Heat Pump Month blog series – Are there any buildings you can’t heat with a heat pump?

As part of Heat Pump Month, we’re publishing a series of blogs to highlight just some of the common questions and brilliant benefits of using a heat pump to heat your home or business.

This blog looks at one of our most asked questions – whether you can use a heat pump to heat any building.

When it comes to heat pumps, there are many misconceptions around the age, size and style of property that can be heating using this technology. The great news is that any property CAN be heated by a heat pump – either air source or ground source.

Keeping a building warm is simply a matter of matching the energy that escapes with sufficient energy going in. As heat pumps can be sized to almost any level, any building can be heated using a heat pump system. The project will require the heat emitters (radiators) in any room to be sized correctly in order for the system to work effectively, but this will be done as part of the system design.

Guy Ransom, commercial director of Finn Geotherm, explains:

“There are no enclosed buildings whose heat loss cannot be matched via the combination of a correctly designed heat pump generation system and appropriately sized special heat emitters.

“As it’s very simplest form, any building is simply a box with a heat loss. The task of a heat pump installer is simply to assess that heat loss and ensure that it is matched by the rate of input of heat emitters.”

EPCs and insulation

In addition, it’s also good to know that low EPC ratings and levels of insulation are not a barrier to a heat pump installation. Again, it is simply a question of your installer specifying a heat pump system with a correctly sized heat pump and heat emitters (radiators), which will heat the property to the required temperature, while matching the energy input needed with the energy loss.

Period properties

During their 15+ years of installing heat pumps, Finn Geotherm has carried out an abundance of projects at cottages, farmhouses, large country estates and period properties. Each time, leaving the customer with not only a warm feeling about cutting fuel bills and reducing carbon emissions by stepping away from fossil fuels, but also with the warm feeling of having their house properly heated for the first time.

Heat pumps are perfectly suited to period properties. These systems work at their most effective rate when they provide steady state low level heating, meaning that you can leave them on to maintain a lovely warm home while still achieving significantly low energy bills. Older properties in particular can benefit from this sort of warmth and a consistent temperature also helps to maintain the condition of your property and your possessions inside it.

Sitting pretty

Another great benefit of a ground source heat pump system is that, once installed, you can’t actually see it, meaning that stunning homes and workplaces aren’t impaired by having a new heating system installed which requires something like an oil tank to store fuel. Heat pumps can be put in without impacting the visual appearance of the property, with the ground loop simply running underneath a lawn or driveway.

This is why Finn Geotherm has been able to successfully heat a huge range of buildings – from castles to cabins and everything in between – all with no need for supplementary or back up heating. See our case studies for examples of the large variety of properties where we’ve successfully installed heat pumps.

Can we heat it with a heat pump? Yes, we can!

We’d love to talk to you about your project.

1st July 2021