The military is shunning heat pumps and instead warming soldiers’ homes with cutting-edge electric boilers that cost less to run.
Ministry of Defence (MoD) officials have been working on “Project Nixie” since 2020, The Telegraph can reveal, focusing on finding alternatives to heat pumps for barracks.
Much of the MoD’s domestic building stock is not suitable for heat pumps, which have only been fitted in a “very small proportion” of military homes.
An MoD spokesperson said that the project was launched to find a cheaper alternative to heat pumps, which require comprehensive and expensive work to a property before installation.
And, erm, are they cheaper for everyone? If so, why isn’t that being shouted from the rooftops?
Because politicians are unbelievably stupid? Talking to my contacts in the Snivl Service, it really is unbelievable how stupid most of them are. And narrow minded. Greta screams and shouts and the kids, indoctrinated all their lives, believe her. So many people have made so much money from it the lure is irresistible.
How often you use it is very relevant to it’s true cost. Were it only to be used a few days a year, the capital cost of the install and the annual maintenance bill would make any potential savings in electricity consumption irrelevant.
Furthermore with this sort of usage it’s not improbable that conventional electric heating could also have a lower carbon footprint.
Cheaper alternative to heat pumps . $64 000 question: compared to what?
Compared to purchase and installation costs?
But are running costs cheaper than gas? Answer: no.
As always, instead of specifying an outcome, the Greenies pick a solution and demand it’s subsidised!
I haven’t analysed the thermodynamic cycle, and I don’t know the duty cycle, but it’s worth a look. As with all electric solutions, it requires cheap and reliable electricity. So that’s windmills and solar panels ruled out then 🙁
When you strip the “cutting-edge electric boilers ” of the advertising bullshit, they’re large, well insulated hot water tanks with immersion heaters, plus (maybe) the ability to use a solar thermal source. What makes them cheap to run is solar PV in the summer and time of use electricity tariffs that let the tank be heated up when electricity is cheap (or even free or negative cost), and it’s then used as a heat store for both hot water and running the radiators. Without PV & TOU tariffs they’d be appallingly expensive compared to heat pumps.
The other factor is the usual capex/opex trade off. Heat pumps often involve considerable up front costs for replacing radiators and the hot water tank, plus the necessary plumbing, but then are cheaper to run than alternatives.
@John B : cheaper than gas? It depends!
If it relies on a high temperature heat resevoir it could be very good at buffering demand for the majority of the year when heating is mainly required at night. Not so good in the depths of winter.
I don’t think the general public realises yet just how much they’re going to fucking hate heat pumps and curse their miserable, shitty existence every day.
They’ll learn. Heat pumps are worse than seeing Michael Gove scurry through your garden at midnight with a chewed up human femur in his slavering mouth.
The proposed system depends on cheaper off peak electricity for its economy. But if the systems proliferate, there won’t be cheaper off peak electricity, will there? That depends on a reduction in demand off peak & this will increase off peak demand. As will overnight recharging of electric cars & all the other “smart” ideas. You can’t timeshift if there’s nowhere to timeshift to.
And it certainly isn’t going to solve intermittency.
There is no plan for continual, reliable, all year round, electricity supply to meet demand. At some point you’re going to have to wake up & face it. Or you’re going to be sitting in the cold & dark.
Depends if you factor in running costs?
Assuming an electric boiler costs ~£2k done and dusted. For average MoD property it could cost >£20k for an ASHP with appropriate insulation, new pipework, radiators etc. Up front. So that’s potentially >£18K to offset against the cost of the extra electricity. Installing PVA and batteries to harvest off peak would reduce the cost further. Given the working lifetime of an ASHP that’s close to £1k per year toward electricity cost…
The op says they cost £5k to install ‘about the same as a gas boiler’. £3-4k for a new combi and install is about right for a 3 bed house. Prob mod doest pay VAT so it’s really £6k not £5.
But it then it also says they cost £20k each.
Anyhow it’s just rebranded economy 7 electric heating like what I had in my flat in the 80s and that was shite.
Another crap solution in the name of green progress.
You can get phase change stores and radiators now which therefore aren’t red hot lumps all the time and the stored energy can be tapped as required.
Gas is much cheaper overall though.
Oil is cheaper than gas I reckon, and something like 20% the cost of leccy. But they’re trying to take oil away from us too. Even tho an ecologically friendly drop in replacement exists (hydrogenated vegetable oil).
They can take my wife’s Aga from my cold, dead hands. I’m getting a heat pump in the year Never, on the date of Fuck Off.
Its MoD, I wouldn’t rely on them to have done a good job in the trials and follow up assessment.
One of the quarters I had on Blandford Camp in the late ’80s was in a purpose built estate. They been built with a hot air heating system that was warmed overnight on Economy 7 rates. It was basically a pile of insulated bricks.
In winter it wouldn’t heat the house beyond 7pm, even when we were careful.
They can take my wife’s Aga from my cold, dead hands.
No Steve. You’d meekly acquiesce when they came into your house & removed it with a court order.
(Or more likely, remove it yourself under threat)
BiS – Lol
You don’t know Steve. x
All things being equal, if you’re starting from scratch then heat pumps make sense – after all, 1kW of leccy in can transfer up to 4kW of heat from one place to another. Not only that, you can use them in reverse for all the 40C UK summers Greta guarantees us within 2 years. (But it screws the Gov targets so all eligable subsidised units ship with this disabled)
However, add in a minimum wage and the need for humans to actually install these things, a good wedge of overhead to pretend these devices cost more in the UK than RoW, government paperwork, government accreditation, plus the fact the vast majority of housing stock isn’t simply unplug gas boiler and replace with heat pump (plenty of radiator pipes and actual radiators are often too small for the lower temps these things run at) and all of a sudden, it costs an uneconomic fortune!
Call me a simpleton, but it does strike me that with a little thought you could devise either a combined gas heater/heat pump or electric heater/heat pump that eliminated many of the difficulties of relying on a heat pump alone e.g. the need to re-pipe.
A simple competition for engineering undergraduates could probably produce first-proposal designs that could be reworked into something useful.
Dm – sounds like hybrid cars, i.e. unnecessary additional complexity and cost giving you the worst of both worlds.
Boilers already work, so let’s use them.
BiND,
The officers’ accommodation at Chicksands still runs on storage heaters (it’s Grade D, so poor they can’t charge us for it…) in the “Chechen Village”.
Of course, since reservists get shoehorned into the unused rooms… you’ll arrive on Friday to a sub-zero cabin, with the storage heaters just as cold as the rest of the room.
The first time that happens, you end up running everything electrical, even your iron, as improvised heaters to try to get the temperature into double digits.
The second and subsequent times, you get the cheap fan heater you brought with you and use that to warm yourself and your room up. Even if someone had turned the heaters on the day before, they were basically useless.
(Oh, and you washed, shaved, showered etc. at your own risk after running the taps for at least five minutes, since they kept finding Legionella in the water supply…)
Other sites no better – HMS Collingwood’s hit the national news, with some of the blocks so bad the Second Sea Lord personally came down to condemn them as unfit for habitation.
The state of much of the military estate is genuinely shocking, and getting worse.
The state of much of the military estate is genuinely shocking, and getting worse.
The British Army now numbers just 75,983 people (oh dear) and recruitment is in free fall.
But they’re focusing on the critical, strategic issues:
Day three of DSEI began with a discussion regarding a critical question for the British armed forces, “How does the Army increase recruitment of women and minorities?” The question is a strategic one and at the forefront of the Ministry of Defence’s priorities
They’re so horribly confused by Diversity that they’re starting to mix up good signs with bad:
Though challenges abound, [Major General Tom Bewick OBE] began by citing some positive trends: there is no gender imbalance in basic training completion rates among men and women, and the Army is retaining more women than men in the long term
Tom Berwick is the General Officer Commanding, Army Recruiting and Initial Training Command (ARITC).
Does anyone want to tell Major General Tom Berwick OBE? Not that there’s any point, a man with an OBE and a Major General’s pension is never going to understand things that would threaten his OBE and pension.
On a positive note, all this Diversity bollocks and the complete lack of any serious effort to increase the size of the army or its depleted weapons stockpile proves our rulers don’t actually believe we’ll go to war with Russia.
You don’t know Steve. x
I would suggest I do, Steve. Keyboard warriors are ten a penny.
You people are going to be stuffed unless you do something about it And very soon. But to do that, you need to work together. One thing’s for sure. Confronted by numbers & force, the State always backs down.
BiS – I would suggest I do, Steve. Keyboard warriors are ten a penny.
Ok, you’re the expert.
You people are going to be stuffed unless you do something about it And very soon. But to do that, you need to work together. One thing’s for sure. Confronted by numbers & force, the State always backs down.
Going to be? “¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ”
Forget it, BiS. It’s Clowntown.
It’s the town you’ve made.
It’s the town you’ve made.
Narp, it’s got nothing to do with me.
That, of course, being the problem
That, of course, being the problem
Mate, you live in Spain.
Don’t lecture me. x
Yeah. I live somewhere where the people will challenge the State. Regularly. Although not enough for my liking. I’m soon off somewhere where the State is scared shitless of the people. There’s whole areas where it daren’t go.
@bloke in spain – “overnight recharging of electric cars ”
It makes much more sense to charge electric cars during the day as you get the benefits of two effects. Firstly, the sun is shining, so we have solar power available to help satisfy the demand. And secondly, for many people their cars can be charged at work, where there are likely to be greater concentrations of vehicles, making it easier to arrange for adequate infrastructure rather than having to supply extra power to every home.
@ BiS
So, you’re off to Sweden – handily we won’t need to change the short version of your name. Not sure I’d pitch in with the darkie’s however just to see things kick off.
Sweden! FO! I did Sweden. One word. Mosquitoes. And don’t knock darkies. You’ll upset my house slave..
>And, erm, are they cheaper for everyone? If so, why isn’t that being shouted from the rooftops?
Because they’re cheaper to install – not to run.
And these people ‘look to the future’ so they ignore the massive upfront costs of installing a heat pump and focus on the ‘savings’ you’ll get – well, really, whoever inherits your home will get – some decades down the line, after you’ve paid off the heat pump install.
To a large extent, it makes sense to put a heat pump into new construction – not so much to refit it into old. But they don’t care about that.
Planner, eh?
>The British Army now numbers just 75,983 people (oh dear) and recruitment is in free fall.
This can’t be real. Its smaller than the USMC.
Good lord it is!
They been built with a hot air heating system that was warmed overnight on Economy 7 rates. It was basically a pile of insulated bricks.
We had one of these in a mid-70s house share. One night it ran amok (I guess the thermostat failed and maybe the timer as well) and when we came down in the morning, it was glowing cherry red inside. Fortunately we weren’t paying the bills. An even more bizarre system was an earlier house share on a new terrace in Thame. The heating was (I kid you not) electric elements buried in the ceiling. As there was an open stairway in the living room, the top two inches of downstairs were reasonably warm, but upstairs was nice and toasty! Utterly bonkers.
@Agammamon – you’re entirely right – here in NZ we did a new build in 2016 (and they are mainly bespoke in NZ) with an inverter (heat and aircon), a gas fire (traditional) and the main heat was underfloor air to water heat pump hydronic heating. It’s the toastiest home in winter. And economical to run.
And of course the commonly built open plan living areas so commonly built into NZ homes means a heat pump will warm up your living spaces and kitchen. Quite a lot of new homes have heat pump driven all house aircon – either warm or cool – with airducts in the roof space and vents in most rooms. (I should say also that most NZ homes are single story). Wood burners are widely used and heat transfer systems (again using roof space ducts). piped gas less common – we have 90kg gas bottles for the fire and cooking.
I just remember how the MoD managed to F-up the old triad electric billing and reckon they’ll again make all the wrong decisions under the new regime…
https://www.edfenergy.com/large-business/talk-power/blogs/targeted-charging-review-tcr-getting-grips