Theway government grants work in UK is, the richer you are, the more you get from the government. They freauently are offset against your taxable income, so they are most effective if you are in highest tax bracket.

Conversely, poorest people rent the shittiest and least efficient homes, but they don't have the choice to replace the heating system - that's the landlorsa decision. But he doen't pay the utilities, the tenants do, so why would he care?

The grants I have see now e.g Finland seem to be a straight grant of €4000 which gets you almost all the way to a decent heat pump.

These are cash grants not deductions (as they should be! They are covering a one-time cost!)

This is for single family detached homes (which are almost invariably owned)

Retrofitting is going to be much more than the cost of the unit itself though. You can't just replace an on-demand gas boiler with a heat pump. The rest of the heating system is completely different between the two, it just wouldn't work. It's especially problematic in apartments where there is limited space.

But we (Nordics) replaced all our oil pans. I naively thought it was the same thing just oil instead?

A boiler makes hot water in a tank in the basement and showers, radiators and taps use that hot water?

I have seen (In Scotland) some extremely weird contraptions where water was heated in the shower by what I can only assume was an flame in a box on the wall. But surely that’s not what Germans and others on the continent are using? They do have a central hot water system?

How else is water coming to the radiators? I guess my question is: are there gas lines around a typical home to any other place than the boiler and possibly stove? Why?

The main issue is that a heat pump takes a lot longer to heat up water on demand than a gas boiler. A gas boiler as used in the UK typically has a heat output of 25 to 50kW. Where as a heat pump for the same sized home can produce maybe 8kW of heat - given the right outside weather conditions.

The gas boiler can directly heat up cold water and provide sufficient flow for a hot shower, but the heat pump cannot. Because of this you need to buffer the heat in a hot water tank, usually something that's a few hundred litres, and heat it up over time. I believe boilers using heating oil work somewhat sim

In the UK houses heated with gas usually don't have a hot water tank, or even anywhere to put it. You can get all-in-one heat pump units that are the size of a large fridge which have a built in tank, but I've lived in places where there wouldn't even be space for that.

The boxes in the showers used in the UK are electric. They work pretty well (esp. considering most homes in the UK are single phase), but I am always concerned by the fact that an electric wire carrying 30kW of power is running right next to running water :-) Other than a gas boiler older homes may have a gas fireplace, but they are not so popular now.

There's also issues of the flow temperature for the heating system. Traditional central heating usually has a temperature of 70-80C, where as underfloor heating systems using a heat pump usually have a max of 35C. With a heat pump the efficiency drops with the temperature delta, so they are optimised to produce lower temperature water. But traditional radiators work better with higher temperatures.

Yes by heat pump I mean one of those fridge size things. They include hot water tanks. I have one of those and it’s around €4-5000 eur so within the grant money from a scrapped oil burner. Mine produces both 50deg water for radiators and 35deg for underfloor via an electronic shunt (about €500 extra) because I have underfloor heating on one floor and radiators on the upper floor.

It also connected directly to 4 pipes hot/cold tap and hot/cold radiator water making an easy swap.

Are you saying the space requirement of 60x60x180cm would really be the problem?

> But he doen't pay the utilities, the tenants do, so why would he care?

When you talk rent in London the first question asked tends to be "bills included?". This suggests to me that a non-trivial number of landlords would be interested in efficiency. Anecdotal, I don't have the data for the whole UK.

> When you talk rent in London the first question asked tends to be "bills included?".

In my entire life I have only seen bills included in properties that were rented room by room, i.e. each room has a different tenant. I have never seen that for entire property rented to a single tenant

> When you talk rent in London the first question asked tends to be "bills included?".

is this something new? i have been renting in London for almost a decade and I have never heard of a landlord or agency offer to pay my bills.

> Not sure what your point is: once no fossil fuel is used to heat Europe (which has to be very soon), something else will. The replacement could be anything but it seems unlikely to be coming from Siberia.

Thank you for putting this more clearly than I could.

Europe's got to move to more heat pumps and more industrial use of electricity to be greener. Then the question becomes: where is the best source of that electricity?

Maybe some of it can be very efficient natural gas plants-- especially if power-to-gas provides viable to eat up solar surpluses during the day. But nuclear is a good thing to have in the mix, too.

I am curious how well the new Lithium free batteries CATL is working on will perform at 10% extra volume and half as expensive they could be enough to make power-to-gas to expensive.

Yup, battery improvements may neutralize power-to-gas --- though there's a lot of reasons to consider it as useful (in addition to gas-to-power there's a whole lot of users of natural gas and not all may be easily retrofitted).

Still, I think a share of decent, predictable base load makes everything easier, and that's where nuclear can shine.