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this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2024
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They're still way too expensive for most people to afford even with the current financial help available.
If you want to roll these out you'll need to do a government scheme to roll these out for people.
And if you're going to do that, you're better off with a government scheme for free insulation and window glazing. It'll be a much cheaper scheme and still cut CO2 emissions from boiler usage.
I'd argue for the roll out of a government scheme for insulation and a "Lifetime ISA" style financial vehicle where homeowners save some money each month and the government adds 25% into the account up to £1000. That way if you max the contributions, people would be able to afford the cost of a heat pump and installation in 2 to 3 years.
In a world where we need to get fossil fuel use to zero, we need to provide support for both adding insulation and shifting from a fossil boiler to a heat pump.
Properly sized heat pumps are nowhere near as expensive as many people think. It's primarily an issue of needed heating capacity bring massively over estimated. Technology Connections has put out a great video recently that goes over it far better than I could, and he has had a similar experience with his parents as I did mine. The HVAC company wanted to replace with a heat pump of the same size as the furnace. A furnace that had at minimum 2.5× the capacity that they actually needed.