Share your heat pump experience

Still using the original HW tank and immersion, about to upgrade to a pressurised tank but its only a small tank, property now has electric shower instead of a bath. 

Approx £4.5k installed, believe they're slightly cheaper now. Would never recommend storage heaters, where this house is folk are removing Dimplex Quantum's to install A2A.

The other huge positive over a wet system is the A2A doesn't have the complexity of a wet system and doesn't rely on 3rd party equipment and sensors, it's all Panasonic and easy to operate.

The government have introduced support for air to air heat pumps as part of the boiler upgrade scheme and the grant level is £2,500 which would cover most of the cost of a multi-split system. A2AHPs use a simpler and older technology that has been around for 200 years and we know them as fridges or freezers.

https://www.zerochippenham.org/2025/11/22/uk-government-introduce-grant-support-for-air-to-air-heat-pumps-and-heat-batteries/

Think the grant is just available in England and Wales at the moment.

I wonder if ​@Viv1966 got anywhere with their heating upgrade ? 

I've found some more detailed information on A2AHPs that covers how they work, installation although it is wrong about there not being a grant as that is a very recent change. You do need to take care of the hot water heating and it's usual to install a hot water tank (if you don't have one already) and use an immersion heater. If you have an EV you may be able to make use of the discount tariff for that with various suppliers.

https://energyguide.org.uk/air-to-air-heat-pumps/

I'm not saying that this solution will suit everyone but it does have a substantially reduced cost, a much less intrusive installation process and a very simple and reliable design. With that in mind it's worth considering that as an affordable alternative to an ASHP.

I installed a smaller 3.5kW unit, very low cost A2AHP in 2024 as an experiment (keeping my gas boiler) and it has worked very well over the last two heating seasons. The house actually needs 5kW of heating on the coldest days but even so I've managed to reduce my gas consumption by 85% and a hybrid solution is a perfectly acceptable. We get along well with the unit and we've adapted our lifestyle slightly to gain the environmental benefit of using a lot less gas. I've learnt that going green doesn't have to be all or nothing. If you can strive to be substantially better it will put you in a position of knowing how to take the next step after that if that's worth doing. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

Peter