Installing a heat pump now costs around £15,000. Credit: SolStock/E+
Major heat pump supplier attacks SNP – Green plans to use them to replace gas-fired boilers in Scotland, warning that parts of the country are too cold for them to operate.
Lord Willie Haughey, a business tycoon, said the heating system was unsuitable for the Scottish climate, as its performance was noticeably reduced in freezing weather.
Labor Party colleagues said that some devices may stop working properly when temperatures of -5°C (23°F) or require more electricity to run properly, resulting in higher bills.< /p>
It was -15°C in parts of Scotland last winter and the country holds the record for the most low temperature in the UK: -27.2°C at Braemar in Aberdeenshire in 1982 and at Altnaharr in Sutherland in 1995.
The multimillionaire who owns a heat pump company also warned that they are noisy and only heat water to 54 C (129.2 F) — less than the 60 C recommended by the Health and Safety Administration for killing legionella bacteria.
< p>His intervention comes after Patrick Harvey, minister for the Scottish Greens, last week unveiled plans for houses that would receive lower environmental ratings if they were heated with gas-fired boilers.
From 2025, homes will be required to achieve an EPC rating of C or higher at certain trigger points, including sale, meaning that some properties with boilers will be banned from the market.
A strategy published by Ministers in 2021 said the average cost to install a heat pump is around £10,000, four times the £2,500 cost of a new fossil fuel boiler. Lord Haughey said the cost is now £15,000.
Air based heat pumps work by extracting heat from the air, while ground pumps are powered by cables buried quite deep in the ground close to home.
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The pump then uses electricity to convert that energy into heat for the home. They were originally designed as air conditioning systems.
Lord Haughey, who made his millions in the global refrigeration business, said: “I own a heat pump company and after Patrick Harvey's statement, I really should be jumping for joy.
“But the truth is that heat pumps don't work as efficiently in Scotland as they do elsewhere.”
Legionnaires' disease
He said it was due to the colder climate and warned that “Legionnaires' disease can develop with more low temperatures in hot water supply systems.
Lord Haughey added: “My staff always tell me that I should not criticize our core system. business, but that's the ecological nonsense that the greens sell. I'd like to challenge Patrick Harvey to a scientific debate.”
The mogul also said that heat pumps are so noisy that if they were in eight or ten neighboring houses, the sound would be louder as a result. “rattle windows.”
He called them “ugly and bulky” and said they left a bigger scar on the house than a satellite dish.
A Scottish government official said: “About 20 per cent of Scotland's carbon dioxide emissions come from heating our buildings. This means that the only way to cope with the climate emergency is if we make our buildings energy efficient and move away from fossil fuel heating.
“It will also cut costs for all of us in the long run and make us less dependent on unstable and increasingly expensive fossil fuels.”
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