United Kingdom

4063 readers

152 users here now

General community for news/discussion in the UK.

Less serious posts should go in [email protected] or [email protected]
More serious politics should go in [email protected].

Try not to spam the same link to multiple feddit.uk communities.
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.

Posts should be related to UK-centric news, and should be either a link to a reputable source, or a text post on this community.

Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.

If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread.

Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.

Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

How to cut your energy bills by 30 per cent with a heat pump (www.thetimes.com)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

29 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago

However heat pumps just don’t seem to make any sense, and the more marketing materials I read critically, the less convinced I am of their practicality, nor the integrity of the vendors - if they work similarly to air conditioning units or refrigerators why do they cost 20x as much as those devices?

A refrigerator cools a fairly small volume with excellent insulation, which allows it to use a fairly small compressor running at a single speed. This is cheap.

The big differences between typical air conditioning units and heat pumps are:

they're set up to move heat both ways (eg: both heating and cooling) which requires a tiny bit of additional hardware
They often have a more substantial compressor to handle the larger temperature difference associated with colder temperatures
They're a lot more likely to be a system intended to support the whole home instead of a single room
People care about efficiency, which has variable-speed systems getting installed
There's a lot of demand for them right now, and limited supply