I seen a press release about "Heat Pump offer" for lower tariff for heat pumps?

 @Jeffus  No, dumb.  I had a smart meter installed some years ago but the house RCD immediately started tripping at 6pm every night so I went back to a dumb one.
The engineer who took it out thought that the burst of microwaves when the meter phoned out to record the reading was tripping the RCD which was close by. Hopefully this is a non-problem with current technology and if not then my first response will be to screen the RCD. OvO have apparently been installing SMETS2 for some time.

The pipe runs are 28mm as far as they are visible (22mm was the hot water), sorry.

I hadn't considered battery assistance to optimise tariffs.  The Vaillant ASHP delivers 12.3 kW at a SCOP of 3.63 suggesting that it draws 3.4kW so to fully time-shift a 4 hour cheap band would require 13.6kWh of storage. What would do that (my brief research led immediately to the aforementioned Tesla Powerwall 2 at £5000+. Ouch). I’ll check your links though.

I looked at wood pellet biofuel but not oil. I can talk about pellets if you like and if it’s not off-topic.

That’s more often than not caused by faulty RCD units. Smart Meters are designed to try and avoid that, but it’s an imperfect science.

@Jeffus  “you will find very few hybrid setups these days.”. This implies a trend that they are a decreasing breed. Did you form an opinion as to why?  An obvious possibility is that bigger and better heat pumps are taking away the need but another could be that those potential customers aren’t coming forward e.g. because of high electricity prices.  My house is a bit weird but I can’t believe that it has a significantly higher head demand than all the farmhouses around here or even many large stone country or town houses. I did the calculations and the installer did too using the MCS toolkit and we both came out with figures that said that a single heat pump would struggle, hence the hybrid. My installer said that they don’t get many rural properties, full stop.

PS I never thanked you for your welcome post, much appreciated.

1st step towards sustainable heating today - replaced radiators with ones that will work at 55 C. Replacing rads with ones the same width and height but rather thicker worked well and they look OK. Installer (a different one) says that I’m the only house in the area doing this apart from an architect who lives nearby, so why? My theory is that there are definite issues up front (cost, upheaval) with risk downstream (uncertain cost savings and the possibility that one is investing heavily in a technological dead end) and no concrete benefits except a warm fuzzy feeling.

Which brings me back to tariffs.  

There are between 2 and 4 million rural properties chucking out tonnes of CO2 each year (11 tonnes in my case, five times the CO2 output of my car even when I was driving a lot and three times the CO2 output of an average gas-burning 3 bedroom house.

The energy companies should be rewarded, cajoled, incentivised, forced, shamed, whatever into providing tariffs that pass the benefits of CO2 savings properly back to their customers who invest in sustainable systems even if this means subsidising the process from those who elect not to.  There’s a log-jam here which needs to be shifted if we are serious about sustainability.

This in turn requires that the government researches the issue and if my analysis is right should match its actions to its policy. Just offering significant cash grants up front doesn’t seem to be working.

OvO is in a position to be a market and civic leader here - if the impending announcement is a log-jam breaker then I will be the first to make sure to applaud it and make sure that policy-makers hear about it.

PS: the other comment attributed to the architect was that any house over 15 years old can never be made heat-efficient through insulation so (my conclusion) don’t base policy on the assumption that it can.

It is a good question. I am not questioning your need for one by the way. If the qualified designer says that is the best option then why not go for it.

A number of reasons why you won't find many examples

1. Grants outside Scotland don't pay out for Hybrid heat pumps. That is clearly a big one.

2. Complexity and cost puts some people off.

3. The number of installers able or with decent experience to offer hybrid setups is relatively small

4. It feels like a transition technology as gas will go at some time 

5. Households are encouraged to go for a fabric first approach. Improve insulation etc ideally so a heat pump will suffice. It is not easy or cheap in some homes, not just rural ones

6. There is already some tightening in the mortgage market for homes with poor insulation so there will be more of an incentive to prioritise that going forward so a hybrid setup isn't needed.

7. An expectation that costs may be taken off electricity and loaded onto gas at some point making the financial case for hybrid setups less appealing.

You will find examples of hybrid setups but they will be rare even in rural locations.

Under the boiler upgrade scheme in England and Wales in December which pays grants for heat pumps:

46% of upgrades where previously off the gas grid  

57% of installs were classed as rural

It doesn't tend to be particularly newer homes taking up heat pump grants.

@Jeffus Interesting. I wonder if Scotland and England are materially different. I am about to see if I can find figures for up here but if over half of installations up here are rural then my sources are way wrong. I’ll report back when I know.

The government down here produce monthly stats on their website

You may fine something similar in Scotland.

It obviously depends on what is classed as rural although the off grid stats are a good indicator 

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/boiler-upgrade-scheme-statistics

I haven’t looked myself but there might be some interesting stats on the MCS dashboard that covers the UK

https://datadashboard.mcscertified.com/Welcome

Also there might be some interesting stats related to Energy Performance Certificates which give an idea of the quality of homes across the UK in terms of insulation to see if Scotland is similar to the whole of the UK.

@Jeffus  I’ve spent the last couple of hours down a deep rabbit hole entitled Scottish Government statistics and reports. I’m no wiser about rural retro-fits but I finally found this:

“10. The Scottish Government should continue to work with the UK Government to support heat pump deployment through energy market reforms.

Whilst recognising that this is not a devolved area, there is a clear need to rebalance gas and electricity prices which currently give gas an unjustified (in carbon terms) price advantage which commercially disadvantages heat pumps in on-gas areas.

The different regulatory regimes for gas and electricity are part of the reason for this; most of the regulated social and environmental levies are made on electricity rather than gas, increasing electricity's relative price. A rebalancing of these costs through action of the UK Government and Ofgem is urgently needed to address this issue.”

Someone agrees with me :-)

This is a good breakdown of what are known as Policy costs or Social and Environmental levy.

It adds about 13.5% to electricity and 3.6% to gas for someone using the TDCV Typical Domestic Consumption Value of energy. So the percentages will vary by customer.

I agree it makes sense to shift some of these, but they will end up going back onto electricity longer term once gas is phased out. The Warm Home Discount will still exist. It is a bit like EVs, it is only a matter of time before taxes on EVs are increased to cover the loss of fuel duty.

There would also have to be some safeguards for high gas vulnerable users if their bills increased but nothing is impossible.

There has been some analysis on what the shifting would mean.

The following screen shot of a document updated every couple of months

@dr_dongle I had mentioned today being the day to look out for news from OVO. An announcement will be made tomorrow here on the forum.