Politics, (renewable) Heating and Gas
As Registered Gas Safe Heating Engineers, both Ben and Stewart (with a W) have a wealth of conversation starters (and nearly 30 years experience in the game) about all things under the sun. Including Solar power!!
We are the hosts of this podcast that brings a serious conversation about the UK's heating/renewable and energy policies with a variety of guests as well as discussing politics in general. Some religion may be discussed as well.
Hitting a streaming service on your phone fortnightly! (or possibly weekly. Still to be decided =)
Politics, (renewable) Heating and Gas
The Heating Industry Uncovered: A Conversation with Nathan Gambling
Our longest podcast yet!!
But well worth listening to the end.
Get ready to turn up the heat with our guest, Nathan Gambling: heating industry expert, master plumber, and host of the podcast Beta Talk. Let Nathan's passion ignite your curiosity as he shares his family legacy, starting with his grandfather's pioneering work in domestic central heating. We explore the fascinating science of heat, the evolution of the industry, and the indispensable role of thermostats and TRVs.
As we shift gears, we tackle the implications of the government's ambitious plan to install 600,000 heat pumps a year, and how this affects us all. Nathan unravels the complexities of boilers and heat pumps, and how heating system efficiency can significantly impact the environment. We also take a deep dive into the crowded domestic heating market, discussing the hurdles faced by heating engineers as they adapt to rapidly evolving technologies.
Finally, we touch on the critical role of training and qualifications in the heating industry. Nathan shares his own journey transitioning to a City & Guilds course and offers invaluable advice to apprentices. We discuss the future of renewable energy in the heating sector, exploring the distinctions between solar PV and solar thermal. By the end of this episode, you'll be well-versed in the regulatory landscape of the heating industry, the potential of hybrid systems, and the future of heating systems. Join us on this enlightening journey with Nathan Gambling!
Hello and thank you very much for once again listening to our podcast Politics, Renewable Heating and Gas. And today, Stuart is not here yet. Hopefully we'll be, but we do have an amazing guest, Nathan Gambling, and I'll allow him to do the introductions so that I don't miss anything else. Nathan, who are you and where are you from?
Nathan:Firstly, I know nothing about politics. By the way, I don't know if you're going down there.
Nathan:So my name is Nathan Gambling. I run a podcast called Beta Talk which is all about renewable heating. I started that up about I think four years ago and the reason I started it up was to amplify the voice of good heating engineers. Because as people are now talking about heating ends, the carbonizing heating process, around the wider discourse of climate change, I realized that there was a missing voice. People weren't really talking to the on the ground cold face engineers. So that's the reason I started the podcast.
Nathan:I do a bit of consultancy, so I consult for Nesta, I informally chat to the Department of Energy Security at Xero quite a lot, etc. Etc. So I started plumbing in 86, 87, I think it was. I did my apprenticeship with the Ministry of Defence. My friends were describing as a lazy plumber back then. I think I was more interested in going to raves back in the 90s but I got into teaching so I was asked. I've got a degree in behavioral psychology so I got asked to teach in a prison in 2006. It was the first UK prison to teach plumbing. The sitting gives level three to 2006,. 2007. Taught in various colleges and yeah, so I get sort of described as this sort of expert in heating.
Nathan:I never liked that where there's hundreds of women and men out there doing heating the way better than me, I suppose my, my, I suppose my, my niches. It was my grand. My granddad was one of the sort of the forefathers of domestic central heating. So he was venerated throughout Europe as being his very good combustion engine, especially with oil. He was. He said he had no peer when it came to oil combustion. So places like Sweden, all the scandal. There was large archipelagos, lots of lots of islands, so they couldn't really have an extensive gas grid when domestic heating because you can't really lay lots of gas pipes under the water. So they went oil. So they were a very big domestic heaters, a lot of oil, and he helped the Swedish develop their technology. That's kind of kind of me and I suppose now this is Sorry, sorry, Nathan.
Stewart:Hi, can you see me?
Ben:Yes, hi, stuart, hi, I'm.
Stewart:Nathan. Hi, I'm Nathan, all right.
Ben:Very well so if anyone, anyone that's forgotten. Stuart is our co-host. Nathan has got some dogs. There's the crying one, yeah. That's three dogs, nathan, that's three more than I'd ever have in my own house.
Nathan:Well, this is my house, this is my daughter and I'm living on just back. I'm babysitting the dogs while I've been out.
Ben:Yeah, right, yeah, sorry about being late guys.
Stewart:My kid just snuck everywhere.
Ben:Oh, and I think this is our first opportunity to wish you congratulations, stuart, for your new baby. Thank you, congrats, thank you, thank you, thank you. Nathan was just telling us a bit about himself and about where he came from and why he's considered the expert in the heating industry.
Stewart:Yeah.
Ben:So, nathan, do you want to crack on from there?
Nathan:I think we'll go from the next arrival time We'll go to the dogs to get settled.
Ben:Okay.
Nathan:Give me.
Stewart:Give you what I say.
Nathan:They run straight up saying that was my daughter Perfect.
Ben:So these are her dogs Fantastic.
Nathan:So, yes, stuart, we've never met before, I don't think have we.
Stewart:No, I don't think so.
Nathan:Do you also enjoy plumbing and heating in the London area?
Stewart:No, I'm based in Manchester now. Oh, you're a Manchester.
Nathan:Yes, and how did you two meet? How did you two meet?
Stewart:We used to work together Must have been in 2015.
Ben:Yeah, when, stuart, I think you first got married. Yeah.
Stewart:You decided to move to London.
Ben:Yeah, I think it's a mancunian mistake. I know so many people who decide to move to London and make it big, and then they'd realise London's too expensive and they moved back up to Manchester. Yeah, yeah, so that's what you did, but I think we worked together for a year, didn't we? Yeah, and we've kept up the friendship, so that works out really well.
Stewart:Yeah.
Ben:And we call each other on nearly a weekly basis to complain about various jobs that we can't believe ever happened.
Stewart:Yes.
Ben:But so, nathan, you were saying that you were the, that you don't know why you became known as the heating expert. But I mean, I definitely see you as a heating expert.
Nathan:So Well, you know I don't like that word. It's because I've got a podcast, I've got a voice, quite an authoritative voice. You know I could say that people in the department will listen to that podcast, sort of evidence, sort of professional development type thing. But it doesn't mean I'm this great, great heating expert. My advantage, I suppose, is I kind of know the science of heat, which is possibly something our industry is lacking. So, whether that's engineers, manufacturers, even technical directors, in some of the working for some of the manufacturers, we kind of seem to have lost touch with the science of heat and why certain things were introduced into this industry.
Nathan:So things like all stats, all thermostats and TRVs were not introduced as energy efficiency devices. They were introduced into the homes because we were always pushing heat into a home far too quickly. So we needed something to turn it off, turn the heat off. Otherwise you'd be in and up and down at your chair all day long turning the heating on, turn it off, turn it off. So we had a switch on the wall put on the wall to do that for us. And that's because when we design heating systems we design them to be able to push heat into the home quick enough for when it's outside design temperature, and outside design temperature in the UK is minus three. So if we've got heat that's quick enough to go into our room to match the speed of heat leaving our home when it's minus three. And let's say we need your 80 degrees to do that back in the 1960s. When it's nine degrees outside, you only need now half the speed. You only needed 50 degree water at your ads. And yet we seem to have got ourselves into this situation where people think you always need hot water in your radiator, that need to insulate your home. Well, no one was insulating homes in the 60s. So yes, you needed 80 degree water and it's minus three, but you only need 50 degree water in your ads when it was nine, because you've half the speed of heat is now. If it was 10,000 Jps you needed when it was minus three, that's 10 kilowatts. You're only going to need 5,000 Jps when it's nine degrees outside.
Nathan:But the reason we couldn't have these variable temperatures going to our radiators, of course, was because we didn't have condensing boilers. So, as you two you know your gas engineers in that lovely hot, hot flame is water vapor. And if that water vapor hits metal surface around about 54, which to us is hot. To our skin would be hot, but to a flame over a thousand degrees it's piddly. That water vapor condenses back and that's what would happen on these boilers. It would condense back into quite a horrible corrosive liquid and that would throw the water jacket on a boiler.
Nathan:And you know boilers are expensive. Back in the day you know 1963, a brand new all-border could cost you the same as a brand new mini car. So the idea was you always keep your temperatures high. But of course, four decades later, we still think you always need high temperatures and radiators. The condensing boiler was obviously invented to mitigate that problem. My granddad R&D engineers working on that back in the day after the 70s fuel crisis, and my granddad was one of them and he was half Dutch and the first condensing boiler came to the market in 1981 in Netherlands and since then we are still controlling them with fixed flow temperatures with an on-off strategy.
Ben:This is a question Stuart brought up. I think the last episode was how old are the combi boilers and how old are heat pumps? He was seeing heat pumps as new technology. I think heat pumps were brought out long before combi boilers were. At least, the technology was discovered a lot longer before.
Nathan:Are combi boilers or condensing boilers.
Ben:I think combi boilers Worcester, I think, or Valent, we decided, was the first to bring out the combi boiler in the UK. That was about 2000 to 2001. No, it was 1980, I think we discovered.
Nathan:Combination boilers have been at work In the 80s. You could get a combination. I mean a combination boiler just means it's doing a combination of two things it's heating the water instantaneously for your hot tap and obviously then it's heating the water that goes around the heat circuit.
Stewart:So yeah, they were only really commercially available in the early 2000s or late 90s Are you talking condensing or combi?
Nathan:I'm dancing Right. You're talking about condensers. So condensers are the technology where you haven't got to worry about that condensate forming now so we can have low temps. So condensing boilers, like I say, the first condensing boilers came to market in 1981 in the Netherlands.
Ben:When did heat pumps come about?
Nathan:Cool heat pumps have been around. You can go back into the 1800s, end of the 1800s, people working on heat pump systems. So vapor compression systems see all the heat pump is. For anyone that wants to know all the heat pump is, you want to explain something? It's sonic, moving heat from an evaporator to a condenser. That's it by vapor compression.
Nathan:So in my hometown of Norwich city of Norwich, where I grew up, john Sumner built a heat pump system in 1945, commissioned it in 1948. It took heat energy out of the river and it put heat energy into a factory Gerald's factory which back in the day would have been a printing press factory back then and that was working up until the 2000s. So vapor compression systems have been around a long time. I mean they start to get tested in the 50s. But then there's something. There was something quite interesting happening between, obviously, gas has been discovered and stuff like this. So back in the days we knew we could sort of have electrical heating with these really efficient systems but we sort of carried on with sort of fossil fuels. But yeah, I mean vapor compression systems have been around longer than natural gas borders.
Ben:So when I have customers who say, oh, this air source heat pumps, they're too new, we haven't tested them properly, we can really turn around and say they've been installed for at least 60, 70-odd years in the UK and the technology really reaches back to the 1800s.
Nathan:Yeah, I mean the London Festival House. They had one put in in about 1952. It wasn't put in brilliantly, it was. I don't think the designers accounted for all of the soundproofing that was in the place and of course that is quite. That's an insulation as well. So obviously with all the bodies in that sort of crevice, the thing overheated, the rooms are overheated. You didn't have inverter driven compressors back then. So when these compressors started out they were very, very noisy and of course that's not what you want when you're when you've gone to watch some music at the London Festival House. So that got decommissioned.
Nathan:Now that one was in the news. We heard about that one because it went wrong, but the one that John Sumner built and commissioned back in 1945, 1948, no one really knew about it until people started talking about it, like me, on podcasts. And that's what you tend to find with technology. No one buys a television and if it's working really well or a phone it's working really well. Set up forum groups where they go oh, my teleworks really well. If something doesn't work, they set up a forum to comply, compare it and write into newspapers. So the technology is everywhere.
Nathan:So millions of people every day in the UK are going to work in places that heat with heat pumps. You go every day. You're going into shops that heated every day with heat pumps in the winter. So when you look up at the ceiling a lot of people think that's air conditioning and they don't realise it's also doing the heating in the winter as well. And these split systems have been around for a long, long time. My cousin's been putting them into nearly half a century. They're everywhere. They're in the TV studios where you'll get guests, come on and say heat pumps don't work. Well, that TV studio doesn't have rage, it doesn't have under the floor heat and it has air to air heat pump systems that are either pushing out cold air in the summer or pushing out warm air in the winter. So they've been around a long time.
Stewart:Can we speak about heat pumps in the domestic market?
Nathan:Yeah, so in the domestic market. Obviously this is where it's starting to come into this domestic, because we've been used to fossil fuel boilers, because, arguably, gas has been very cheap for us. And this is one of the interesting things Gas boilers have a very small variability in their efficiency. So an engineer can put a gas boiler in, put it on the wall not very well and it's running at, let's say, 78% efficiency. But they can also then go and put it in really well at a run at 96. But you're only talking a very small variability there. If you put a heat pump in bad and it's running at sort of 240% efficiency, or you put it in well and it runs at 500% efficiency, there's a massive variability between them two points. It's quite big. So that's what's really important to put these heat pump systems in properly. But it's also worth pointing out that heating is a system.
Nathan:One of the big problems we've had in the industry is your boiler manufacturers will market their boilers Is that really really efficient? And the same with the heat pump industry. They're marketing their heat pumps as if they're really really efficient. And heating is a system. And the analogy I always use is you know, you've seen bolts got a very, very efficient heart to be able to pump all that oxygen around his blood body quick enough. But if you transplanted that super-duper efficient height to my body, I won't be able to run any faster or freely longer, because my system is an optimum. So it's the same with boilers. You know, you can plug the most efficient board or the most efficient heat pump into a home, but it's not going to be efficient unless the system's efficient.
Nathan:But yeah, we come back to your point. We're starting to think about putting them into homes. They are going into homes, they've been going into homes for 20 years. I know people that have been putting them in for 20 years and if they're putting in well, they work really well. But if they're not putting in well and the system isn't designed or commissioned properly, you can pay very, very high bills. And of course this is what we tend to hear about. We tend to hear about the horror story ones.
Stewart:So what about the government push now for heat pumps? You know, as you're saying, you hear about the horror stories lots of houses would need to be optimized in order to put in a domestic heat pump into them, which obviously would be a huge amount of cost which a lot of people can't afford at the moment. So with this government push and I know they've just put the grant up for them, I think is it, it was five grand, it's now seven and a half grand, but the average cost of a heat pump upwards of 15 grand, and then you can put possibly another 10 to 15 grand on top of that. In regards to insulation cavity wall insulation, double glazing, upvc windows Not every single property is suited for a heat pump Domestically, we're talking, obviously not talking commercially, and it's not always cost effective to make it so. So what do you think about the government push that they gave a certain figure I can't remember what it was, but they wanted the X amount of installs heat pump installs a year, 600,000 installs a year. After that number, thanks, ben.
Ben:Yeah 600,000.
Ben:Can I just come in there quickly before you reply, Nathan, because obviously last week Prime Minister Issunak he came and gave this big speech. A few things that he mentioned was that there was going to be relaxation on when new zero emission cars would come in. They're no longer going to be coming in 2035, it's going to be, I think, five years back from that, so 2040, where we will no longer be able to buy new fossil fuel cars. Also, the 2035 phase out target for gas boilers he's relaxed that as well. So it was apparently. 2035 was when gas boilers would be banned from. You wouldn't be able to buy a new gas boiler from the shops anymore, You'd have to buy an air source heat pump. He's now relaxed it slightly and the poorest household apparently will get an exemption and will be able to buy a gas boiler, which I find very interesting because I remember when condensing boilers came out, there was a possibility that we didn't have to install a condensing boiler.
Ben:Right at the very beginning you could say, oh, it was too hard to install a condense pipe and therefore we wouldn't have to put in a condensing boiler because we put in a standard efficiency boiler. But we had to fill out a form, and I don't ever remember filling out a single form. I always found a way to run a condensing pipe for my new condensing boiler, so I think this is going to be something that is going to be taken into account. Well, I think poor people will I say poor, such a terrible word, but it's what they've got on the website the poorest households. I do think that there's going to be a People are really going to have to think seriously about whether they want to actually go back to a gas boiler.
Ben:I really believe that by 2035, gas prices will be so high compared to electricity prices that you would want to go on to an air source heat pump by then and you no longer would want to put in a gas boiler. Part of that will be because, as fewer and fewer people put in gas boilers and more and more people put in air source heat pumps, the price of gas will have to go up, because the energy supplies will still be producing gas and they still need to sell it, but they're selling it to a smaller and smaller market. So that's why I think that the poorest households that Rishi Sunak was so worried about, that they are able to have a get out of jail free card by 2035,. I think they will still need to have an air source heat pump installed. Just some thoughts I'm throwing in there.
Stewart:Okay, but just the cost though the cost of the installation and the significant difficulty which can be on certain properties with the installation of the heat pump space to put the cylinder space outside to put the pump, upgrading of pipe work and radiators, etc.
Nathan:Yeah, there's obviously the capex, the upfront cost. Obviously heat pumps are going to range. The actual heat pump ranges between about 1,800 pounds of that foreground and then obviously you got this. So it's the install cost. There is this sort of mythology that we need to upgrade a home to have a heat. Any home can be heated with a heat pump. Any home can be heated with human body heat.
Nathan:Any home and that's where I come back to people have sort of lost touch with how heat moves. So your average home in the UK average obviously there's lots of different types your average home in the UK is 8 kilowatts. What does that mean? Well, you need 8 kilowatts of power for when it's minus three. That's the design temperature in the UK 8,000 Jps. So that means if it's 10 degrees outside, your home now only needs 3.7 kilowatts. So it's always changing. Your temperature is outside always changing, which means the temperature or the speed of heat that we need to push into the home always changes. So a home that needed 8 kilowatts when it's minus three you could have a party with 80 people dancing around because we all emit 100 watts when we're dancing and heat that home and maintain it 21. If it gets to 10 degrees outside, you can beat most of the people out and you only need 37 people.
Nathan:So there's this bit of a myth that you need insulated hires to heat them with heat pumps, because heat pumps are considered low temp. Temperature and energy are two different things. They're the same, they've got a massive relationship with each other, but they're different things. Energy and temperature are different things. So if your home needs 8 kilowatts of power, which is 7,000, 8,000 Jps of energy per second, it's not going to need that for most of winter and you can provide that.
Nathan:Like I said, 1960s homes only had single panoradiators. They didn't have double convectors, they had single panoradiators. If it was 80 degree water they could push out, but back then they needed about 10,000 Jps. They could push that out. If it's 10 degrees outside, you only need to push out 5,000 Jps, so you only needed 50 degree water. So this notion that we need to upgrade the fabric of a home is a little bit overplay when it comes to pipe work, depending on what size heat load you need. So you do your heat loss calculations. If you need sort of like 20 kilowatts, yes, you're going to have to upgrade some pipe work, for sure, but not always does pipe work have to be upgraded and not always does rads have to be upgraded. No one has sort of single panels anywhere anymore. Lots of people do have double panel, double convector rads. So it's a horses for currencies.
Nathan:You go and look at the homes. Homes are different. You know everyone's done lots of lifting things to their homes over the years. So for some people disruption can be low. For some people cost can be low of anything to be upgraded. But that's not for everyone. Some people it's going to be disruptive. Some people haven't got space. Some people haven't got space.
Stewart:Sorry to interrupt you, but for the government to push that disruption and cost on someone, for some of you who may not have the space for hot water cylinder, may not have the external room for the heat pump, etc. Etc.
Nathan:Well, the government have got an obligation, haven't they? Since 2008, to decarbonise heating. So they've got, and the best way to decarbonise heating is with heat pumps. We know that there's nothing, but there's no better technology at the moment. The technology's sound. It's been around longer than natural gas borders. Yeah, the poor old person in the middle is the homeowner. Not all of them are going to be able to do this easily. So the government have got to come up with some very clever ways, some incentives. So obviously the financial sector that's circling, the industry, is sort of thinking of ways or can they get involved, whether it's at 0% interest, loans etc. Etc. But the government has the commitment. Our country wants them to lead on this technology or lead on to getting things done right. But yeah, it's going to cause some problems. We're in a transitional stage, so obviously in any transitional stage, there's going to be a lot of bumps along the way.
Stewart:It's like the, you know the ultra low emission zone that they have in London, which I believe people down south are not too happy about. Well, they tried heating a fresh air zone into Manchester, which would have been a similar thing, and they also wanted people to upgrade their vehicles etc. But the financial help just wasn't there. They couldn't roll it out. The government completely messed it all up and currently the whole scheme is under review. And they weren't. They had not sure exactly when they intend to do it, but currently they're not doing it. Do you think potentially heat pumps may go the same way, as they've put another five years on it now? They said I think only it's needed by 20. Was it 2035 or 2040? Do you think by the end of that, they're just going to keep on extending it and keep on extending it, as I don't see them hitting their targets.
Ben:I don't think that's going to happen.
Nathan:The target was always known to be very, very ambitious. But I mean they put an ambitious target in place to sort of force people nudge, nudge things along. I mean, yeah, it's a very, very ambitious target.
Ben:But 2050 is when we signed international agreements that say we have to have hit our target by 2050. And if not, we get these huge fines. So I'm assuming that the government wants to get this done by 2050, even if they're saying we're going to take a bit longer to do it, we still have to have hit those targets by 2050. So I don't see how the government really can ease the burden. I really think this is more of a political political points system that the government's thinking OK, if we say that we're going to allow people to still install gas borders for longer and be able to push off buying electric cars, then they'll vote conservative at the next election. I think that's what they're thinking. I just don't know how good that is for the country in the long term. That's just me thinking.
Nathan:I've got a question for you because obviously this podcast you talk about politics as well, don't you? So I mean, where do you see the politics coming into our industry?
Ben:I see that well, the most recent thing that's happened is Rishi Sunak's announcement last week about the pushing off the when people can still put gas boilers in by and the money that he's pushing into heat pumps, so upping it from 5000 to 7500 pound using the boil upgrade scheme. This is a really terrible name. That's really why I see that. I also see the regulations that we heating engineers have to go through. I mean, I have been to quite a few surveys to properties. I find that a really time consuming, really big hassle.
Ben:When you think that me and Stuart, we go out on a day to day basis, go to our customers houses, do a boiler service, do a gas certificate, repair a gas hob, fix the toilets.
Ben:If we're that desperate for work, we have work in front of us. So for us to now say, yes, we're going to spend two hours on a customer's property measuring up and then spending a further three hours outside the customer's property in our office, spare bedroom or kids room when they're not there, then where do we have that time to do that one? There's so much that we have to understand which we don't need to understand as heating engineers. I don't want to know. I hate the fact that I need to understand what the fabric of the building is made up of. I don't know. I hate the fact that I need to measure the wall, because the distance between the inner and outer brickwork tells me whether there's a cavity inside there or not. I just never needed to have that information before. And so suddenly I'm just grateful that we live in the IT world, because the information technology world, because soon we'll be able to use our phones.
Nathan:Is this for boiler installs or on a vet? Is this for surveying a property?
Ben:Well, I know that we need to do that for boiler installs, but I do that more often for air source heat pump surveys. When I survey a property for air source heat pumps, I need to ask them how old is the property? If they're aware of that. Do you know what's under the floor? Do you have floorboards going straight to earth, or do you have insulation? They may not know. Do you know what's inside the walls? They may not know. So I walk around the building and I need to see are there those little drill holes in the wall for where cavity insulation was installed?
Ben:I need to go back and see does the age of the property mean that they have a cavity at all or not? Because, why? Because if they have a cavity, then that gives me extra U-valueness and if that's been filled, then that's an insulation that needs to be taken into account. Basically, what I've decided is that there's no such thing as a true heat loss calculation. It's all a bit of a guess. So why can't we use rule of thumb, like we used to use on boiler installs? Because that's what we seem to have anyway.
Nathan:Well, you've got software that can help you calculate and there is this technology that can kind of measure. So there's a couple of companies that will try and measure your transfer coefficient. So that's the amount of what you need per degree change outside. Basically, when the domestic heating sector started, people did do calculations. I mean, what you're doing when you're doing a calculation, you're trying to work out how quickly heat leaves the home at design temperature, which, as we know, is minus three in the UK. Now that kind of did used to happen because when the domestic heating sector first started we were mainly an employed industry. So you're talking about your regional gas boards, your councils, so most plumbers and heating engineers would have been employed and you would have had what was called fitters. And then around sort of the like 70s and 80s, we had this massive thing of where people would start to become sole traders and so forth. So we are now predominantly a sole trade industry. So that's about around about 86 plus percent of us are sole traders.
Nathan:So, tying in with that, boilers changed around the 80s. They stopped being sort of floor based boilers. We went from high mass heat exchangers to low mass, low water content heat exchangers, which meant you can hang a border on the wall, so the job become a bit quicker. We also had the combination boilers getting a lot more popular. Now what that meant was in a sole trader industry you've now got people think, well, I can do that in a day, I can do that in half a day. So the industry came quicker and quicker, the manufacturers around the industry and we probably got the most overcrowded manufacturer sort of market in the world. Anyone that makes anything to do with heating will try and sell it here. They then took on this thing, a notion of speed, and were making things to do with, like, how quickly can an engineer get things in quickly? So this whole notion of surveying a property got attenuated. It became all about well, you can just swap a border in, put a border on the wall, and that's what's happened and that's what we train our engineers to do. Our engineers are trained to safely put stuff on the wall. They're not trained in the science of heat. They are. They're going to do an apprenticeship that all stuff is happening. At college you learn about it, but you'll find most apprentices learning about it at college aren't working with companies. They actually do it. So they forget it. So as they're out there working in the real world, most people have come into the industry by the gas safe route previously was called me, so yeah, they might be fantastic.
Nathan:I always stick up for energy. I always try and tell people there's kind of two. They're two main genres of heat energy. There's engineers that can go out to a border and, as you guys know, there's hundreds of makes, models now and there's engineers that can go out to a border and get your border working.
Nathan:Now, if you're elderly or you're a young kid, it's middle of the winter, it's eight o'clock at night and you've got someone that come around and get that border going. That is one of the most incredible skills there is, because we need some people, need wallpapers to just literally stay up at night. You've then got people that are very good at designing heat systems and putting in very efficient heating systems. That got compensation, control, et cetera, et cetera, and sometimes you might get cost over. Sometimes you might get an engineer that's really, really good at that but can also fault diagnose, but not often.
Nathan:Sometimes the people that aren't great at fault diagnosing want to put in new systems because they're the ones that say to the customer I think you need a new boiler. The boiler might be only seven years old, five years old, but that's like now. I think you need a new boiler because, again, it's not always their fault, because we've got a market in an industry that's incentivized that. So you've got companies like Valent and companies like Ideal that would fly you abroad to Miami and Vegas if you sold enough of their borders or skiing trips. So we've incentivized replacement rather than repair, which is hard to be a bit that that's not creating problems. So I mean, marketing in our industry has created a lot of problems.
Nathan:I believe Engineers are always going to get the blame. You engineers are always going to get the blame if you don't know stuff. So at the moment there's all these people now talking about our industry and talking about decarbonization, where it's think tanks, where it's the academics, policymakers, that are getting a bit. They can be a bit. They say why doesn't a heating engineer know this? Why doesn't a heating engineer know heat costs? Why don't they know flow? And I say to them well, I tell you what they do know. They know how to get your border on straight away.
Nathan:And I use my dad as an analogy. My dad retired in COVID. He retired at 74 years old. He probably would have retired. He retired in COVID 74 years old. He had customers old enough to be his parents Now. He worked across 176 villages. He was an oil. All he did was oil. He got oil working. Now he could get any oil ball to go on this planet. Trust me, it helped his father in law help develop the technology way back. But he could get any oil ball to go. But does he know about heat loss? Does he know about velocity, pipe size? He knows nothing about that. Why should he? He didn't put heating systems in, he just repaired all of it and he was brilliant at it and he was a real asset.
Nathan:You know, if you're in your 90s and you've got no heat at nine o'clock at night and you've got Jim Duckgamblin come around to fix it, that's what you want. You don't want someone coming around that knows how to size radiate properly and do heat loss calculations. So there's these different types of engineers. I think people talk around. Our industry need to recognise that.
Nathan:So you know, because a lot of engineers are getting a bit demoralised around the transition, you think, well, why should I do that? What's it all about? And so we've got to really we've got to really sort of pick up some of the engineers that are really good at these skills of repair, help the ones that want to sort of design systems and more efficient, help them familiarise themselves with some certain concepts and, yeah, getting used to doing things, like you know, heat loss counts can be a pain. I mean there are going to be apps. We know someone very well, adam, who's developing the Karno software that's going to help out with that and stuff like that. So there's going to be tools to help us do our job.
Ben:I just can.
Stewart:I ask when do you see the future of the gas industry going in the next, say, 30 to 40 years? Do you think if you were a young man you know in your 16, 17, and you were going to train to be a gas engineer, would you recommend someone doing that now or would you say no, that's a dead industry. In 30, 40 years it would be gone.
Nathan:Well, I was doing my apprenticeship now and I mean, obviously 16 year olds have got way, way better things to think about than their lifelong career. But if you're that age group, yeah, it's worth now getting into renewables, pv heat pumps, battery stored, that's where that's where it's going. Obviously people are younger than me. You know they can't understand me. They're going to want to stay in the gas industry completely. Get that because it's not just about you know. They've got their business to run it. They've made a successful business. Why pivot? Why pivot? And change and risk. And that's what happened about 15 years ago. There were companies that were having quite a successful. You know they've got some people working for them, maybe 20 people working for them. They pivoted, thought renewals was coming in, retchanged all the branding and it didn't work for them because the market wasn't there, they didn't have the customers and some of them lost, you know some of them lost out and they lost their companies and they're back doing, you know, back as self-employed traders.
Nathan:But I definitely advise the younger generation to get in no point getting into gas. If you're the younger generation, I say that of course there is because you're still going to have for 15, 20 years, people are still going to want their gas appliances repaired. But it's an exciting industry. So yeah, I mean anyone could get into it. It's very exciting. We are at this transition. Like I say, 15 years ago, 20 years ago, people did try and start it. It kind of happened. But yeah, it's definitely happening now. I mean it's the way it's going. There's no two ways about it. We aren't going to be burning you know 2050, we're not going to be putting gas into people's homes still.
Ben:Yeah, I do think that an apprentice nowadays should be focusing on both. I don't want to say gas, I don't want to say plumbing. They should focus on plumbing and electricals in college, because plumbing allows you to know how to run pipe work and electricals allows you to do the PV, the batteries and car chargers. And plumbing does not tell you how to spec up a heating system and how to measure out a property. So there has to be some sort of training on that as well. There needs to be something new. There needs to be a renewable apprenticeship.
Ben:There cannot be a plumbing risk? How?
Nathan:did you get into this? Did you do an NVQ or?
Ben:Who me? Yeah, I did a two year NVQ two in College of North West London and then I did a further two years. For some reason I switched into a city in Guilds course. I never got my level three, but I was on the level three course and for some reason they switched me. I can't remember why. I was 21 at the time.
Nathan:So heat loss is taught at level three. Can you remember what the number of your course was, the 6035 or 6189? Because a lot of 6189. Right, so you were on the NVQ so at level three, heat loss will be taught. But don't get me wrong, some of the teachers aren't great at teaching it and obviously like a lot of stuff going on in college or anywhere. Like your gas train is set at St Richard's, a lot of it's just tick box exercise, because training is an industry. It's a business in its own right.
Ben:They just want to do I do. I do also think that it depends on if you're an apprentice. That means you are working for someone else and you're doing evening courses which is what I did for the last two years of college or even if you're doing a day release course. You are then going back to your, to the person you're working for, and you're saying, oh look, I learned that we should be doing heat loss calcs. And he goes heat loss calcs, what's that? And then he never talked about it again and you say, oh, have you ever seen those triple panel rads? It's triple panel rads. They're way too big. Let's put in the double panel 700 eyes and 1000 wide, like we've been doing the whole time. 28 mil pipe to run for flow and return. What's wrong with you, man? Right, so you never, ever will as a, as a.
Stewart:Ben, I don't understand how big radiators, small rooms, more radiators.
Ben:I just don't know how. That's why I think a renewable engineer that does know how to run pipe, that does know how to calculate, because the problem we have here is that we've got gasmen over here who don't understand how to measure up a room properly. So forget about us. Train up the next generation and somehow get us to bring these people up without us getting in the way and giving them our old knowledge, which doesn't apply anymore. I don't know how that works. I like giving out ideas that no one really understands, but then they can also work on, you know, electrical work, which I've never done an electrical course before, so I don't really understand how to go from consuming.
Stewart:You're saying the future is people will be both sort of plumbers and electricians to able to install the new technology.
Ben:Yeah, but plumbers is the wrong word.
Stewart:Well, be able to run pipe work. Maybe, pipe fitters and electrician, you're able to run pipe work. Also, can we touch on solar as well, being used in conjunction with heat pumps?
Nathan:Yeah, obviously PV makes a lot of sense. You know if you're generating your own supply. It makes a lot of sense to work with heat pumps and there's lots of analysis.
Ben:So solar PV. Just in case people don't understand what is solar PV and what is solar thermal and why have we gone with solar PV?
Nathan:Solar PV is photovoltaics, you're producing electrical current. Solar thermal is where you are capturing infrared from the sun to heat up water that you want to do useful things with, whether it's heat up water to supply domestic water to your taps or for your heating system. So that's the difference. I mean they both generally will have something on the roof, but solar PV is. I mean, a lot of analytics will say at the moment, if you've got to spare 10 pounds and pound, put a load of PV on your roof and yeah, working in conjunction with heat pumps is good.
Nathan:And there's another company I'll give them a plug. They're a new startup called Walmart W-A-R-M-U-R and they have got an app where a customer because obviously customers are finding this all very confusing and why wouldn't they? Because engineers are far more confusing and the app will pull in loads of data for what your house type is. It'll use EPC data and a few other things and it will tell you what the average running cost will be if you had a heat pump system a heat pump system with PV, heat pump system with PV and batteries. But interestingly enough, it will also tell you the price running costs if you had these agile tariffs. So it does sound quite useful for a customer because it's so complex for customers out there. A customer just wants to be kept warm as cheaply as possible.
Ben:Yeah, just again. So an agile tariff is where the energy supplier, like Oxfas, they would choose the cheapest or they tell you when the cheapest energy is going to be in the next 24 hours, am I correct? And then you can choose to pull in heat to charge up your hot war cylinder using electricity when it's cheap, at two o'clock in the morning as opposed to it at seven o'clock in the evening.
Stewart:Didn't that use to be the old economy? Seven for the old war heaters.
Nathan:Yeah, economy seven, economy 10. You've got different prices for, I mean, electricity is kind of works like the stock market is bought, the price changes every half hour and so people, your suppliers, will buy electricity then to obviously to give it to us all. And so there's all these interesting. The trouble is it gets confusing. I mean people ask me what tariffs have you been on? And it's not my real expertise. My expertise is the fact that they can now quickly eat moves.
Nathan:But it's getting so complex, so complex by homeowners. And then again, of course, what companies do you trust on the internet to give you the right information? Because if it is a complex industry I mean it was complex, it was just heated it's complex now that we're integrating all this different stuff. What websites do you trust? So it's a mind field out there for the poor old consumer and the poor old homeowner, which is why there's another company that's interesting. So they are doing hybrid systems. You know you're hybrid and you keep your gas boiler Now in a bit of a purist around heat and science.
Nathan:I always sort of say, well, you don't need a hybrid system.
Nathan:You could heat all homes, most homes with heat pump system and bear in mind air to air heat pump systems are very, very cheap and you can heat the home with air to air, you can also call it.
Nathan:But the interesting thing with the hybrid system and he was on my podcast recently, christof is that it gives the homeowner that reliability.
Nathan:They know they've still got their boiler so they don't have that fear factor. So they might have some money, they might have a financial package that helps them to get the heat pump bit of it, but nothing else has really changed and what you tend to find is your heat pump will do the heat for most of winter, nearly all of it, and of course, over the duration of a couple of years the homeowner then got to think oh, that's great, I've had this nice low temperature heating felt because it's a lovely, comfortable heating and you've got different variable temperatures going to your rads and for them, for sort of initial sort of couple of winters, they've always had that reliability. You haven't had that fear factor of the heat pump not being out of work. And also that a lot of these heat pump systems pure heat pump systems are being put in, unfortunately, by people that don't really know what they're doing. Of course people are getting cold and are paying a lot of money.
Stewart:Can I ask me is the heat pump industry regulated, as the gas industry is, via the gas safe register, or is there some sort of governing body?
Nathan:Well, you could argue, is the gas safe industry regulated?
Stewart:Well, yes, it is. The gas safe register carries out inspections of its engineers and, you know, looks into reports of where was the last time you inspected? I was inspected in 10 years. I think I've had four inspections.
Ben:So it's not really great.
Nathan:I mean there is an argument. I know we've got the HSE, the health safety executive, have this thing. We obviously was calling out it's gas. So this is yes, to put gas appliance in you have to have that kind of accreditation, but that's there's. No, there's nothing to say that what you're doing on the heat side of things, like you could go and you know no one's looking at the quality of the heat inside of it, that's what we call the SYNC system. The SYNC system is all your emitters system, your radiators, the pipe cylinders you chose, and obviously we've got these compote person schemes which are really really easy to go and get. You know most plumbers out there, you know I used to teach the water regs and I can tell you now most plumbers that they have got no idea about water regulations. They go on their half day course, have absolutely no idea about water regulations, no idea about G3 building regulations. Most people don't actually know how to interpret the building regulations. I would argue the gas industry isn't as regulated as people think it is. There's lots of money being made from it. The training centers make lots of money for your five year retakes and obviously gas say that make lots of money.
Nathan:You could argue that the heat pump industry is more regulated on the side of the SYNC system. So there is been more emphasis put on the fact that you've got to design the heating system properly. So that's obviously with an MCS install. So there is no law that you have to. You know, no one has to have a heat pump put in under MCS unless you're getting a government grant.
Nathan:So obviously when the government started to give grants for heating systems these heat pump heat systems or PV, you know they didn't want anyone just going and putting this stuff in. It had to have some form of regulation. The government put money to. It had to have some sort of standard and that was MCS. But you know, if a builder comes, comes to me and they just want a heat pump system putting one of their homes they're building and they're not applied for a grant, you don't have to have any qualification to put in. But you don't have any qualification to be a plumber. You know you only have to work to build in regs and water regs and there's no law that say you have to have a qualification to be a plumber.
Stewart:If you work on suck plumbing you do need to be, I believe, very minimum level two sitting in guilds qualified, Not legally. If you want to go into some thousands, call yourself a plumber, you can do it, but on site it's very different.
Nathan:Yeah, but that's not, that's not illegal law, that's. But that's going to be down to the developers. I mean, these large developers want to see your SCS cards and stuff like that. But because they want, they've got lots of massive health and safety policy documents they've got to keep up to date with. But yeah, there's no law to say to plum in this industry you have to be qualified, you just have to abide by the regulations. And that's kind of the same of heating.
Nathan:Obviously, with heat systems the stomach it comes under the company person schemes which haven't really worked in this industry. Most of us know they haven't worked as as heating and plumbing became more complex in the 80s you found that notifiable works. You'd notify the bill, your bill authority, that you're going to do a job. Most building inspectors were coming from the brick trades and the carpentry trades and of course they didn't know our industry had no idea about the unvented cylinders. You know the 1984 building act meant we were now used to the unvented cylinders. We were the only country that wasn't allowed to use them, the only view it was using for ages.
Nathan:But you know, your average bricklayer and chippy that became a building inspector didn't have any idea about these systems. So that's why we engendered these company person schemes. You self certified, notify the work. But I can believe that hasn't worked because that became an industry zone, right? You know all these training centers south of a night that would train these people to get these sort of certificates and you know people go in do these tick box exercises. You're allowed to take that multiple choices as many times as you want and you got your certificate. So the skill level out there isn't that great, you know really, really.
Ben:I don't know what I'm taking those courses for, because if I do an installation of an unvented hot water cylinder and I decide not to record that I've installed it, who will ever know that?
Stewart:Well, the manufacturer won't issue a warranty unless a benchmark has been filled in. So therefore there's pressure the most.
Ben:most of the unvented cylinders give a 25 year warranty because they know that in 25 years you're not going to have a claim on it once. That's why they give those warranties.
Stewart:You know giving a five, seven or 12 year warranty. You know ideal or valent or worst that they want to see the benchmark filled in.
Ben:That's because that's because boilers know that if that the water quality, if it's not good, will wreck the boiler and therefore, and therefore they make you put in the benchmark and say what chemicals have you used and whether you've done a power flush and all this stuff that Nathan's going to say, Well, chemicals don't work anyway, or it's not good, not good for the system. Anyway, that's what they request, that they do because they know that it's going to break down. But hold on.
Stewart:I had an idea the other day, for I think it was a three year old boiler.
Stewart:And before they were willing to come out the boiler had been registered in benchmark etc. They wanted the customer to send a photo of the logbook, you know, the service logbook. The shirt had all been filled in by a gas safe registered engineer before they're willing to send an engineer out. So manufacturers are doing what they can to make sure things are done to a minimum standard by these sorts of things, mostly because they want to save themselves money, not that they care about the customer.
Ben:Yeah, and when was the last time a customer called you up and asked could you please fill in the booklet in the back for the last three years?
Stewart:when the engineer comes around they're not going to.
Ben:It doesn't. It's not. There's no way to track these things. So I also think it's interesting. I think MCS will become that governing body. Like gas safe is of gas boilers, so MCS will be of all renewable technology.
Ben:I think that you will have to become MCS registered in order to buy an air source heat pump in the way they won't do on a safety thing. So Corgi was set up originally because a building blew up from gas. So now you need to be gas safe registered in order that you know the legs so that you don't blow up a building. Now there's no safety concern of that on renewables, really, unless you have bare electrical cables maybe, but the actual heat pump is not going to blow up and your solar panels aren't going to blow up and your battery is not going to blow up. So I think it's harder for them to become the organization that is on safety. It can't be a safety organization. But I think MCS has to become. They want to control as much as they want to control. I think they have to become the registered body even for heat pumps and solar panels that are installed by builders on building sites as opposed to just on properties that I work in and residential properties. Maybe that's something in the future, I don't know.
Ben:Actually yes, I do wish I had a magic ball, just that shot over there. I wish I had a magic crystal ball that would tell me the future, and then I wouldn't be doing this. I'd be investing on the lottery and on the horses.
Nathan:Can I ask you a question, as gas engine is, and obviously you're north and Ben, as we know, is down south, so I actually probably know the answer from Ben. I mean, have you both considered transitioning? I mean, I know, ben, you've had a little. You've been on some manufacturers courses. I think you've been on Nebe's training, I think haven't you? Yeah, Nebe's course Is it something you're considering to do, or have you built up a nice little business where you're just quite happy to do what you do?
Stewart:No, my business is very good as it is and transitioning would be such a headache. Why give up something that's steady and going well for someone known? Yeah, ben's definitely looking into it. It's gone a lot of courses, and how many heat pump installs have you done today, ben?
Ben:It's not about that. I'm not going for the many heat pumps.
Nathan:Another question for Stuart. Now there's obviously lots of noise and discourse around efficiency and some engineers are now realising OK, so we're controlling ballers with on-off thermostats. Perhaps we should have been doing that for the last three decades. Are you getting excited behind the science that's now starting to come out? I mean, it was always there. All the four or five of us the heat needs to be knew about it. Are you getting so excited about how a heating system should be controlled, even if they are gas? Is that something that's sort of exciting?
Stewart:It's always possible. But you can always say to a customer what do you want, it's what you're willing to spend. You can offer a customer a heating system with weather compensation wireless thermostat.
Ben:What's it called Modulate thermostat?
Stewart:TRVs and every single device under the sun. But at the end of the day it all costs money and it's what people are willing to spend. You could say to them with all these devices you will save X amount a year. But people look at payoff. Like you mentioned before with solar panels, if you've got to spend £10,000 to stick solar panels on your roof, that's a pretty good investment because the payoff is quite quick. But people want to see the here and now and they don't want to spend an extra couple of hundred pounds.
Ben:But what if you?
Ben:could what if you, stuart, could install a better heating system without the customer being aware of it? So what if you decided that instead of putting in a, instead of the cut the let's, you put in a Nest thermostat right, the Nest, nice, smart looking Nest thermostat. And you investigate it and you realise that Nest can actually do open therm, which makes it more efficient. Forget about why it makes it efficient. It is more efficient to run it on open therm. Back to the boiler. You might think, okay, well, I'm going to not tell the customer, it's just going to be open therm and it'll run more efficiently, even if the customer doesn't know about it, and it's not cost them all. It's just putting the two wires that you'd anyway put in into a different two ports.
Ben:Then you would say hold on. Well, I know that when you do a bit more research you'll find out. Valence can modulate down to this level, but an intergas boiler can modulate down to that level and maybe I don't know an ideal boiler can modulate down even further using open therm. So then you'd say, well, instead of me advising my customer to go with that valence boiler, I'd tell them to go with this different boiler which can modulate down further, and that's because you have studied, you've understood that these are better products. Why they're better products? Not because your customers are aware of anything, just because you know you're doing a good job.
Stewart:Isn't that what we do? You're the customer. I'll say to you you can have a high firmostat which is, you know, smart firmostat, modulating, you can do everything and it's got all the bells and whistles.
Nathan:No it doesn't and that will cost you.
Stewart:I could offer you an ESI firmostat which goes on your wall and goes on and off, and that will cost you 50 quid. What are you going to say? I won't offer the highs what's the moving crisis and everyone's struggling at the moment. What would you tell me?
Nathan:A high firmostat is an on off firmostat. It can't compensate, but the software hasn't been checked, so it's not smart.
Stewart:People are trying to save money wherever they can.
Ben:Yes, but I can put in. So don't put in an ESI firmostat. Put in a Honeywell traditional wireless thermostat. That's not smart, that doesn't connect up to your phone but is open firm and therefore can modulate your boiler up and down much more efficiently on off thermostat.
Stewart:Again, you are bound by what the customer is willing to spend. You know you can say to a customer I can put you in an all singing, all dancing heating system for this, or you can get basic for this. Why?
Ben:can you? I can do basic and efficient.
Stewart:Of course you always put in basic and efficient but.
Ben:But I can put in basic and efficient with open firm. So open firm doesn't mean that the customer has to do anything with low temperatures, there's no difference in cost.
Nathan:I mean you can put a compensated system in exactly the same product.
Stewart:Yeah, not at all. I'm talking about more, about other things, you know, when you say to the customer if you insulate your loft space, if you put on TRVs, these kind of things, you know all these extra costs, the customer's not interested. You don't need to put a TRV on Part of the building regs, which is that I can't remember off the top of my head. Is it part L?
Nathan:No. So this is something I advise a lot of people on. So building regulations people think building regulations are the approved documents. The approved documents.
Stewart:Sorry, it's the new boiler plus stuff that came out a few years ago.
Nathan:No law in this land and I had to go from some people in the department and listen to my podcast to agree with me. There's no law in the land that would ever tell you you have to use a specific product, and that's because of this. If you have a law that says you must use TRVs, someone might come and invent something better than TRVs the very next day innovation and we can't use it because there's a law in place that says we must use something you will never find.
Stewart:It comes on people. In 10 years time something in your room better may come out.
Nathan:Part L. So if you read any approved document and you guys should know this because you can't be supposed to know how to read the approved document when you read the first paragraphs of an approved document, it says most of this is guidance. Only the text that's in a green box is the actual requirement. So if you look at part L, you'll see that the actual text in a green box, tens of thousands of words, are just guides. The only text in a green box there's three words that are what we're talking about Use effective controls. That's it. That's the requirement in law. Now the working groups that write the approved documents, don't get me wrong. The working groups that write the approved documents have manufacturers write them. So of course your chemical industry loved it when BS7593, you know, the standard for using chemical inhibitors was put into the guidance. And they come out with things like it's now mandatory. No, it's not. It's been put into the guidance. And the manual to the building regulations is explicit in saying you do not have to follow guidance to meet the requirement. And the requirement for inhibitors is the next little sentence under use effective controls. You must commission as a system. So English law isn't silly enough to say you must use certain things. So there's no law. There's clause 520 is the clause in the guidance that says about TRVs. It says if you use TRVs, you basically can't meet your requirement effective control.
Nathan:Now what I've now told industry, though TRVs were invented because we were putting speed. The heat was going into the homes far too quickly. We invented it or we brought things into the industry to turn the heat off quickly, because you're overheating the home all the time. You're pushing heat into the home as if it was minus three outside. That's why the TRV was introduced, not as an energy efficiency device, as an off device. There's no law to say you have to use TRVs. Now you could argue that everyone putting it on off systems isn't actually meet the requirement. Use effective controls because we've had condensing borders. The reason condensing borders were invented was so we didn't have fixed flow temperatures. That's why they got invented, and it was still controlling them with a fixed temperature.
Nathan:So your customer, you just tell your customer, well, that's now the requirement. You also. It's like you wouldn't put an open-fluor appliance in your customer's house, would you? You wouldn't have them say, well, I can get an open-fluor appliance cheap down the road. I want you to put that in because it's cheap and I'm the customer and I decide what happens. You just wouldn't do it.
Nathan:And it's like controls. You say, well, this is what we do, it's going to cost you I mean, it sometimes costs them less, it's a more comfortable heat and they'll actually enjoy it more. So don't ever be sort of fearful about that kind of thing. Yes, the customer is important. Yes, we want to be doing. You know, if they don't want radios changed, that's up to them. If they don't want them changed. But you don't need to change rads for compensated systems.
Nathan:But the controls industry is a very, very powerful industry. They like you putting stuff into every room. They love it. So one of the one of the manufacturers for the control industry I won't mention the name, but they also made all the napalm, all the cluster bombs and all the land mines for the Vietnam War. So don't try and tell me like Honeywell, yeah, and they also made control system for the plane that dropped the three nuclear bombs. So when people say, oh no, they don't sell stuff just to go into every room, but they're not worried about energy efficiency, they're worried about sales. The control industry was worried about sales Once the domestic heat industry started to grow in the 60s. A lot of companies realized they could get things into every single home in Europe.
Nathan:And then something into every single room, in every single home in Europe.
Ben:The problem with that, nathan, is that you've now said we cannot trust the manufacturers and therefore the heating engineers needs to become the gatekeepers between the manufacturers and the customer. So they have to rely on us on me and Stuart to give accurate information. As you can hear from us discussing things, you've always been the gatekeeper. You've always been the gatekeeper. It means Stuart don't agree on everything, so he will insist on TRVs and he'll insist on the Hive thermostats. I wouldn't touch a Hive thermostat and I've only just realized in the past couple of years that maybe I shouldn't be putting TRVs on low-temp systems, because I've been in all these other online groups where people discuss these things.
Nathan:Trvs are on. User them as a high limit stat. So if you're getting a lot of solar gain into a room, particularly a room, trv can shut things down because you overheat in the room. You've always been the gatekeeper. You guys are the interface between the customer and this is why engineers are so important.
Nathan:It's a hard job, what you do, the cognitive flexibility you will have. You're meeting so many different people. Thankfully we've been a wonderfully diverse country. Lots of different people live in our country and that's great. But the cognitive flexibility you have to have to meet all the different customers you're going to and explain all this stuff to is one of the hardest aspects of your job and I think that's really underrated. They don't realize you're going into you might possibly go into a few hundred homes every year and meet people and try and explain this stuff to them. It's a complex thing and that's a skill in its own right, which is why I get so angry when people think we're just tradespeople that try and exploit people.
Nathan:Well, we're not. We're keeping people alive, gas eating. I do not demonize gas yet. I mean. Obviously I'm in an industry where lots of people are starting to demonize gas, but gas is keeping people sanitized, it's keeping people alive. So you can. I'm not ready to demonize it yet. I mean, someone said the other day we should be calling it natural gas. There was nothing natural about it. Well, it did take over from town gas, which was poisonous, and it was coming out of the ground, so that's why they called it natural gas and it lifted a lot of people out of poverty. It gave people sanitation and stuff like that. So it's a yeah with this transitional step.
Nathan:But the engineers are so key that you guys are so, so important. And of course I understand. I just talk about it now. I'm not even on the talk. It's very easy to me to talk about. You are the people that have to go around into people's homes. Try and explain it. There's lots of fear, there's lots of uncertainty, so it's all very well-governed. So we've got to do it. And all the other commentators say we've got to do it. You're the interface. You and the customers are the most important part of the equation.
Ben:Yeah, okay, wow, that's one hour and four minutes Wow Podcast. That's the longest we've ever done. So, nathan, you've kept us very interested for a very long time.
Stewart:Thank, you very much.
Nathan:And I think we'll have to have you back on another time. My daughter's mum is giggling over here because she just knows I can talk about this for a long, long time.
Ben:Yeah, can I just say that your podcast Bass Talk I think I discovered that maybe three years ago and I got hooked on to that and I remember going all the way back. I remember listening to the new episodes as they were coming out and thinking, hold on, there's like a year's worth of podcasts I've not listened to yet and on my long drives between jobs so I've listened to all of your podcasts. So I'm quite that you were the one that pushed me into looking at heat pumps. I wasn't too interested in it before. I started listening to your podcast and started realizing this is really, really important and I need to get involved in it. That's why I wanted to get involved. Not because I mean you, stuart, you're not that interested in it. I definitely am, I definitely. It's not just about being the future, it's just being a better way to heat your home. That's what I wanted to be involved in.
Stewart:No, just briefly. I wanted to ask about the, you know, the infrastructure for all these heat pumps and everyone. You know, tomorrow, if everyone had a heat pump and electric car, where's all the electricity going to come from? The amount of building work that have to do to the national grid now to get it up to scratch? For, you know, for that amount of demand would we have to go nuclear, or, you know, because solar and wind power just isn't going to cut it when there's no sun and when the wind doesn't blow, what they're going to do? The only real answer is nuclear, isn't it?
Nathan:Well, it's an interesting thing. So you've got three things You've got demands, you've got supply and you've got the thing that connects the supply and demand. So, for instance, back in the day I don't know how old you gentlemen are, but back in the day when we didn't really have more than four channels on television, people, coronation Street was a very popular program and they had to worry about the supply. The supply had to be flexible. So for things like when Coronation Street adverts come on, you've got about 8 million people switching a three kilowatt Kettle on at the same time, so they would have to wind up power stations specifically for that event. So there was always flexibility on the supply, but it meant bringing on big, big power stations.
Nathan:And what they're now realizing now is if people have got these batteries in their EVs and they got these electrical use and appliance like heat pumps, they got PV. You've now got flexibility on demand, millions you know millions of products that have got the flexibility on demand. So, which means you can do clever things so that the yes, you're right, you know, obviously, we know wind and so isn't going to work when it's so is not a nice job. But you know we're bringing more of this stuff on with the decarbonizing the grid, and if you've got flexible demand as well, then there's no worry. The issue in the challenge is is how do you get all that to talk to each other? So how do you get all these adult tariffs and how do you get all these appliances? You know the infrastructure is there in the home. You know all these EVs that they're there, like they can have flex issues. You've got to be the communications that we worked out.
Ben:EVs is an electrical vehicle, so you're electric car.
Nathan:So when people say the national grid won't cope, I mean there's supply, that there's not really anyone worried too much about supply. I mean it's the and obviously it seems really strange thing to say if we've got these electrical using appliances, like you know, charging up your EV battery or heat pump, they actually help solve the problem because they are the bits and pieces that can actually make the demand flexible, because you could set, say you could have, you know, if you've got these special AI algorithms talking to each other, you could have, like I don't know, 50,000 batteries in cars saying, right, we'll store enough energy for when Manchester's watching man city play or something you know. You can have all these clever things going on where all these actors are, like this energy can then put it back into the grid to supply different areas. So so that flexibly into into Mars, I mean very interesting, but it's what people are trying to work out at the moment is how it all communicates to each other. So that's all the sort of clever stuff that's going on at the moment.
Stewart:Interesting. Is there any sort of breakthrough technology with batteries? Because, like EVs at the moment can only do maybe two to 300 on the max sort of range they've got? Is there any new stuff coming along in the market with, say, tesla or any of these sorts of companies? Yeah, I think.
Nathan:China's had some big, big breakthroughs in batteries, that there's breakthroughs in battery technology coming online all the time. I mean Chinese have just put a load of cars onto the market, you know, obviously going to rival your things like Tesla and if you look at that market, you know, if you look at that market, 20 years ago all your big car companies were sort of laughing at the notion that it would all go EV. But all your biggest car companies out there now will get into EV, so that it's here to stay. Factory technology is always going to be changing. Obviously there are different factory technologies to lithium, so it's always going to be a very interesting market. Lots of people researching it.
Nathan:It's not really my expertise the sort of the battery side of things, but yes, it's an interesting thing. I always argue it's the complexity. That's what worries me. I mean I could do me email, I could do a podcast and I could do a little bit of social media. But all these we live in a world now we have to pass words for this and passwords for that and it gets a bit too confusing for people, right? So I completely understand homeowners are very fearful about this new technology to heat them, for instance. Well, I say no. Heat pump aren't new technology. They've been around longer than natural gas boilers in this country.
Ben:There was a podcast you did way back where you were talking about elderly people, particularly their eyesight, not being able to see modern day thermostats. Do you ever, did they ever come up with something to be able to use?
Nathan:Yeah, there's nothing on the market. I mean, Macular degeneration is a big, big big thing that we've been with the elderly in our country. Yeah, I mean it's. You know, our control industry, arguably, is being people who design the controls, are going to be white males between 20 and 40, you know, techie type people that design all these fancy controls at the digital lip flash. But not that great for the average person. I mean even heating, even heating engineers will struggle with some control interfaces and that's why they like to get familiar with certain makes. Yeah, they can be complex, You've got, I mean, if you look at them in.
Nathan:Any elderly people listening to your podcast will remember some of the old thermostats where you should have the pullout pins. Yeah, your timer when you're heating would come up, that little pullout pin. Well, if you think about it, they were great pieces of technology because you can walk up to that and think, oh, my heating is going to come on at six in the morning, it's going to go off at 10 in the morning, it's coming back, and you could do that and get all that information without having to press all these buttons and menus. On a modern thermostat You've got to press and hold this one down for 10 seconds and press it. But you could just go up to one of these old programs and tell you exactly when it was coming on, exactly when it was going off, and you know. No one had to touch anything. So complexity with all these controls is interesting. Ideally, you want a control system where the customer hasn't got a touch. Everything's automated. It's just running out to run smoothly.
Stewart:Do you think the government do you remember with the solar panels there used to be a feed-in tariff, which is where you'd get money back from energy back in the grid? Do you think the government will do some more sort of incentive towards heat pumps? I know they're offering seven and a half grand now. Do you think there'll be another sort of incentive, maybe like just throwing ideas out there, council tax reductions or something like that for people who do go and install them?
Nathan:Without a doubt. Yeah, these things people are thinking about all the different sort of incentives. You've got consumer insights groups, you've got sort of social scientists think of all these sorts of like nudge theory is very interesting around this. What will inspire and encourage people to do this? And, yeah, you'll have financial incentives as well.
Nathan:I mean, there's obviously something called heat as a service hasn't really took off yet, but heat as a service At the moment we're all paying for the energy we use. So if we've got an inefficient heat system, we're paying someone for more energy. But whereas heat as a service is where someone will come and put your heating system in. There's different models, but they'll come and put your heat system in. You haven't paid for it. So it's kind of like on up, you pay a monthly charge and what you're saying to the person is well, I'm not paying, you don't actually pay for the energy you're using. You're paying for the service. So you're you're.
Nathan:What your requirements are is that you want to be kept at 21 degrees all for that winter and have enough hot water wherever you want for your water, and you pay that. Pay the company a monthly charge for that. Now what that does is that incentivizes the company provided that top notch efficient system in, because they're now paying for the energy. And so that's where the competition market comes in. Yeah, because you might have a company that's doing that down the road and then another company that's doing it and they're going to be competing with each other to put in the most efficient systems because they want you to the customer. So it dry, it drives up efficiency and then keeps, hopefully, prices low for all us customers. So, yeah, things like heat as a service, very interesting business model. Not really has encroached into sort of the UK, but not quite how I would envision it. But yeah, definitely There'll be all sorts of interesting incentives.
Stewart:And then long term, what do you envision happening to the gas port, such as transco and the gas carriers and all that kind of stuff? Well, talking sort of years down the line.
Nathan:That's an interesting question, because it doesn't become a stranded asset. Obviously, we've got lots of pipes under the ground.
Stewart:You could do connections, single property and things like that.
Nathan:Yeah, I mean, that's why they are. You know, that's why this hydrogen thing came. You know people were talking about having hydrogen boilers because you know, I don't think high. You know, maybe in very, very, very small there. Hydrogen is good for industry processes industrial processes. I don't think it's not the solution for going to individual homes at all. Don't get me wrong. We've had a good run of it. We had the world's first gas grid ever started in 1814. We gave the world that technology and, like I said, it's lifted people out of poverty etc. Etc. And give the world sanitation. So it was a good system at the time. But I don't think continuing to put a flammable gas into people's home is the way to go anymore. Now we've become a bit more advanced.
Ben:Wine, so we should pipe wine to everyone's house using the gas grid.
Nathan:I mean you'll probably get the large gas pipes being used as sort of like underground robotic races with like little mobile cars racing around.
Stewart:What sort of percentage of properties would you say are not suited for heat pumps?
Nathan:Well, thermodynamically, every home could be heated with people.
Stewart:Logistically say, it's just not logistically or financially possible. Good question.
Nathan:Good question. So thermodynamically every home can be heated with heat pumps. Logistically it's interesting because it doesn't just come down to the building archetype, it will come down to people, you know, sometimes the people living in there. You know we're all living different, complex ways. Some people might not want that space that used to be an air encumbered made back into an air encumbered for a cylinder. They just might not want it because of the way they live. Things like planning, do they have space outside or on the wall, etc. Etc. So yeah, the logistics for different home archetypes are complex.
Nathan:Disruption can be. I mean, you got to remember back in the 60s, 70s, 80s, most people never had central heat and they had single point heaters in different rooms, whether it's a coal fire, your three bar electric fire or a gas fire. And when people started to have heat systems, when it was disruptive, the whole room, whole house was getting pulled apart to lay pipes. And you know, I come from a family heating engineers but we didn't have central heating until about 1980. But you know, there's always been disruption if you're going to change things around. Obviously, back in them days people had floorboards and carpets you could roll up. Now people have fitted carpets and screwed and glued flooring, so it makes it a little bit more awkward. But yeah, logistics, and that's where you guys, you go out, survey the property and you do a feasibility study.
Stewart:Is it feasible for this property and sometimes the property- as the gas board gets less and less, as, say, 90% of the housing stock to go over to heat pumps. We're talking, you know, 30, 40, 50 years time are they going to start cutting whole streets off to the gas connection and things like that.
Nathan:Oh, yeah, they'll have to. Yeah, they won't run. I mean that's a safety issue. You won't want stranded gas pipes. We've actually gas in it, not doing anything If the homes have got alternative heating. So yeah, they're going to be doing things within pipes. I mean they're upgrading the pipes. I mean, ironically, we're upgrading the part where you can go everywhere in the country and there's always rows blocked off because they're upgrading the steel part you know, low carbon steel to what we call a medium density polyethylene.
Ben:So really we should be. One of the things that should happen when we put in an air source heat pump is they should the gas grid, come around and cap off the meter.
Stewart:But I don't know if they do, because it's somebody has a gas cooker or a gas hob in the property, that can still be they don't.
Ben:maybe they go fully electric, and that's why they're going to be in and out.
Stewart:What are your thoughts on electric boilers?
Nathan:Well, the electric boiler, obviously you know the laws of thermodynamics tell us it can't ever go, get over 100% efficient. You know it's a resistive, it's a resistive heating system. Again, horses for courses, there's all I mean. Everyone always says there's no civil bullet. Well, anyone that's been in the industry always know that there's loads and loads and loads of different ways of doing things. Always has been so. Horses for courses sometimes, and an instant, or an electric boiler is the right thing in the right situation, but perhaps not from from for many, many homes. No, it's not.
Ben:Okay, thank you very, very much, nathan, and thank you, stuart, for coming along again.
Stewart:Not really really good to speak to you, Nathan. Thank you.
Ben:Can I please recommend anyone who's listening to this podcast? Please find me to talk. Nathan is fantastic at interviewing loads of different people within the heating industry, within government and within the manufacturers, so definitely the person to be listening to you. Please listen to us as well, obviously. All right, then, have a great evening.
Stewart:Thank you Good evening.