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The big lie.

 

Do solar panels ‘save’ you money? Do heat pumps ‘save’ you money?

 

Ok, so that you don’t have to read it all...NO.

 

The reason is that on  TYPICAL basis, not by some bloke who posts on YouTube and swears that his set up is saving so much money that he is richer than a dentist. We have to talk ‘typical’ because it’s the only thing we can all go by. And typically they just do not save you any money at all.

 

They will typically COST you money that you’ll NEVER see back. But that isn’t actually the reason why you shouldn’t buy them. More about that further on. But first of all, I’m going to show you an email I sent to a solar panel company who, surprise, surprise, never emailed me back.

“Your 4kW solar & battery system costs around £11,500 to buy and install.

This system will produce around 3,400 kW per year on average.

At 21p/kWh that would be a saving per year of £714

If I sell the electricity to Octopus, I’ll get an average annual income of £350 – so I can see straight away that it is better to use that energy, rather than sell it.

I can also see that if I divide the capital cost £11,500 by the annual savings of £714 that is a payback period of 16 years.

The £11,500 I had in the bank was earning 3% interest – which I’ve now wiped out. That was £345 a year…which I'm now losing. So before I can look at any savings, I am already down – by £345. The ‘saving’ of £714 must have £345 deducted. I'm down to £369 – that is the actual saving. £11,500 divided by £369 is a payback period of 31 years.

I also have to take into account that the batteries will need replacing in (at least) 15 years’ time. That’s a cost (today) of around £2,500 and also a new inverter, £1,200 – so that’s £246 a year that I should be setting aside. My saving is now down to £123 a year.

Over its life, a solar panel array will need maintenance and servicing, from cleaning to part replacements. This is thought to be on average £160 a year, but we’ll be generous and say it’s £123. My saving is now wiped out and my solar array will NEVER payback, in fact, it may well COST me money. The above is your own data, so why would I want a solar array?”

As I said, they never bothered me with a reply. After all, what could they say?...  “Yep, you got us there!” They certainly couldn’t argue with the mathematics, as the information came from their own website. The bit that people forget is the lost interest on the capital paid out for the solar panels. That £345 really puts a dent in any alleged ‘savings’. Once that’s taken into account, your payback period – stretching out to 31 years – puts it way beyond the actual life of the panels, so there will NEVER be a return on your money, even before you take replacement batteries and inverters into account.

So stick with your gas (or even electric!) heating, and read on. The situation is similar with heat pumps. For this assessment, we’re going to favour heat pumps in a ‘new install’ situation. So we’ll assume that you are completely refurbishing your home – maybe ripping out the gas central heating. This strongly favours heat pumps. If you were merely swapping out the heat source, such as the fact that your boiler has come to the end of its life, then it would be cheaper in all respects to simply replace the boiler with a new one. Gas is cheap, and new boilers are about £800. Installation would be another £1,200. But as we just said, we’re going to favour the heat pump by imagining that we are looking at new everything.

A heat pump can be air source or ground source. That is to say that it gets the majority of its heat from either the air or the ground. By using electricity, that heat is then transferred into the building. Heat pumps therefore have a ‘coefficient of performance’ (CoP). Typically, a heat pump will have a CoP of 4. That means that for every 1 kilowatt of electricity you put in, it will give you 4 kilowatts of heat energy out. So if your total requirement for heating your home is 8,500 kWh over a year, and your heat pump has a CoP of 4, then you will put in 2,125 kWh and get 8,500 kWh of heat back.

 

If your electricity costs are 21p per kWh then the heat pump will cost you £446 in electricity charges over the year. Now let’s compare an electric heating system with that – what is considered to be the highest cost heating (oil and gas are far cheaper). 8,500 kWh will cost you £1,785 a year. That’s £1,339 more a year than a heat pump. That looks like a lot, and heat pump installers will gladly tell you that you’re crazy even considering electric heating, and that it will be far cheaper to go for a heat pump. You could spend that £1,339 on a little holiday. Really? Let’s see.

Let’s ignore costs briefly and look at practicalities. A heat pump installation is going to be VERY intrusive. The fabric of the building is going to come under some stress, and so will you. The outside equipment isn’t pretty, and pipes will be laid all over the place – pipes that could one day spring a leak, but we’ll ignore that. Heat pumps can also run all the time – especially when it’s cold outside, whereas a conventional heating system shuts down for many hours, often all night.

Ok, so again, before we delve into costs, the first thing you should do is make friends with your heat pump installation company – you’re going to have to use them when it goes wrong. You can’t just call a plumber out. Now, costs: According to the Energy Savings Trust, a typical heat pump will cost £14,000 but you’ll get a government grant of £7,500 off this so, £6,500.

Now let’s look at an electric heating system. For a typical home, you would probably pay around £1,000. So we see already that an electric system is some £5,500 cheaper to install. However, that should be eaten up by the running costs, right?

Heat pump after 10 years (halfway through its life)

Air source heat pump installation £6500 (after grant – 9 rad system)

Running costs £4460 (electricity consumed)

Annual servicing £1750 (£175 a year)

Future replacement costs (depreciation) £2180 (£4360 cost of replacement)

Total £14890

Electric after 10 years

Installation £1000 (9 plug-in heaters at £111 each)

Running costs £13390 (electricity consumed)

Future replacement costs £500 (£1000 cost of replacement)

Total £14890

So no difference after 10 years. And remember that we’ve pitched the most expensive heating (electric) against a heat pump. We’ve also been very generous to heat pumps, in that no breakdowns at all have been assumed, so zero maintenance. This is highly unlikely. We’ve assumed no increase in electricity prices, but also no inflation. We’ve also assumed a heat pump CoP of 4, whereas 3 or even lower is often reported. So again, we’ve painted heat pumps in a very rosy light. Sure, after 10 years, the costs start to look better for heat pumps due to running the heating systems (electricity used), but wouldn’t you think that after a decade that your heat pump would perform far better in costs than an electric heating system? After all, that’s what you are constantly told. The truth is somewhat different.

 

Due to their high costs, EVEN AFTER a grant of £7,500, heat pumps cannot even beat an electric heating system after 10 years’ use!

So we’ve seen then that solar panels and heat pumps are a dead loss – literally. If you were say, building your own home and starting out from scratch, which system would you install? All the homebuilding magazines will tell you to install a heat pump and/or solar panels. This is because the people who write for these magazines are extraordinarily dim, and cannot do basic mathematics. Obviously, it would be cheaper for you to go down the conventional route and install a gas boiler, right? Wrong.

With a new build, or a major refurbishment (after all, that’s what we just did the heat pump calculations for) you have a golden opportunity to ensure your home doesn’t lose heat. If you ever take a wrong turn in parts of Cornwall, you might be taken in by a bloke called Jack – who has one eye. He will put you in a box and you may never see the light of day again. Well, this has gone dark, hasn’t it, boys and girls?  But let’s look at the Cornish you…

 

 

 

Oh, dear. But one-eyed Jack has done something nice, apart from giving you a tiny breathing hole – he’s insulated the box…a lot. He’s done this so that your screaming doesn’t alert his neighbours. In fact, he’s insulated the box so well, that you don’t need any heating to keep you alive in Bodmin. Just the heat from your sweating body is enough to keep you warm. And therein lies the trick – the box doesn’t lose any heat because of all the screaming-insulation Jack has installed. This is the thing. We only need to heat our homes because they lose heat which is put into them by the central heating. So it follows, and this is obvious even to a politician or a policeman, that if you stop the heat from leaving, just as Jack has stopped you from leaving, then that heat stays inside.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So, we can do the same thing to your house – once the inept police, after many tip offs, finally freed you from Jack. Back at home, after you have sold your story to The Sun, you spend the money on applying extraordinary levels of insulation to your house.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And it seems that your hair has grown back, too. The wife and kids are still as annoying as ever, but that’s a matter for when you go ‘Bodmin’. So, the real key, then, and where you should be spending the thousands that you would have spent on solar panels or heat pumps, is insulation. Insulate your home so that it doesn’t leak heat, and you simply won’t need a heat pump or a solar panel to waste your money on. You could use the cash to turn to drink, and maybe open up that Only Fans account that you’ve been dreaming of. You really could heat your home with just a few kilowatts of electric heating. In fact, a so-called ‘passive house’ can be heated with just a 3 kilowatt electric fan heater costing just 63p an hour.

What is a passive house? It is a house just like yours, but built with fantastic levels of insulation – even going so far as to not let door and window frames pass heat from the inside to the out. It’s sealed so much that the change of air inside is limited to just 0.6 changes per hour. In other words, it would take nearly two hours for the air inside to be refreshed. This is achieved by use of a ‘heat recovery ventilation system’. It uses a quiet fan to replace the air inside (so no open windows) and warms the air coming in by taking the heat of the air going out.

As we saw earlier, with one-eyed Jack’s box, (virtually) no heat leaves, so the heat doesn’t have to be replaced. And that’s where you should be spending your money. Because when you spend money on a heat pump or solar panels, as we said, that doesn’t stop – you need to keep spending money. This is why they don’t work…though you could say the same about a gas heating system – you need to keep spending money on it. Isn’t it far better to insulate the crap out of your house because you only have to do it once? Heat pumps and solar panels have to be replaced in about 20 years. And they can break down, costing you a small fortune in repairs…because you can’t just call a plumber in. Heat pumps and solar panels require expensive tradespeople (what used to be called ‘tradesmen’). And any parts are not going to be a tenner, like a ballcock would be. We’re talking the money that even a vet would notice was missing from their bank account. So we’ve learned, then, that the three most important things to do to save money on your energy bills are:

Insulate

Insulate

Insulate

It is, to be real, very difficult to convert your house into a passive house unless it is of timber frame construction. A stone-built house – brick or block – can easily leak heat. You would have to seriously increase the thickness of your outside walls with sheets of Celotex (PIR) boards which have great insulating properties. Then there’s your floor – most homeowners have no idea just how much heat you lose through the floor – and the windows, the doors, and the loftspace. You should also have your windows facing south or slightly south east in order to pick up free solar heat in the winter. In fact, it’s so difficult (but not impossible) that a new odd word was coined for the attempt – EnerPHit – an alternative to passive. It aims to reduce your heating demand by 90%. So if you were using 8,500 kWh a year, going EnerPHit would reduce that to 850 kWh. This means paying £178 a year for your electric heating rather than £1,785. Appealing, eh? It’s still major work, but do-able with very many homes.

 

Courtesy of Mr Bim Architects

The above is a ’trombe wall’ - a wall constructed close to a bank of south facing windows. Winter sunshine – being at a low angle - pours in and warms the wall, which acts as a heat battery – releasing it immediately and also later in the day. You don’t have to worry too much about summer heat, because a shade, built horizontally at the top of the windows, stops the main solar energy which is primarily downward during the height of summer.

Again though, it has to be said, you have to be careful how much you spend – to make sure it isn’t just lost money which you could have spent on your energy bills. Spend £10,000 on insulation – with your annual saving at £1,587 a year - and that’s a payback period of six years (but take your lost interest on investment into account – let’s not join the game of lies which solar panel and heat pump companies partake in). Shouldn’t we be building homes to passive or EnerPHit standards right now? Of course we should, but we have inept politicians, remember, who are too preoccupied with telling you that carbon dioxide is warming the planet.  And even a female police officer could work out that’s not true.

So let’s do the math – as annoying Americans say (not realising that ‘mathematics’ is plural):

Capital invested in a major insulation programme £10000

Amount saved on energy bill £1607

So it would look like a 6.2 year payback.  But we have to take loss of interest into account…

Interest lost per year £300

So £1607 minus £300 is £1307

So actual payback is 7.6 years. This is real payback for your £10,000 invested in insulation. This is far and away better than ANY solar panel or heat pump. In seven and a half years, you’ll get your money back, and from then on, it’s just an out and out saving every year on your energy bills.

After your insulation programme, our strongest advice would be to use an electric heating system, as that has the lowest maintenance and servicing cost of all fuels and systems of heat – no boiler, no annual service, no insurance required, low cost parts, and 100% efficient and virtually 100% reliable.

All of these videos you see on YouTube about solar panels and heat pumps are all missing the point…you need to keep the heat in, not let it leak out and thus replace it using rare earth and toxic materials, and refrigerant gases. As we said, this idea may be difficult to achieve unless you carry out a truly major refurbishment to your home. But many homes will lend themselves to this, room by room, especially if your home has downstairs wooden flooring. Even if it concrete, there is thermal sheeting like Depron, which has a thermal conductivity of just 0.035 W/m.K. That’s better than fibreglass, which is 0.048. Contrary to what you would think, a wooden floor loses more heat than a concrete one, and is more difficult to insulate. It has to be remembered that all that timber has to be ventilated, so you may lose some of benefits of insulating. It may be better to convert your downstairs flooring to solid. If so, you can lay a vapour barrier and PIR (Celotex) sheeting. This is also very lightweight, and obviously much better than just pouring concrete in – which isn’t advised. You may want to engage the services of a builder and even a surveyor.

Of course, all of this means that you may have to spend more than £10,000 – especially if your house is brick or block, but remember that it is a one-off expense, you never have to do it again. You must do the costings for your own project, but you wouldn’t want to spend much more than £10,000 or your payback period would be too long. The great thing is that it’s one hell of a selling point when you finally decide to sell up and move away to Cornwall.  Oh, wait.