Martin shares his family’s decisions and experience of switching to an air source heat pump.
Over the last few years, we have been thinking about reducing our carbon footprint as have a lot of other people. The key changes that would have the most impact are moving to a more plant based diet, reducing the amount of travel fuelled by fossil fuels and replace our gas central heating system with an electric system.
Being farm members and choosing local food wherever possible helps with the first one. The second one is more difficult – we cycle as much as possible and I suppose at some point we will buy an electric car. But it is the third one that we have decided to tackle head on. We already buy our gas and electricity from Good Energy – they generate their electricity from their own wind farms and solar arrays. Our carbon footprint would reduce by about 60% if we move away from burning gas.
As I write this, we have heating engineers in the house taking out our gas boiler and replacing it with an air source heat pump. It is probably the wrong time of year to do it as we will be without heating for a few days this week!
The purpose of this blog is to share how we have got to this point and to let you know how the system operates. There has been a lot of negative press about heat pumps – they are said to be noisy and do not generate sufficient heat. We will soon find out if these claims are true or not. Watch this space!
Follow the next stage of the journey here.