Utility Week

UTILITY WEEK | FEBRUARY 2022 | 17 Heat costs, because this would excuse it from needing to bring down costs. "Lazy installation businesses will rely on finance to avoid being relentless about cost reductions," says Szymik. Two potential sticking points in the uptake of heat pumps could be the manage- ment of the voucher scheme itself, and the fact that houses receive a lower energy per- formance certificate (EPC) a€er having a heat pump installed. On both fronts the company has been working with the government, says Szymik. "We have been doing a lot of work with the government on the voucher scheme, we know they have learnt lessons from the Green Homes Grant." Heat pump development The second task of the R&D centre will be the construction of a proper lab facility which will include weather chambers that can be set to produce specific conditions that mimic real life, allowing developers to see how heat pumps would have performed during past weather events. Despite being a relatively mature technol- ogy, Octopus's head engineer for the electrifi- cation of heat, Peter Konowalczyk, says there is plenty of development still to be done. The company wants to work with smart control manufacturers to optimise them for use with heat pumps. It is also trying to influence manufactur- ers in how they design the controls of the heat pump itself, such as those for separate heating and hot water, because these will be critical for heat pumps to make full use of time-of-use tariffs. Already heat pump owners are turning their heat pumps off for short periods when the electricity price is highest to help reduce running costs. Octopus says the cost of running a heat pump has been reduced to the point where, on the company's Agile tariff, it is just 4% higher than gas, but real progress will not be made in this area until the cost of environ- mental levies are switched from electricity to gas, it says. The company also hopes to develop more sophisticated ways of varying a heat pump's electricity demand by varying the compres- sor speed. Szymik says buying direct from manu- facturers has already reduced the cost of the heat pumps themselves, which make up around half of the total price, by 40% but the company has not ruled out becoming a manufacturer itself one day in order to gain full control over component development. For the moment, R&D work is focused on immediate problems such as finding a solu- tion for the 7% of homes that have microb- ore pipes, and the 50% of homes without hot water storage and the 14% of homes that are flats. Despite traditionally not being seen as a heating solution for flats and high-rise build- ings, Konowalczyk says it is perfectly feasi- ble to connect up individual tenants using an indoor heat pump connected to outside in the future. A€er that, the focus will be on decreasing the size of heat pumps and improving their aesthetics. "It is difficult to make a heat pump even more efficient, but we can make it smaller. The focus for the past 10 years has been on efficiency, but now that we have reached [a coefficient of performance] of five, that is enough," says Konowalczyk. Lucinda Dann, features editor Octopus has mocked up typical three-bed houses at its Slough R&D centre to better train hundreds of heat pump installation engineers Centre of attention: a heat pump

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