from the toilet, waste pipe from sink or bath running into it). This is fine in the UK climate where a normally empty pipe doesn't need insulation. I hear that it won't work in places that get extreme low winter temperatures, but the UK doesn't have winters that cold.
You don't see them on new builds, I think, probably because the pipe going from inside to outside would reduce insulation effectiveness.
Yeah it makes sense for buildings where plumbing was retrofitted.
Otherwise people try to retrofit narrow drain pipes in the walls which are prone to clogging or give you poor flushing performance. Or outside big enough pipes outside interior walls where you get to hear every flush/shower unless you build a box around that. Easier to just run it outside if you can configure your bathrooms that way.
It isn't more interesting with solar panels because they won't generate nearly enough electricity in the winter. You should see both as entirely separate energy saving investments, not dependent on one another. (I'm however very happy with "free" cooling in summer)
You might need other radiators if your current radiators are very small. But you also might not in a recent house, or in a recently renovated house (e.g. the radiator are still sized on single-glazing-glass when having double glazing installed).
You can also choose in-foor heating with the next renovation, a lot of homes already have in-floor heating and it's very comfortable. You can probably also boost existing radiators with small fans on the bottom or choose an electronic back-up module which boost the temperature a bit on the coldest days.
Tldr: it really isn't that hard. The focus on hybrid systems in NL is purely thanks to a lobby from gas-boiler installers and manufacturers. Air/water heatpumps are a drop-in replacement in a lot of cases.
> more insulation
Nothing to do with a heat source.
In the netherlands we were used to really cheap gas (groningen gas field). This meant that, instead of adding more insulation, it was cheaper to just install a bigger gas powered heater to heat our homes.
This means that people now really need to improve insulation of their homes big time, before even being able to consider switching to a heat pump.
My house has a 30kW gas heater. When I switched to a heat pump, first I had to replace the entire roof with PIR insulation. It was previously just uninsulated wood. Now I can easily heat my home with a 7kW heat pump (which most of the time doesn't even need to produce 7kW of heat).
I was lucky, my house already had insulated walls and floors, and used floor heating (low temperature heating). Most homes here use high temperature radiators, which become way less efficient when used with low temperatures produced by heat pumps.
So for many people here, it is cost prohibitive to switch to a heat pump, as they first need to improve isolation and replace their radiators for a heat pump to even work.
You can switch to a heatpump before insulating your house; you just need a bigger one. Which isn't really great thanks to our struggeling energy grid but its still cheaper than a gas heater.
Not directly with the heat source, but with the output flow temperature that the heat source can create.
In that regard, an air-to-water heat pump is much lower temperature than a gas or oil boiler can efficiently produce.
That can cause a need for larger radiators to compensate and sometimes for insulation if the radiators can’t be further increased in size. (Or if the heat loss at design temp is too high for available or sensible sized equipment.)
> more insulation
Why is this ? (Sorry if it's a stupid question.)
A misunderstanding. A lot of people (at least here in the Netherlands) believe that heat-pumps just actively refuse to heat a home when it's not up to spec, isolation wise. That of course isn't true, you'll just need a bigger heatpump.
Air-to-Air heat pumps can be quite affordable. Or even cheap if you find no name deals. There is install, but even that is not really that significant. This is at least in Nordics.
> There is install, but even that is not really that significant.
The install itself isn't that hard they come pre-charged with refrigerant. I have installed a few of the air-to air myself and had no issues. All you need is a vacuum pump and proper refrigerant manifold or adapters. Vacuum out the lines for at least an hour to draw out all the air and moisture, close valve and let sit for an hour, if the gauge shows no leak, open the heat pump zone valves and you're in business.
A friend did it and had all the refrigerant leak out after a year but he realized the flared end that came from factory was malformed so he cut and re-flared the end, vacuumed out the system, left it overnight, saw no leak, and had an AC tech do the charge. Was solid after that. A from zero charge requires some knowledge of the systems capacity and a scale to weigh the charge so he hired someone to do it.
There is now an even easier way than vacuuming. Instead of pulling the unwanted air and moisture from the lines, you can push it out with another gas, which itself can somehow coexist with the refrigerant. I haven't tried it because I already have the pump and gauges, but if I were installing my first mini split, I'd consider it.
Example: https://www.highseer.com/products/pioneer-kwik-e-vac
It's so ridiculously easy to vacuum and charge a heat pump it's kind of unnecessary.
I think I spent $200 in parts on Amazon and have done 4 heat pumps now. It's a vacuum pump, a scale, and a digital manifold/guage. Punch the numbers for subcool/superheat into a calculator and use the temp probes on the lines where they connect to the condenser and you can even skip the scale.
Isn't the problem having access to the gas in the end ? They are tightly regulated, and this is why installers can charge a lot of money, I believe. How did you manage to locate a source?
For a typical new install, the outdoor unit contains the charge and unless your lineset is unusually long, you just use that, releasing it with the valves after installing and leak-checking the lines.
In the US, you can get your EPA 508 cert online in a couple hours and buy the refrigerant online. (You need the cert to be legal, but it’s not really checked just to buy.) Tightly regulated is not true in practice. You could buy some in 3 minutes online and have it Monday.
Yes, in the US I think it's fine; you have a lot more freedom.
In France, access to the gas technically requires a certification that is not available to regular people. You need to be professional and bow to the bureaucracy.
I know somebody who was required to pay the full installation price for a heat pump he installed himself because there was no professional that was willing to charge and launch the installation for the small fee it should require.
This is the hypocrisy and value-destroying behavior of EU collectivist governments. They tout ecological solutions, but you need to pay far more than is reasonable for those modern solutions. Predictably, people chose things that are worse but cheaper, like wood-burning stoves or pellet stoves.
Those things are made artificially expensive for no good reason, and that's because they get built overseas mostly, and this happened because of regulations in the first place. Then they wonder why the EU is losing ground economically…
For your friend’s new install, the refrigerant was in the outdoor unit when shipped from the factory. Accessing that gas just takes an ordinary hex key/Allen wrench. Only if they’d made a mistake and let the refrigerant leak out (or had a ridiculously uncommon length of lineset) would they need access to additional refrigerant.
Yeah, I know they come pre-charged now. But I can't remember what his problem was back then. Maybe he didn't know, or he fucked up…
From what I understand, self-install should be fine up to a 12m run, but if you let too much gas leak, you may have issues because of low pressure.
At least now you can buy them for relatively cheap. Mine required a swap of the control board on the inside unit, and it was ridiculously expensive (almost as much as buying a new unit). I am not sure why it fried, but probably bad solder from old age (it's about 15 years old at this point).
It's an excellent technology, but the surrounding business feels extremely shady.
s/508/608/
My only caution is this method does not let you check if the lines are leak tight.
Probably not for entire apartment buildings since most of them run on oil or gas burning here. I only saw heat pumps on apartment buildings built after 2020 or the single family homes in the affluent areas.
Yeah, here they are used for AC in apartments. Unless for some weird reason they are electric heating... And even then for some reason we do not like them visible so they need to be hidden on balconies and like.
That's another problem in Holland too. The government mandates people moving to heat pumps for new houses (and existing ones in the longer term) because they don't want Russian gas dependencies and they want to close the national gas fields (they cause earthquakes).
But then neighbours start complaining about the look of the outdoor units and causing hassle with court orders etc. Really if they want people to move they should make it easy and cheap, so invalidate cosmetic complaints automatically.
Longer term this shouldn’t be the case though - a fridge is just a heat pump, and an air-to-air or air-to-water heat pumps aren’t that much more complicated, nor should they be any less reliable.
It’s something that will become more of a commodity and eventually won’t be any more sign of wealth than owning a fridge.
I mean, we can see it already in air-to-air systems - I’ve had mini-splits supplied and installed here in Australia for something like 20% of the cost I’ve heard quoted for equally sized units in the US, for example - just because basically every electrician has a license to install them here because they are so incredibly common (for cooling even more than heating, but they can basically all so both here). Air-to-water I expect will be the same in cold climates - in 15 years basically any plumber will be able to do it and they’ll be far cheaper than today.
> air-to-water heat pumps
these are slightly odd, however: they either need an external air intake set up, or they require that the water (tank/heater) be located in a space that you don't mind being cooled down (often quite significantly) AND that isn't thermally connected to the space you're heating via other means.
still great technology, but deployment can be a little more challenging that space heating/cooling.
They are weird in the way that their utility varies.
IIRC Dave Jones of EEVBlog fame has shown a air-to-water heat exchanger that he has at his home. It's outside. And the climate in Sydney is generally warm(ish), so it makes perfect sense there.
I can also see them being useful in parts of the American South where big garages being common and the weather gets hot: Take some of the heat from the garage and convert it into hot water for showering and cleaning. Win-win.
But they're not so hot, per se, in my part of Ohio, where unfinished basements are commonly used as utility spaces.
My own basement, for instance: As unfinished basements go, it's pretty good. It's not a bad place to hang out and work on stuff any time of year. But it's a big space, and it's cold down there in the winter because I don't want to pay to warm it up. Despite being cold, that's really the most-suitable place for a conventional water heater for this house -- and it's where the house was designed to have it, too.
But if I were to "upgrade" to a heat-exchanger water heater, then as a practical matter I'd be making my already-cold basement even colder.
If it ever got cold-enough down there to make supplemental heat desirable (or worse: necessary), then it'd be an absolute loss: Burn energy over here in one place in the basement to try to keep it warm, and use that energy down the way a bit to concentrate into a tank full of hot water, while the basement stays cold.
Even if it I had a nice modern mini-split down there to provide that supplemental heat: That would mean having air-to-water heat exchanger that is backed up by an air-to-air heat exchanger that is already at the edge of its efficiency curve because it's cold outside. The combination would be reprehensibly dumb: A complicated Rube Goldberg system that costs more to buy, more to maintain, and more to run than approximately anything else would. (I might even be better off just burning my dollars directly.)
(The smarter move for my own home, in Ohio, would probably be a gas-fired tankless water heater, since they leak almost no heat while not being used.)
I have the same air to water heat pump HWS that Dave has - it's a split system so you can put the tank inside the basement and the heat pump outside. You just need to run two insulated water pipes between them and a temperature probe cable. There are of course systems where the heat pump is attached directly on top of the tank but lots are split. They should easily work at -10 °C so no issue having the heat pump outside.
> I can also see them being useful in parts of the American South where big garages being common and the weather gets hot: Take some of the heat from the garage and convert it into hot water for showering and cleaning. Win-win.
Uhhh, better to put the unit inside the home where it provides a bit of a/c. Double win if you cool the compressor with incoming water.
Not in the south myself, but with trad water heaters, I find it dumb that I’m heating incoming 5-10C municipal water in summer time when I could have a tempering tank/loop letting the interior air warm it up (and getting a tad of “free” AC) to 20-25C first before paying to apply heat to it. Would improve “capacity” of the heater too.
Even in winter time, my home heating is more efficient than most water heaters (even if they’re both gas, water heaters are typically non-condensing, and actively pump out warmed interior air for combustion), so it makes sense all year round.
Sure. It's better to start with an excellent home design that most-effectively uses every iota of modern tech to optimize efficiency. And sure, even more efficiency can be eeked out if one is willing to layer on their own productive infrastructure hacks.
But not everybody has those opportunities. Not every home has an existing conditioned space within which to put a water heater. Not every person is equipped (mentally or physically) to engineer and use tempering loops and/or water-cooling compressor motors.
As a practical matter: In a warm-climate home that already has a water heater in the garage (which is very common in the American south, from my limited direct observation), replacing a traditional water heater with one that uses a heat pump can make a lot of sense.
This replacement is something that any person and a friend with minimal plumbing and electrical experience can accomplish on their own in one afternoon, without incurring the expense and inconvenience of relocating their water heater somewhere else. There will be no drywall dust, and no paint.
It's a natural fit.
---
And don't take any of this the wrong way. You've got some great ideas there.
But not all environments are the same. During the warmer months in my own city, I've measured incoming water at 76F/24C -- warmer than the house, and also warmer than the basement where the plumbing lives. A tempering loop may make sense for you in your environment, but it would be the opposite of useful in my environment: "Oh neat! A thing that makes my home harder to cool in the summer!" (Unusual? Perhaps. But it's my reality anyway. I've never run out of hot water in this city during the summer. Not even close. But things do change in the winter -- maybe I'll measure the input temperature again when I get home tonight.)
It's fun to think about niche concepts that don't have broad-scale adoption. And sometimes, it makes sense to set forth and make them a reality.
But it's always important to remember that there's often very real reasons for them to remain niche concepts that aren't broadly utilized.
I measured it tonight just because I was curious.
Same house, same tap, same thermometer as the previous summer reading. It went from ~room temperature to ~60F/16C in a hurry. That's about the temperature of the basement right now.
It then dropped to about 48F/9C as water from the pipe under the street was introduced, and it stayed at that temperature. That'd be great for an incidental cooling loop, except: It's rather cold outside and it will remain cold for months. :)
>Longer term this shouldn’t be the case though
Long term I'll be dead anyway. To me the the actions taken in the present is most important that what maybe might happen 30 years from now since that's why everything is fucked in Europe, because everyone coasts on hopium for the long term instead of fixing the present.
You got downvoted, but I share the sentiment. It seems we coasted on hope for better solutions that never really get there and are largely unaffordable for most people.
A heat pump would make a lot more sense if electricity were cheap; alas, we went all in for renewables while ignoring nuclear for political reasons. The result is expensive electricity while still having a dependency on fossil fuel and even importing the renewable tech. That makes no sense in the short run, and I very much doubt it will make any sense eventually.
Get an ERV - it will most likely have air filter. Such a life improvement to a point I'm actually waiting for winter now (in summer you have a problem of mosquitoes, house doesn't cool quickly enough by itself and if you close shades for sleeping - you don't get adequate ventilation).
air conditioning is also a heat pump. they cost way less then the air/water heatpumps and are easy and cheap to install. Since two years I heat with air conditioning and its super effective and cheap.
edit// Hot water is generated by electric solar panels. 1200w are sufficent to have enough hot water for two persons
> Sign of a rich and very developed country.
You need to find another reason. Looking at IMF 2025 GDP per capita figures (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi... ):
Norway: $92k
Denmark: $77k
Sweden: $62k
Germany: $60k
UK: $57k
Finland: $56k
So yeah, Denmark and particularly Norway are a bit richer than the others, but the others are in the same ballpark.
If I had to bring up some particular reason, gas grids are more or less non-existent in the Nordics, and electricity is cheaper than in central Europe or UK.
LMAO good one.
Those are some big heatpumps, but in terms of installed capacity at a single location they have yet to beat the Stockholm municipal heating utility's installation at Hammarbyverket, which since its most recent expansion in 2013 has a total of 7 heat pumps capable of extracting up to 225 MW of heat energy from treated sewage. The utility claims it is (still) the world's largest heat pump installation. Notably it actually uses both the hot and the cold side of the heat pumps; the cold side is sent into the district cooling network.
Interesting. In Helsinki the municipal energy company has a plant with 7 heat pumps which is slightly smaller at 160 MW heat and 100 MW of cooling. https://www.helen.fi/en/news/2023/Waste-heat-plays-a-signifi...
Looks like the expansion to 300 MW will have Stockholm beat soon if it hasn't already happened! Or is that in a different plant? Wasn't entirely clear to me, but great progress nonetheless!
My understanding is that at the moment there's no expansion happening at the Katri Vala plant (the 160MW mentioned in the link above), the 300 MW is the total heat pump capacity spread out over half a dozen locations.
>energy from treated sewage
wouldn't untreated sewage, still fermenting, be warmer?
Maybe. I guess it's easier to handle in treated form though. At the point where it gets to the facility it's actually not really sewage anymore, it's just clean water, so after passing the heat pumps it's just released into a nearby lake via a small turbine (both the sewage treatment plant and the heating plant ar located above the water level of the lake).
So this lake freezes before others in the area ?
> heat-pump equipment costs roughly €500,000 per megawatt of installed capacity
Interestingly enough the price for these giant heatpumps is pretty much in line with domestic ~10kw units.
There is a huge heat pump running in Vienna since 2019:
https://www.wienenergie.at/blog/staerkste-grosswaermepumpe-m...
a bigger one is planned:
https://www.wienenergie.at/ueber-uns/meilensteine/2022-spate...
A bit OT, but since this article also mentions district heating: Are there any efforts to attach any of the recently built AI data centers (and their power plants) to district heating networks?
In Vienna, a hospital is heated by a neighboring data center using a heat pump, while the hospital cools the data center.
https://www.wienenergie.at/blog/fernwaerme-zukunft/#Abw%C3%A...
If we all went full-in on nuclear we could use resistive heat and air cool datacenters all day with no concern for the cost. It's a shame.
We couldn't since all the capacity would go to AI, not to your home heating.
Except that nuclear power is extremely expensive.
Dumb question, why is the water in the Rhine warm?
It not warm as in ”warmer than the typical living space”, but it is warmer than zero Kelvin, so heat can be extracted from it.
Doing that takes energy, that’s why it is called a heat pump. That moves heat from the water to an already warmer place, against a heat gradient, just as a water pump moves water against a gravity gradient.
If the water were warmer than your typical living space, they wouldn’t need a heat pump; a water pump to pump the water closer to where heat is needed would be sufficient.
Practically, the water would need to be somewhat warmer than 0℃ because you don't want it to freeze and clog the plumbing after you have extracted a useful amount of thermal energy. :)
Depending on the contaminants, it's more likely a few degrees below 0C but you point still stands. Fish are removed as contaminant but minerals and pollution likely is not.
And normal water takes quite a bit of heat extraction to actually freeze if at 0C, maybe the device does not even extract enough. But you want to be on the safe side of course since clogging up your heat exchanger with ice (which expands) is not great.
(edit: and as noted in other reply pressure is a thing)
You also don't want to create an iceberg at the point where you dump the water back in the river.
> Fish are removed as contaminant
Why do I have a feeling this is one of those "green" ideas that has some horrible environmental consequence. One that could have been solved with a way simpler technology for far less money in exchange for a bit of efficiency loss.
Moving water will get much colder than 0℃ before turning solid. -10℃ or even -25℃ are easily possible. If the water is also under pressure, it can get even colder.
I thought to supercool water, it needed to be completely still? am i confusing it with superheating?
I don't know much about water. I just remembered that rivers aren't freezing at all, even in harsh winters and searched a bit on the internet.
To be honest, I'm writing this comment mainly to say: what a great user handle, I smiled :-)
The river is not warm or warmer than the air. Heat pumps are amazing at extracting thermal energy. I think water is very dense compared to air, thus making the processes more efficient in such a large scale.
The best thing about using watercourses as your heat source for heat-pumps - the water flow naturally takes away your "colder" output and brings you more "warmer".
Ground source heat pumps are limited because the ground they have chilled stays stubbornly in the same place, so the only way you can extract more heat from it is to make it even colder, which gets less efficient. Watercourses don;t have that problem.
The opposite effect is also why thermal stations (including but not only nuclear) are usually on the coast or near large rivers: you can dump a lot of water heat into water and have it carried away.
Not always good for the local ecosystem without mitigation, but at least one Japanese reactor allowed local colonisation by tropical fish and local legend said the same about Sizewell.
Sizewell C claims to plan recover waste heat and use it for carbon capture somehow, about which all I can say is a big old hmmmmm.
> always good for the local ecosystem without mitigation, but at least one Japanese reactor allowed local colonisation by tropical fish and local legend said the same about Sizewell.
Not quite the same thing, but there is a tropical greenhouse in the south of France that used to be heated by cooling water from a nearby uranium enrichment facility: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_ferme_aux_crocodiles (unfortunately not available in English).
It has a decent bunch of thermal mass, so it takes quite a long time for it to reach air temperature during a cold snap or heat wave. This makes it a decent heat source during the winter and cold source during the summer - especially for short-term peaks.
You could get an even better result using the earth itself, but that is way harder to scale.
It isn't. It's just warmer than air in winter
The air temperature isn't relevant.
It is, since the obvious alternative to taking the heat from water would be taking the heat from the air or from the ground.
The air is colder in winter than the water, and the ground only provides a limited amount of heat before you can't extract any more. So water beats both.
It is a bit relevant because if the air was warm enough you would be better building huge air source heat pumps.
And if it was really warm enough you wouldn't need heating in the first place.
> The Mannheim heat pump setup will cost €200m ($2.3m; £176m).
Browsing on mobile, I saw no way of contacting them about the mistake.
At that rate the article will be eventually correct, give it few years
Looks like its already been corrected
Heh came here to post the same comment, I was somewhat shocked by the alleged power of the almighty dollar ... but it's just a typo of course. Phew. :)
According to Google's built-in exchange rate calculator it should say $235m.
I've lived in a couple houses built in the 80s that had heat pumps. why do people keep acting like heat pumps are a new thing? i feel like i'm taking crazy pills.
I keep wondering if instead of moving water they could use "solid state" heat pipes instead. Especially for geothermal where you could just drive them into ground, no need to actually drill or circulate water.
Pipes moving water are cheaper than heat pipes, which are not "solid state", typically heat pipes contain a lot of water in liquid and vapour form under low pressure. If you wanted to move a lot of heat, you would need bigger pipes, which would need to withstand more force, so thicker. It's cheaper to just move that water with pump and if you place your inlet in proper place (higher than your machinery), you could even get some energy from flow of water.
I am unsurprised that the big heat pumps are in Germany, because Germany as a country seems to be really into heat. As far as I can see, what is considered normal room temperature is about five degrees higher there than anywhere else.
> ... modelling suggests the system will affect the average temperature of the river by less than 0.1C.
Okay, so that clears up the question I had, then. Not enough to make any appreciable difference.
There used to be a coal-fired power station on the east coast of Scotland, a little south of Edinburgh, Cockenzie, where the cooling loops dumped a huge plume of warm water into the sea. It was well-known as a local fishing spot, with surprisingly clean water flow detectable even a mile or so out from shore. That was several degrees warmer and definitely had a (possibly positive) influence on the ecology of the area - there were certainly a lot of interesting things swimming around there.
archive.is paywall bypass link: https://archive.is/nQP9A
So $235 million for 162MW, or $2.35B for 1.6GW
A 1.6GWe nuclear reactor is around $8B.
These are… completely unrelated ratings?
The heat pump generates 162MWt, at the cost of around 50MWe.
The nuclear reactor produces 1.6GWe alongside 4.5GWt.
Furthermore the listed costs are also unrelated: the 235 millions are for the bare units (and an estimate for something a few years out), while the 8bn are turnkey (of what exactly I’m not sure: the beleaguered Olkiluoto 3 and flamanville 3 cost 11~12bn, while Taishan is estimated at under 8 for two reactors).
I'm just comparing the magnitudes here. A nuclear reactor powering dumb cheap resistive heaters is just several times more expensive than the heat pumps.
But unlike these heat pumps, the reactor doesn't need electricity.
1.6GWe gives you 3.2GWt max alongside. In more modern this is even less. Of the 100% energy produced 33-38% will end up in the electric grid.
.. those are somewhat unrelated things, though?
A heatpump needs power to operate, but will generate at least 3x more heat than the electricity to power it.
The article describes how there will be a water battery.
So it can be thought of as a part of a bigger countrywide or europe-wide plan and grid?
Sure, but if you build a nuclear reactor suitably close to your city (!) it produces hot water directly in addition to electricity. It's just a much bigger pain to ship hot water over long distances than electricity.
Sweden's first commercial nuclear plant[0] was built right next to a newly constructed suburb precisely so that it could be used for district heating too. And also for producing small quantities of weapons grade plutonium, for... research purposes. Waste not, want not!
(It didn't last very long and was shut down in the mid 1970's, for somewhat obvious reasons.)
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%85gesta_Nuclear_Plant
It was Philippsburg was 30km to Mannheim, Could have send 3GW of thermal energy over.
Germany at its best, instead of keeping its 20GW+ nuclear power running and get district heating pipes installed to them, they engineer this solution at x times the cost. In this case a 30km pipe from Philippsburg NPP would have done the trick.
It's the year 2135. Discussions about energy anywhere in Europe begin with the customary lament for Germany's shortsighted decision to cease nuclear energy production sometime in the 20th century. Nobody knows where this tradition originates from but it is rigorously upheld.
At this rate by 2135 Europe will have returned to feudal society, most people will be living without electricity, and the primary source of heating will be wood and coal.
Touch grass.
You mean if Germany still exists and the mongols did not have take over Europe.
I think they know how to deal with horse archers now.
Guess who supplies all the nuclear fuel? Russia, and we don't want to buy from them anymore. The same is true for pretty much all nuclear power plants.
We did buy Uranium from Russia because it was cheap, but they are far from the only suppliers. Half the world can mine uranium: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_r...
Even Germany had Uranium mines in the Erzgebirge. They just were closed due to environmental concerns and the iron curtain falling, which is also why there are no more "official" reserves. There was no exploration done after 1990, so known exploitable reserves in Germany are low. But that's just because nobody went looking.
Uranium isn't rare and it isn't really expensive. We just need so little of it that there are not a lot of running mines.
That is such a bad explanation. One, Russia is not the only supplier, two, Germany still buys fossil fuels from Russia.
This problem could have been solved by breeder reactors. Now China is doing it instead of us.
Well that thing was never turned on in Germany.
They not only developed it, but actually built it to completion, with the liquid Natrium circulating. It was ultimately stopped for political reasons by the SPD state government, and the usual cowardice of CDU/FDP.
No, this is a lie. It is also funny because Germany was so depended on Russian Gas that nuclear fuel even if fully depend on would be laughable.
Germany has its own fuel enrichment and production, and it is still running https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urananreicherungsanlage_Gronau
And no Uranium ore does not stem from Russia, they might still produce some of the UF6, but this can be much more easily shifted because unclear fuel cost are only a small fraction of the total cost!