He went on: “I have a gas boiler. I wish I didn’t, but I live in a flat and heat pumps are a very difficult thing to put in there.”
Mr Stark said his own boiler engineer was sceptical about the application of heat pumps.
“The gas boiler guy who comes round and fixes my gas boiler – it breaks very often – tells me they will never work,” he said.
The head of the climate watchdog behind the planned boiler ban has admitted that he still has gas heating in his own home.
More than four years after claiming he was “keen” to convert to electric heating in his flat, Chris Stark, the chief executive of the Climate Change Committee, said he still has a gas boiler.
But of course this isn’t going to change the plan. Everyone must just wish harder instead.
What’s his problem? I live in a flat and only have electric heating, and it’s not one of these heat pumps either. It’s not an either/or problem. Put your money where your mouth is.
I wonder why his boiler keeps breaking? They aren’t very high tech. I have an oil boiler which has been reliable for the last 15 years or so with about 3 significant but easily fixed problems in that time.
However the last service showed up a problem with the fire box insulation that may do for it eventually. I’ll probably bite the bullet and replace it before the ban on them in 2026. No way am I prepared to fund the major expense entailed in making my old house suitable for a heat pump, if it’s even possible.
First rule of modern politics: whatever the Greens advocate, it won’t work and will end up being contradictory to their stated goals.
Of course, their real goals are that the few of us that survive their policies should live in caves 🙁
‘live as their slaves!!!’
There Rupert. Fixed that one for you.
I’m in the same boat as TG. When we moved in to this house 13 years ago, almost to the day, the heating engineer said it was old and could die at any time but it was worth keeping. We’ve had a couple of minor faults but its still going.
I’ll be having a chat about a new boiler when he comes to do the annual service next week, there’s no way I’m forking out for something that is forced on me because of delusional thinking.
We are also buying a new oil boiler before the ban. Heat pumps are cancer and only morons buy them, they’re not intended to be a solution at all, they’re meant to inconvenience and punish you.
About the Climate Change Committee
The Climate Change Committee (CCC) is an independent, statutory body established under the Climate Change Act 2008. Our purpose is to advise the UK and devolved governments on emissions targets and to report to Parliament on progress made in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and preparing for and adapting to the impacts of climate change.
We’ve had a ‘Conservative’ government for 13 years.
13 years, lads.
Tim’s being a little disingenuous here. The chimp’s solution is; he could afford a heat pump & the insulation, if everybody else was compelled to have heat pumps & insulation. The economy of scale would reduce the price & it would be further affordable by taxing the f**k out of any other form of energy use to provide subsidies. So his argument is: he can’t have a heat pump because you didn’t get one first. I think our argument with him would be best conducted with a baseball bat (cricket bat for the traditionalists amongst us). Loss of dentistry is a strong debating point.
Problems with gas boilers tend to be the non-gas bits : PCBs, water valves, pointless regulations etc.
Richard Tice on GB News just mentioned this on his show. Excellent Irish bloke giving all the realities of net zero – 25% reduction in meat comsumption, 25% fewer flights, completely un achievable, etc. etc.
Plus, we sent £190 million EVERY WEEK to the US last year to purchase their fracked gas (which also meant a four-fold increase in CO2 over and above the CO2 emissions if we had fracked UK shale gas !!!!!).
‘Conservative’ plan for net zero would mean building the worlds largest offshore wind farm EVERY 10 WEEKS.
Labours plan for net zero would mean building the worlds largest offshore wind farm EVERY 6 WEEKS.
Energy production in the UK down 60% in the last 23 years.
The people running this country and the useful iddiots who support net zero are insane.
Oh yeah, NHS hospital up north to spend £30 million going green – heat pumps, LED bulbs etc…..
The climate change bandwagon has been defying economic reality for decades
The wheels are about to fall off after a doubling of domestic energy prices, driven in part by this governments whacko energy policies
It’s becoming the go-to get out clause.
Yes I’d take in a refugee except I live in a flat.
Yes I’d drive an electric vehicle except I live in a flat.
Yes I’d have a heat exchange boiler except I live in a flat.
I’m sure there will be others.
BiS – The economy of scale would reduce the price
Idk if we can expect big price decreases on heat pumps, they’re inherently a lot more complex than boilers, and the cost of everything is rising anyway in large part thanks to Net Zero.
But I think you’re on to something – most people, including ecotwats, still assume they’re going to be able to live their lives much as they have.
But that’s not the plan at all, as Addolff indicates. However, I think he’s underestimating how bad the final destination of Net Zero is.
We may be annoyed by attempts to force vegetarianism and insect meat on us now, but I reckon they’ll move on to literally starving us to death like the last time Lysenkoism was tried.
Why else would you deliberately sabotage your own agricultural and energy capacity?
I didn’t say he was correct, Steve. Just that seems to be what he believes. It seems to be a belief across the environmentalist community. There’s some sunny upland in the future when all this crap comes together to work & it’s all milk & honey.
Trouble is, none of these people have any knowledge at all of how things actually function. How you would get from here to there. Half the time they’re even ignoring the laws of physics because they don’t realise they exist. And that government is largely made of these sorts of people.
The trouble with heat pumps in rural areas is that often the local electricity feed isn’t powerful enough to run them.
So you need a diesel generator…
“…I have an oil boiler which has been reliable for the last 15 years or so …”
Indeed, and so is mine which is even older.
A good reason to hang on to an old one is that they don’t have any electronics in them – no random breakdowns, no firmware updates, no “ooh you can’t get the parts for these any more…” and so on.
All the spares for mine are generic items widely available. Everything is electro-mechanical, everything is simple, obvious and repairable.
Long may it last.
The entirety of Nut Zero is predicated (assuming any rational thought was involved at all, which is highly dubious in many cases) on “stuff that’s expensive now will magically become really cheap”. When asked to explain the processes by which this price reduction might happen, the resulting flow chart inevitably includes an “at this point a miracle occurs” (or two).
@Adolff LED lights actually make sense. Much more bang for your buck compared to fluorescent ( which isn’t even produced anymore in Eur’p..).
Not necessarily “Green” but there’s something to be said for Efficiency…
And the format they’re produced in means you can switch out the old panels with new LED 1:1, so there’s not even any need for any renovation/reconstruction..
Heat pumps… Not So Much… Quite the contrary, really. Thus Really Stupid Idea.
But if the good man needs to have his gas boiler serviced that often, he doesn’t just have a gas boiler, he’s got a damned old, inefficient one..
Modern gas boilers have very impressive efficiencies, and can take care of Creature Comforts on demand very well.
But then again… logic and efficiency are things the Green Zealots have severe objections against…
I saw a wonderful story recently. The chairman of a prohibitionist campaigning group in the 20s was charged with being drunk in public. He explained to a journalist “I was drinking in my private capacity”.
Why is the West (and really, only the West) so neurotic about a trace gas? Satellite observation of both land and ocean show an increase in plant life. More plants = more food, for animals and for humans.
Personally I think more life is a good thing. But I’m weird that way.
We need a Friends of CO2 Party.
‘And the format they’re produced in means you can switch out the old panels with new LED 1:1’
Well no Grikath. The damn things are generally made with screw fittings, instead of the bayonet fitting that God invented.
And, instead of being 1600 lumens, or 100 watts as God intended, the bastards generally emit less light and are proclaimed to be more efficient because they don’t give you what you want.
I think good old Ecks was wrong to just want to hang them. They should restart the fires of Smithfield again and burn them all at the stake.
Grikath: yes they are efficient. Yes the LEDs last for ever, but each unit has a small switched-mode power supply to produce the few volts they need to work, and those things fail with monotonous regularity. I’ve had LED downlighters in the kitchen since we last had it done 12 or so years ago. In that time I’ve had to replace most of them because the PSU has failed. Luckily that design is still available so I can easily do a like for like replacement. The totally annoying thing is, I could have bought just the PSU but they cost more than the combined unit!!
@Boganboy huh? You can get the things with any of the fittings, at any luminosity/wattage, at any basic light colour if you need the fitting type..
Have you specified for B22? ( for the pre-war(! :P) sockets) or GU[xx] for the modern equivalent in your quest on the vast Interwebz Seas?
I had no trouble finding 100Weq/1600Lm with B22 bajonet ranging from 3K to 6K pretending to be an Ozzie shopping on Amazon..
Not as much variety as the other fittings, but B22 bajonet is rather uncommon, if not totally obsolete, in many places nowadays..
@TG yup.. the PSU’s for the low voltage lines are a ….pain…
They’re the Weakest Link, and almost always mass-produced in Asia by the lowest bidder. Even more so for the Famed Named Brands..
Usually it’s the verrah cheep transformers that blow because they can’t handle the initial current peak. Either that or Tin Fingers *somewhere* because suddenly Lead is Lethal.
It’s why there’s a thriving LED driver market..
Personally I just DIY them for the purpose at hand. That’s what Velleman kits are for, just, as Boganboy states, As God Intended..
With proper tin/lead/resin solder, also as She Dictated. ( and no you can’t have my hoard… 😛 )
@dearime, prohibition was pushed by Bootleggers and Baptists so I imagine he was one of the first group
Easy to see who the baptists are for net zero, the bootleggers are the grant farmers skimming off the subsidies I suppose, lot of money to be made in net zero.
One of the crazy aspects to me is throwing away all the competitive advantages in car manufacturing and giving the Chinese a massive leg up by levelling the field with starting over on electric cars. Reminds me of when Japanese were starting to look at selling to Britain and the major manufacturers rationalised their dealership networks which gave the Japanese a leg up on building a dealership network by picking up the dropped dealerships
@Grikath
I’ve put in 12V sytems using single heavy duty transformer/rectifier. Last one I’ve bought was about £45 & ran a dozen downlighters. I actually spoke with the client recently & asked them their experience. They’d had a couple of light units needing replacing & that was it. That’s in 15 years
Main problem was the wiring. At 12V it’s carrying a lot of amps. And one has to calculate the resistances of the cables. If I remember rightly, it started with two 4mm singles from the transformer installation site in the top of a cupboard, dropped to 2.5’s after the split into two runs in the ceiling & down to 1mm’s about 2/3rds along the runs. The spurred out to individual lamps in 1mm. So the cabling was a significant part of the cost. On the other hand, I’ve no doubt that’s far less than it would have cost them an electrician replacing faulty PSU’s when required.
Oh & the chimp’s idea of economy of scale on heat pumps. Possibly on the pumps etc, themselves. But the installations? Best you could expect is the result of a bit of competition amongst increasing numbers of installers. But it’s the same story as solar. All the low hanging fruit of the easy installations will get done early. From there they’ll get progressively harder & costly as the complicated time consuming ones get done. At the top end of that, there’s really limit to the cost. You could see estimates for 100k. Cheaper to just go electric. But that’s not going to get any nearer Net Zero unless the entire grid’s fed with renewables, is it? Because it will always be the marginal generating capacity until the last fossil fuel generator.
Well yes Grikath. I naturally think I should be able to just walk down to the shops and buy what I want. After all, that was the way it worked when I was a boy, about three quarters of a century ago. (Wah, wah, wah!!! Rolls on the floor, bites the carpet.)
I suppose I’ll have to buy things on the net one of these days. The only light fittings I’ve bought from Amazon were bayonet to screw converters. They’re useful in allowing me to use such odd bulbs as I can find in the local shops.
Of course I’ve been buying ebooks on the web for years. But they’re different.
As you can see, I have this odd notion that the world should conform to my whim, rather than that I should conform to its whim. I suppose I’m a bit more like the Just Stop Oil idiots than I like to admit.
Oh yeah, NHS hospital up north to spend £30 million going green – heat pumps, LED bulbs etc
Heat pumps are very useful tools for some big buildings where we have been using them for more than 50 years. Hospitals “could” use them to cool the side of the building that is being heated by the sun and warm the side of the building that is in shade and for doing a bit of additional heating or cooling. However if you are going to be that smart you need to design the building around them. Retrofitting them to replace a hospitals boilers would be lunacy.
The German Good Party has just famously spent 5 million euros and several years finally getting a ground-source heat pump fitted to their modest central Berlin party HQ.
This is proof that everyone else can do the same.
Old boilers can be very reliable, perhaps new condensers one are as well now , not sure but the capability is there and longer term guarantees are available in the market again. But mid term boilers are terribly unreliable because of the requirement to use lead free solder which when used in the unadapted conventional tin plated PCBs of the time grows tin whiskers that cause shorts, often frying themselves in the process. This behaviour is massively exaggerated by putting electronics in the same housing the boiler as they then go through constant hot cold cycling – the latter is still an issue but you can harden against it. Lead in a boiler with a lifetime of 30+ years not much of an issue, new boiler every 5-7 years bit of an issue.
I was trying to get some performance data to do a look at the issues of insulation levels, mould issues and heat recovery systems and heat pumps and got nowhere so if anyone has dynamic performance charts for heat pumps and heat recovery systems do please post or link ’em.
Hypothesis – insulation requirements mean mechanical air circulation will be frequently required -> heat recovery (and bidirectional systems can help summer and winter). That means the ROI of the heatpump extends to the point its not worth having compared to plain old electric .
BiFR @ 08.07, you beat me to it re: the Greens heat pump. AFAIK it still isn’t working…..
And re: changing to LED’s – surely only makes sense when replacing failed / worn out bulbs. I bet these cunts will trash thousands of pounds worth of fully functioning stuff, buy ridiculously expensive new stuff and ignore the fact that the savings they get will take 20 years to cover the cost. By which time, the LED’s will be dead and new ones will be needed.
I still have faith that people will see the Emperors new clothes – the true data regarding how much it is going to cost them and how little (zero) difference it will make to Gaia. And tell the eco nutters and politicians to fuck off.
@Starfish – “The wheels are about to fall off”
What an optimist you are.
@Rupert
Their real goals are that the few of us that survive their policies should live in caves
Spot on. They want us back to pre-farming circa 10,000BC
@Boganboy
Live as their slaves
Yep plus exterminate all excess slaves
@Addolff
Re Richarrd Tice and NI Bloke (not the RoI loon):
https://youtu.be/_bVy1NraCdY?t=2805