Pete, Cambridgeshire: lives in a new-build detached six-bed house that came with a heat pump
[.text-size-large]“On the day we moved in it was -9 degrees and we had the doors open all day while we were moving in. We shut everything up at 6pm but the house had got cold. I didn’t understand how the tech worked, so I didn’t touch anything. It took about two days for the house to get up to temperature and my initial thoughts were ‘This isn’t going to work.’ But Googling I found that the house is basically a large heat sink – when you get the building to the right temperature it maintains it.”[.text-size-large]
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“It’s a different way of working to a boiler. I like to imagine it like a car – a gas boiler will race up to the temperature and coast down, burning a lot of energy; a heat pump gradually builds up to a constant speed and then maintains it. So if your home is insulated you can maintain that heat, then it’s fine. In the winter we were able to achieve a constant 22 to 23 degrees in the large rooms.
It is pretty quiet – we never really hear it. You only notice if we are next to it in the garden and it comes on.”
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