It was a freezing Friday evening early in February 2023, when my boiler broke. An engineer was called, several cold days passed, and his declaration came in sombre tones: ‘uneconomic to repair’. Li…
It was a freezing Friday evening early in February 2023, when my boiler broke. An engineer was called, several cold days passed, and his declaration came in sombre tones: ‘uneconomic to repair’. Li…
This explains why heat pumps are getting a bad reputation in the UK. Basically, no one knows how to install them properly.
I saw that about at week ago. Seems to be getting pushed in the algorithm.
The TL; DW for people:
The installer didn’t place the heat pump on a solid level base. This resulted in the unit not being level, which caused bearings to wear at a highly accelerated rate. Killed the unit in a couple of years.
Hugely over-complicated plumbing install which introduced unnecessary heat exchanging between water loops and mixing of heated & return water. All introduced losses. The unnecessary components in the system just added expense.
Due to the unnecessary losses, the heat pump had to run at a higher temperature for the system to work. Hence the heat pump was a much more expensive unit than really needed. (Dual stage with two refrigerants rather than single stage).
The water tank used was unsuitable for a heat pump fed system, having too short a heat exchanger for the water temperature being fed to it.
The system was set to a fixed temperature with no weather compensation curve. The system was always working as if it was a really cold day, killing its efficiency and putting it under more load than necessary.
The fix would be to simplify the system and reinstall the unit on a proper base, replacing it with a smaller cheaper one. Basically the guy was completely mis-sold by a dodgy company.