I was recently in a situation where I had to replace my oil-fired heating system’s oil tank (it wasn’t double skinned and no longer safe).

It was £2500 to replace the oil tank, or I could opt for £2250 to install a heat pump with the government grant. This included all plumbing, electrical work, installation, and 6 new radiators all over my house.

Honestly to me it seemed like a no-brainer. It’s a tad more expensive to run, but it works really quite well and is a lot less invasive than a big smelly tank of kerosene. I gained another 90cm of width in my garden, it’s actually quieter than the oil boiler, and it doesn’t stink in the summer- win win.

Yes, it's just a lot of money for a lot of people.

Norway is really a different kind of rich compared to the rest of europe, they have tons of oil rights all over the world (and as such they still contribute a lot to global warming even though they have a lot of money for 'green' tech at home).

PS yeah Spain is good for heating but not for AC though (which I don't have, sadly). But I do enjoy life here a lot more even though I would make much more money in Holland.

A boiler should actually be lasting more like 20 years. I recently replaced my 20 year old one purely because if anything went wrong, it’d become an expensive/long job to fix as parts were hard to find, otherwise it was still running perfectly at its manufacture specified efficiency. Running them for 20 years isn’t uncommon.

I had a quote for a heat pump - £20k, plus the cost to replace 13 radiators, plus cost to replace pipework to support heat pump rads.

Pretty sure the government ‘incentive’ was £3k at the time. Doesn’t come remotely close!

UK houses are really interesting.. Single-glass windows, poor insulation etc. And plumbing on the OUTSIDE(!) :)

Are the boilers typically connected to water-radiators?.. I assume so based on the word "boiler".

There are heatpumps that are used to heat water so it would be a slot in replacement..

There is now an even easier way than vacuuming. Instead of pulling the unwanted air and moisture from the lines, you can push it out with another gas, which itself can somehow coexist with the refrigerant. I haven't tried it because I already have the pump and gauges, but if I were installing my first mini split, I'd consider it.

Example: https://www.highseer.com/products/pioneer-kwik-e-vac

Yeah, here they are used for AC in apartments. Unless for some weird reason they are electric heating... And even then for some reason we do not like them visible so they need to be hidden on balconies and like.

They are weird in the way that their utility varies.

IIRC Dave Jones of EEVBlog fame has shown a air-to-water heat exchanger that he has at his home. It's outside. And the climate in Sydney is generally warm(ish), so it makes perfect sense there.

I can also see them being useful in parts of the American South where big garages being common and the weather gets hot: Take some of the heat from the garage and convert it into hot water for showering and cleaning. Win-win.

But they're not so hot, per se, in my part of Ohio, where unfinished basements are commonly used as utility spaces.

My own basement, for instance: As unfinished basements go, it's pretty good. It's not a bad place to hang out and work on stuff any time of year. But it's a big space, and it's cold down there in the winter because I don't want to pay to warm it up. Despite being cold, that's really the most-suitable place for a conventional water heater for this house -- and it's where the house was designed to have it, too.

But if I were to "upgrade" to a heat-exchanger water heater, then as a practical matter I'd be making my already-cold basement even colder.

If it ever got cold-enough down there to make supplemental heat desirable (or worse: necessary), then it'd be an absolute loss: Burn energy over here in one place in the basement to try to keep it warm, and use that energy down the way a bit to concentrate into a tank full of hot water, while the basement stays cold.

Even if it I had a nice modern mini-split down there to provide that supplemental heat: That would mean having air-to-water heat exchanger that is backed up by an air-to-air heat exchanger that is already at the edge of its efficiency curve because it's cold outside. The combination would be reprehensibly dumb: A complicated Rube Goldberg system that costs more to buy, more to maintain, and more to run than approximately anything else would. (I might even be better off just burning my dollars directly.)

(The smarter move for my own home, in Ohio, would probably be a gas-fired tankless water heater, since they leak almost no heat while not being used.)