We got air to water heat-pump with integrated water tank for a new house, it cost 6k euro and I have no complaints. In Baltic States air to water heat pump heating for a new house has been a default for the last six or so years. Of course there are still some who insist on natural gas or even hard fuel but those are becoming rare as majority of new houses are sold by developers who pre-install heat pumps as heating solution. Before it used to be people buying lots and hiring construction workers to build a house for them but that is also becoming increasingly rare and even then first alternative to air to water heat pump is water to water heat pump if they have enough space outside.
Valid comments. I've bought my own heat pump and I'm installing myself. I found that getting them installed by someone else was extremely expensive, overbuilt (in the sense that too much extra equipment was added and the heat pump oversized) and underperforming (in the sense that the hard work of design wasn't done so it is bound to perform poorly). Better than burning gas though.
The main issue is that an air to water heat pump shouldn't cost $10k. I got mine (R32, 8kW) for under 2k Euro including shipping. Since these are Monoblock, any plumber can install them. Of course, they work best with underfloor heating, but that's pretty much standard here in Finland.
Underfloor is awesome, I would definitely choose it if I was doing new construction I found a similar product to what you describe (a Hyundai monoblock, R32, 8kW, $3.6k), and the advertised SCOP at 55C is only 3.2, so that would be more expensive to run than gas even if you achieve the advertised value in practice. Underfloor (or upgraded radiators) is definitely required for this Another concern, 8kW might be pushing it on the power. It should definitely be enough to keep any reasonably insulated house warm, but you might have to wait a while if you're trying to bring a cooled house back up to temperature. Paradoxically, the power requirement in a typical Finnish home might be lower than in a typical home further south, because the length of the heating season justifies more insulation to save on energy, which ends up saving on power unintentionally. Same effect that leads to this 👉 ( ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/ddn-20211105-1 ) surprising map
@@SizeMichael Of course, here in Finland insulation is a must (same as heat recovery ventilation - standard here for at least three decades) and a given. And yes, this means that you need much less power. Also, a kWh at the moment is around 10 EuroCents a kWh.
very good video! A great alternative to water heater is a Hybrid water heater... it have an heat pump and a resistive heat for backup... they have a COP of 2 or 3 and only costs double of an traditional resistive water heater... Its what I have in my home... Ariston Lydos Hybrid 600€ 80L
Energy prices fluctuate so much that comparing gas and electric prices can be misleading. Last year at this time, my utility was charging 2.5X today's price for gas. My electricity was about 5% less last year. A cost projection with last year's numbers comes out with a way different answer than today. I have solar so electricity makes more sense than gas for me, but cost savings for my ASHP and HPWH, I have no idea.
In theory, there should be a fairly solid correlation, since current policies make it such that gas electricity sets the clearing price most of the time. The energy component of the electricity rate should be about 2x the energy component of the gas rate, if the power plants are about 50% efficient; the distribution cost is about 4x for electricity and it seems to be fairly stable; electricity includes the depreciation and fixed costs of the power plant etc So you'd think it should be a relatively stable ratio, but yeah, I did notice that in practice, the ratio has been all over the place recently I've been doing my calculations with the assumption that the ratio would "revert to the mean" at some point, but I wouldn't be surprised if it never does
When we bought our house i ripped out the old oil fired furnace and installed a used heat pump myself. It keeps up excellency with our mostly mild winters 99 percent of the time. I like the idea of point of use water heating, but in America i don't think our outlets can provide enough power for that.
I believe US kitchens are often provided with higher power circuits than the rest of the rooms, since they often include a lot of high power equipment (microwave, toaster, air fryer, electric kettle), but the way in which the higher power is achieved can vary. If it's just 120V 30A, that would be enough power for the point of use water heating, but the wrong voltage, since most of these seem to be intended for 240V. But if instead, it's 2 circuits to the kitchen, one on each side of the split phase, then you might be able to rewire that into 240V I have no idea if this would meet code though!
Too many generalisations. It may not work for you, your house in your area but for a lot of the western world, A2W is a viable and attractive alternative to gas.
I would argue that the problem here is the radiators, not the air->water solution. If the installation had radiator/fan units instead of the radiators then it would work as well as air->air, just swapping the energy transport medium to be water instead of the high-pressure coolant gas. The advantage would be a larger heat-pump that could deliver heat to several rooms, as well as some floor heating in selected rooms. The issue is that the transition cost is higher. You need to swap out the radiator as part of the transition. It would be a future-proof solution, one could install floor heating as part of other home improvements for instance.
Mixing infloor heating and radiatiors one one heatpump is just a money burning machine. The floor heating doesn't need more than 35°C and the radiators probably need 45°C even with Fans. So in the end you will need to heat up all the water to 45°C and mix down the water for the infloor. Giant waste of money.
@@tschuuuls486 My parents built a home (decades ago) with a mixed floor and radiator heating. Yes, there are two water circuits, low temp for floor and higher for radiators. For any new house I would really look seriously into floor heating, not for energy savings but for the increased comfort: it's just great to walk on a slightly warm floor, especially in cold times. Doubly so in the bath room. It means you don't have to put carpets everywhere to feel comfortably (which is an issue for people sensitive to dust / mites).
I think we have to hope that the cost of electricity comes down relative to gas as we build more renewable power. FWIW, I did the same calculations, and just had a mini-split installed. It's a lot more comfortable to have that on gently all the time than a massively over-powerful combi boiler cycling on and off.
There's definitely room for improvement in the electricity/gas price ratio, since electricity made from fossil fuels currently incurs carbon taxes in the EU, while burning the gas yourself does not. I believe this is going to be corrected in 2027 (edit: typo)
12:29 holy hell Is that hideou. I aprove of the concept but I could bever get over the style. surely there must be some that are installed underneath? And what about water to water heating? Scavenging heat from your sewage? In my mind you could never reach negative temperatures as all the heat you extract inevitably flows there. (ofc. this doesn't apply for the radiators)
I had initially bought some more aesthetic versions, but they all had a flimsy feel and one of them broke in like 6 months. This hideous one is much tougher, the plastic feels high quality, and it's incredibly cheap as well, only $18 at my local hardware store. It also seems to be the most mass produced model in the world (you can find them under lots of different brands, but they obviously all come from the same factory) so it's tried and tested You can get models that go under the sink, just remember to pair them with a faucet (or a nozzle) that allows you to get the shower-style flow, which is critical for ensuring adequate washing power out of just 2 liters per minute Lots of people have tried to make sewage heat recovery work, but it's difficult at small scales, and nigh impossible to retrofit. They're doing it at a city scale in Vienna though!
I don't think boiler replacement (air to water) is a good solution, but your numbers for this are rubbish, even without grants in the UK they are now nearer $4000 and prices are dropping, also if you get decent installers, radiator and pipework upgrades are often minimal or even zero - especially if insulation has been improved since the heating system was first installed.
This video is complete BS. Though air2air is a fine solution, you need a reversible ac for every heated room. Air2Air doesn’t provide warm water, and doesn’t have a higher COP than air2water heatpumps. The prices you mention for air2water heatpumps is totally ridiculous, or you got a quote from a bad company. Lot’s of European homes have underfloor heating and otherwise you can also use fans to improve the efficiency of your existing radiators. Both air2air and air2water heatpumps can be a viable option depending on the situation.
An important pillar of my air2air thesis is that sooner or later, Europeans need to wake up to the fact that summer cooling is nearly as important of a public health component as winter heating, as the rest of the world has already understood. However many ACs you need, well, you needed them anyway, even if your heating solution is something else, so the marginal cost and hassle to make them reversible is minimal The prices seem to be consistent across many manufacturers. If you want a CoP that will actually result in monthly savings, you're looking at the $10k range (unless your electricity:gas price ratio is a lot lower than the one assumed in the video, but that's a big discussion in itself, cause you have to guess at what the ratio will be for the next 10 years at least)
Heat pumps are being pushed hard in the uk and a lot of TH-cam channels that are positive keep pushing their seasonal cop are 3 or 4. But their outputs are not that big so their ability to warm up a house is limited. That’s fine if you want to run your heat pump all the time which if you are in the house for an extended period works out but for me I am out of the house for a considerable amount of the day. I have a smart heating system so I can put the heating on before I get home so the house is warm, but that only takes an hour or so. With a heat pump it would need to be on all day to keep the temperature able to be at a reasonable amount. Like EVs they are a solution for some use cases, but not a slot in direct replacement for gas boilers. Every time I see an installation video that goes on about the success of the unit, it’s always lots of money spent on getting the best heating output and then comparing against their old gas boiler. If they’d spent £££ on new radiators/underfloor heating and super efficient hot water tanks then surprise surprise your heating bills would be less. For me
This chap is basing everything on RIO, and is blogging utter rubbish, The only time you need a ASHP or any heating replacement is when your old heating system fails or cost more to repair, My Boiler has failed, got an ASHP from a grant from the UK GOV cost me nothing for an installation. You can't get a better RIO than that. This Video Should be Called "ASHP did not work or cost too much money in my home, so I'm going to bad mouth it"
Subsidies work well as a bridge to competitiveness for technologies that are on a declining cost curve, but heat pumps are not on any significant declining cost curve, so there is nothing to bridge to. If your decarbonization solution relies on subsidizing heat pumps to make them competitive, it will only work for as long as you keep subsidizing, which is economically and socially unsustainable. Maintaining it will always be an uphill battle. I'm looking for long term, stable, sustainable solutions, so they have to stand on their own, without subsidy handholding And fundamentally, "you can have it cheap if you convince someone else to pay for it" isn't a very compelling argument
We got air to water heat-pump with integrated water tank for a new house, it cost 6k euro and I have no complaints. In Baltic States air to water heat pump heating for a new house has been a default for the last six or so years. Of course there are still some who insist on natural gas or even hard fuel but those are becoming rare as majority of new houses are sold by developers who pre-install heat pumps as heating solution. Before it used to be people buying lots and hiring construction workers to build a house for them but that is also becoming increasingly rare and even then first alternative to air to water heat pump is water to water heat pump if they have enough space outside.
Valid comments. I've bought my own heat pump and I'm installing myself. I found that getting them installed by someone else was extremely expensive, overbuilt (in the sense that too much extra equipment was added and the heat pump oversized) and underperforming (in the sense that the hard work of design wasn't done so it is bound to perform poorly). Better than burning gas though.
The main issue is that an air to water heat pump shouldn't cost $10k. I got mine (R32, 8kW) for under 2k Euro including shipping. Since these are Monoblock, any plumber can install them. Of course, they work best with underfloor heating, but that's pretty much standard here in Finland.
Underfloor is awesome, I would definitely choose it if I was doing new construction
I found a similar product to what you describe (a Hyundai monoblock, R32, 8kW, $3.6k), and the advertised SCOP at 55C is only 3.2, so that would be more expensive to run than gas even if you achieve the advertised value in practice. Underfloor (or upgraded radiators) is definitely required for this
Another concern, 8kW might be pushing it on the power. It should definitely be enough to keep any reasonably insulated house warm, but you might have to wait a while if you're trying to bring a cooled house back up to temperature.
Paradoxically, the power requirement in a typical Finnish home might be lower than in a typical home further south, because the length of the heating season justifies more insulation to save on energy, which ends up saving on power unintentionally. Same effect that leads to this 👉 ( ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/ddn-20211105-1 ) surprising map
@@SizeMichael Of course, here in Finland insulation is a must (same as heat recovery ventilation - standard here for at least three decades) and a given. And yes, this means that you need much less power. Also, a kWh at the moment is around 10 EuroCents a kWh.
very good video! A great alternative to water heater is a Hybrid water heater... it have an heat pump and a resistive heat for backup... they have a COP of 2 or 3 and only costs double of an traditional resistive water heater... Its what I have in my home... Ariston Lydos Hybrid 600€ 80L
Energy prices fluctuate so much that comparing gas and electric prices can be misleading. Last year at this time, my utility was charging 2.5X today's price for gas. My electricity was about 5% less last year. A cost projection with last year's numbers comes out with a way different answer than today. I have solar so electricity makes more sense than gas for me, but cost savings for my ASHP and HPWH, I have no idea.
In theory, there should be a fairly solid correlation, since current policies make it such that gas electricity sets the clearing price most of the time. The energy component of the electricity rate should be about 2x the energy component of the gas rate, if the power plants are about 50% efficient; the distribution cost is about 4x for electricity and it seems to be fairly stable; electricity includes the depreciation and fixed costs of the power plant etc
So you'd think it should be a relatively stable ratio, but yeah, I did notice that in practice, the ratio has been all over the place recently
I've been doing my calculations with the assumption that the ratio would "revert to the mean" at some point, but I wouldn't be surprised if it never does
When we bought our house i ripped out the old oil fired furnace and installed a used heat pump myself. It keeps up excellency with our mostly mild winters 99 percent of the time.
I like the idea of point of use water heating, but in America i don't think our outlets can provide enough power for that.
I believe US kitchens are often provided with higher power circuits than the rest of the rooms, since they often include a lot of high power equipment (microwave, toaster, air fryer, electric kettle), but the way in which the higher power is achieved can vary. If it's just 120V 30A, that would be enough power for the point of use water heating, but the wrong voltage, since most of these seem to be intended for 240V. But if instead, it's 2 circuits to the kitchen, one on each side of the split phase, then you might be able to rewire that into 240V
I have no idea if this would meet code though!
Too many generalisations. It may not work for you, your house in your area but for a lot of the western world, A2W is a viable and attractive alternative to gas.
Very interesting. Thanks 🙏
I would argue that the problem here is the radiators, not the air->water solution. If the installation had radiator/fan units instead of the radiators then it would work as well as air->air, just swapping the energy transport medium to be water instead of the high-pressure coolant gas. The advantage would be a larger heat-pump that could deliver heat to several rooms, as well as some floor heating in selected rooms. The issue is that the transition cost is higher. You need to swap out the radiator as part of the transition. It would be a future-proof solution, one could install floor heating as part of other home improvements for instance.
Yep, I would definitely choose in-floor heating if I was doing new construction today
Mixing infloor heating and radiatiors one one heatpump is just a money burning machine. The floor heating doesn't need more than 35°C and the radiators probably need 45°C even with Fans. So in the end you will need to heat up all the water to 45°C and mix down the water for the infloor. Giant waste of money.
@@tschuuuls486 My parents built a home (decades ago) with a mixed floor and radiator heating. Yes, there are two water circuits, low temp for floor and higher for radiators. For any new house I would really look seriously into floor heating, not for energy savings but for the increased comfort: it's just great to walk on a slightly warm floor, especially in cold times. Doubly so in the bath room. It means you don't have to put carpets everywhere to feel comfortably (which is an issue for people sensitive to dust / mites).
I think we have to hope that the cost of electricity comes down relative to gas as we build more renewable power.
FWIW, I did the same calculations, and just had a mini-split installed. It's a lot more comfortable to have that on gently all the time than a massively over-powerful combi boiler cycling on and off.
There's definitely room for improvement in the electricity/gas price ratio, since electricity made from fossil fuels currently incurs carbon taxes in the EU, while burning the gas yourself does not. I believe this is going to be corrected in 2027 (edit: typo)
Also, you can get solar panels on your roof
Air-to-water heat pumps likely work a lot better with underfloor radiant heating, but that's not common at all in older houses.
They definitely pair best with underfloor heating
12:29
holy hell Is that hideou. I aprove of the concept but I could bever get over the style. surely there must be some that are installed underneath?
And what about water to water heating? Scavenging heat from your sewage? In my mind you could never reach negative temperatures as all the heat you extract inevitably flows there. (ofc. this doesn't apply for the radiators)
I had initially bought some more aesthetic versions, but they all had a flimsy feel and one of them broke in like 6 months. This hideous one is much tougher, the plastic feels high quality, and it's incredibly cheap as well, only $18 at my local hardware store. It also seems to be the most mass produced model in the world (you can find them under lots of different brands, but they obviously all come from the same factory) so it's tried and tested
You can get models that go under the sink, just remember to pair them with a faucet (or a nozzle) that allows you to get the shower-style flow, which is critical for ensuring adequate washing power out of just 2 liters per minute
Lots of people have tried to make sewage heat recovery work, but it's difficult at small scales, and nigh impossible to retrofit. They're doing it at a city scale in Vienna though!
This is great content.
I don't think boiler replacement (air to water) is a good solution, but your numbers for this are rubbish, even without grants in the UK they are now nearer $4000 and prices are dropping, also if you get decent installers, radiator and pipework upgrades are often minimal or even zero - especially if insulation has been improved since the heating system was first installed.
Forced air gang gang
This video is complete BS. Though air2air is a fine solution, you need a reversible ac for every heated room. Air2Air doesn’t provide warm water, and doesn’t have a higher COP than air2water heatpumps. The prices you mention for air2water heatpumps is totally ridiculous, or you got a quote from a bad company. Lot’s of European homes have underfloor heating and otherwise you can also use fans to improve the efficiency of your existing radiators. Both air2air and air2water heatpumps can be a viable option depending on the situation.
An important pillar of my air2air thesis is that sooner or later, Europeans need to wake up to the fact that summer cooling is nearly as important of a public health component as winter heating, as the rest of the world has already understood. However many ACs you need, well, you needed them anyway, even if your heating solution is something else, so the marginal cost and hassle to make them reversible is minimal
The prices seem to be consistent across many manufacturers. If you want a CoP that will actually result in monthly savings, you're looking at the $10k range (unless your electricity:gas price ratio is a lot lower than the one assumed in the video, but that's a big discussion in itself, cause you have to guess at what the ratio will be for the next 10 years at least)
Heat pumps are being pushed hard in the uk and a lot of TH-cam channels that are positive keep pushing their seasonal cop are 3 or 4. But their outputs are not that big so their ability to warm up a house is limited. That’s fine if you want to run your heat pump all the time which if you are in the house for an extended period works out but for me I am out of the house for a considerable amount of the day. I have a smart heating system so I can put the heating on before I get home so the house is warm, but that only takes an hour or so. With a heat pump it would need to be on all day to keep the temperature able to be at a reasonable amount.
Like EVs they are a solution for some use cases, but not a slot in direct replacement for gas boilers. Every time I see an installation video that goes on about the success of the unit, it’s always lots of money spent on getting the best heating output and then comparing against their old gas boiler. If they’d spent £££ on new radiators/underfloor heating and super efficient hot water tanks then surprise surprise your heating bills would be less.
For me
This chap is basing everything on RIO, and is blogging utter rubbish,
The only time you need a ASHP or any heating replacement is when your old heating system fails or cost more to repair,
My Boiler has failed, got an ASHP from a grant from the UK GOV cost me nothing for an installation. You can't get a better RIO than that.
This Video Should be Called "ASHP did not work or cost too much money in my home, so I'm going to bad mouth it"
Subsidies work well as a bridge to competitiveness for technologies that are on a declining cost curve, but heat pumps are not on any significant declining cost curve, so there is nothing to bridge to.
If your decarbonization solution relies on subsidizing heat pumps to make them competitive, it will only work for as long as you keep subsidizing, which is economically and socially unsustainable. Maintaining it will always be an uphill battle. I'm looking for long term, stable, sustainable solutions, so they have to stand on their own, without subsidy handholding
And fundamentally, "you can have it cheap if you convince someone else to pay for it" isn't a very compelling argument