On 29/09/2019 19:03, Steve Walker wrote:
On 29/09/2019 18:02, ARW wrote:
On 29/09/2019 17:27, Steve Walker wrote:
On 29/09/2019 14:01, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
In article ,
Â*Â*Â* Steve Walker wrote:
It is new build at the moment, but as the market shrinks,
manufacturers
will stop making gas boilers, even if governments don't ban them
completely - look how quickly 4* and then LRP disappeared, leaving
people with older, maybe classic vehicles having to use unsuitable
unleaded petrol.
My old car is 35 years old, yet runs happily on standard unleaded.
Any old
vehicle may need some adaptation to be used today anyway.
But are you saying there was no need to ban the use of lead in
things like
petrol? Just another nutty 'green' thing?
What I said was that 4* was phased out, but Lead Replacement Petrol
followed pretty quickly after. Garages simply stopped stocking it, as
sales declined. If new builds cannot have gas boilers, it is likely
that one at a time, manufacturers will stop making them. A point will
then rapidly be reached where they are not available - leaving people
with a failed boiler with a major problem.
https://www.theccc.org.uk/wp-content...tober-2016.pdf
So there are still 23m houses with gas boilers that are not new builds.
Yes, amd that document looks at moving existing housing stock away from
gas boilers - suggesting hybrid systems with a heat pump combined with a
small, top-up boiler (so even more complex and expensive) to adequately
heat existing homes; conversion to Hydrogen (a far more dangerous gas
than natural gas); and more loan facilities to allow people to replace
with heat pumps and upgrade insulation (still a lot more cost for
households - assuming they have a sufficiently good credit rating to
obtain such a loan). It is clear that, although not immediately, they do
intend to move everyone away from natural gas boilers - which will leave
many people, some years down the line, with only a very expensive,
complex and slow to install upgrade instead of a simple replacement, for
a boiler failure.
SteveW
There is actually one precedent for a relatively quick change of
technology, and that that was the London Clean Air Act of 1956 (four
years after the big 1952 smog). As a kid, out two main coal fires were
replaced with Rayburns burning smokeless fuel, one with a back boiler.
That, with the new galvanised hot tank with immersion heater replaced
the open burner "geyser" in the bathroom too. Actually, I don't see why
it should be particularly difficult to design an air source heat pump to
run a modern wet plumbing system although it is going to be quite a bit
bigger than a modern 24 to 36 kW gas boiler. You can potentially hang
quite a lot of the "works" outside with the heat exchanger, of course.
As with diesel cars, it makes more sense to let existing boilers "wear
out" rather than having a use ban date.