Air Source Heat Pumps... Questions!

[littlespark]

Listening to the radio the other day, and UK govt has announce no new gas boilers to be sold by 2035 and everyone should go with ASHP... £5k grant to get one..Let me add... only england and wales. We'll stick with peat up here for now.
The following questions.
Probably easy to answer, but just pretend i'm an idiot for 5 minutes


They work by extracting any residual heat in the open air, compressing it and using it to heat the home.... so why are they outside and not inside, extracting already warmed air?

They dont work very well with microbore to radiators. The phone-in callers on the radio said they had to increase the pipe sizes, thus adding to the install costs. Also having to increase the sizes of many of their radiators.

The heat that comes out of these isn't as hot as a traditional boiler... so where do you get hot water? Immersion heater to top-up?

What i saw on a news programme, you get the unit outside... another inside, plus a water tank.. So takes up much more space than a wall mounted combi boiler, that can hide in a kitchen cabinet if need be. Not a lot of one bedroom flats have any space for such equipment.

And discuss.....

 

[marconi]

It is not the falling which hurts; it is the abrupt stop at the end of the fall which does. (Newton's less well known law he coined after falling out of an apple tree as a young man while scrumping).