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My heat pump: a personal story about a broken heating industry
(greenallianceblog.org.uk)
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this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2024
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So…these heat pumps are doing recirculating hot water systems? I presume they have a heat exchanger that either heats the flow directly or has a (small?) reservoir tank that connects to the legacy system?
I ask because nearly every heat pump in the US is forced air and I’m not even aware (and I work in the architecture industry) of a residential product that uses an exterior heat exchanger to heat water. Your outdoor heat exchangers are indistinguishable from ours (the small units we refer to as “mini-splits”).
Forced air is vanishingly rare in the UK, because air conditioning is vanishingly rare as a built in system in residential housing. Yes ours use direct heat exchangers
I don't know why, but I somehow assumed that you were getting traditional mini-splits as your transition. I had to replace my boiler system (in the US) because there were no heat-pump boiler replacements, only forced air. My conversion was from oil, common in the 1950s/60s when my house was built, but my house isn't serviced by gas, and domestic oil service is getting more expensive to maintain due to fewer vendors and higher fuel oil costs. It would have been nicer if I could have just dropped in a boiler replacement using heat pump technology.
Nope. In the UK the vast majority of heating systems are gas boilers, heating water which flows through radiators and the hot water tank. Some houses will have boiler a that heats water on demand, so no hot water tank.
Oil is only used if people are off grid (exteremly rare) and requires bulk deliveries once or twice a year.