One year with a heat pump

It's the first anniversary of our air source heat pump install. It's been good:

• our house is more comfortable;
• our bills have dropped by £500/year; and
• we're not burning gas anymore.

Cost savings

We've aimed to optimise running costs. It's tricky to compare this year to last year: our electricity unit cost went up around 10%, but maybe the weather has been warmer than last year.

Perhaps the most telling indicator is that our energy supplier has asked us to drop our monthly payments by ~£44/month, saving us £525 in the year.

If that turns out to be accurate, we will recoup the cost of the install in a touch over 7 years.

Energy use

On average we now use 4.3 kWh a day to heat the house and hot water. The heat pump uses that energy to generate 14 kWh of energy because...magic.

Of course there's a huge variation in that:

Efficiency

The efficiency across the season has averaged out to give us 3.29 times the energy we put in. The lowest was early on at 2.16 times and the highest we saw was 5.34. 

I don't have a good intuition for how that is working out, as it increased rapidly in the autumn:

Comfort

The heat from the radiators is gentle. The house is a lovely temperature without it being "hard on the nose". I don't have the language to describe it. I like it.

It was a good decision to replace the gas boiler

We're happy, and it was worth the disruption.