Choosing Infrared Heating Over Heat Pumps

I’d seen infrared heaters being promoted, we were interested and decided to try and do some comparisons with using heat pumps. Now we had enough space here to do a ground source heat pump, but when we started looking at the cost, it was just eye watering. Even an air source heat pump, because we’d had to take all the original heating system out of the house, it was all furred up. Some of the radiators didn’t have any heat going to them at all, it was in a terrible state, so it all had to come out.

The first obstacle was really if we’d gone for an air source heat pump, we would have wanted to put underfloor heating in but the biggest challenge we’ve had with this house has been the floors they’re all solid floors throughout, it’s not really practical to get sufficient insulation into them to make underfloor heating, a practical proposition. So, we ruled out underfloor heating, which made us a bit twitchy about having an air source heat pump. Because this is an open plan living space, we haven’t got a lot of free wall area to put radiators on.

And the big realisation that we came to was that for the price for what it would cost to put an air source heat pump in, a complete wet system,  we could have infrared panels  plus  a complete solar panel and battery system, as it’s turned out, the solar panel and battery system plus the infrared panels are probably a little bit more expensive than an air source heat pump, but it’s not wildly different.

One of the frustrations about producing a very well insulated home is that.  If you put something like an air source heat pump in, you’re spending a lot of money on something that hopefully you’re not going to be using very much.  Whereas by putting most of the money into solar panels and batteries, they’re bringing benefit every day of the year, right the way through the summer and the winter.

By having infrared panels, we’ve got no maintenance costs. We’ve got a much greater degree of control over them; we can turn individual panels on and off whenever we want. We also haven’t got a whole heating system to heat up; we haven’t got all the issues associated with wet heating systems. So, the ongoing running costs – not just the energy costs, but the maintenance and the upkeep costs – are also going to be much lower. I think we really want to, in the future, exploit as much as we can that great controllability that you’ve got from being able to switch on and off each individual panel almost, certainly by room.

The full testimonial can be heard on the video here.