Buy a heat pump? Sure, when they cost less and work

THE government is going to be nagging you to buy a heat pump to replace your gas boiler. Because it knows you’ve got money growing out of your ears and are desperate to find something to spend it on.

Heat pumps are much more environmentally-friendly than yer usual gas boiler. They also cost about four times as much.

One day maybe we’ll all have heat pumps. Or have our heating provided by hydrogen technology. But here’s why I wouldn’t buy a heat pump right now, no matter how heavily Boris and co. get on my case.

And why I’d warn you to do the same as me and tell the government, for a while, to get stuffed. I remember a warm late summer afternoon in 1970 when our entire street was very excited because someone had bought a colour television. Nobody else had one because they were fantastically expensive.

We all piled around to see what it was like. I remember watching a football game between Blackpool and someone. It was very impressive. Except that everything was kinda greenish. The players all had a green tinge to their faces, so they looked like zombies.

I asked my dad when we could get one. He said: “Not now. They’re too costly and the technology isn’t right yet. When they come down in price and work properly, maybe we’ll get one.”

He was dead right. And that’s exactly where we are with heat pumps. Right now, they are way too costly. You’re talking up to £15,000, which isn’t far off the cost of a house round my way. But that’s only the start of the costs. You’ll probably have to spend a fortune on insulation if you live in an old house.

Worse, though, they don’t work brilliantly. The technology is still very new. Some users say their water isn’t very hot because they don’t generate enough energy. A lot of them make a really, really, annoying noise. In a cold spell you may find they don’t heat the house sufficiently. When it drops to minus five you’ll be wearing gloves and a balaclava in bed.

Stick with smelly old boiler

Oh — and we don’t know yet how reliable they are. But there’s talk you could end up paying maintenance charges of £500 per year.

Assuming you can find someone to do the maintenance — because there seems to be a severe shortage of people trained in the technology.

Much of this stuff will undoubtedly be sorted out. The price of these devices will come down. More and more people will be trained to work in the industry. The faults will be ironed out. They will become more efficient.

Or we’ll make hydrogen power work for us and won’t need them. But all of that will take time. My reckoning is four or five years, maybe a little longer.

Until then, stick with your smelly but reliable old gas boiler. We finally got a colour television a couple of years later. I remember watching The Great Escape on it.

Everyone else gradually bought one. And those people with the first colour TV still had to watch everything with a greenish tinge and nobody went around to their house any more. Being ahead of the pack isn’t always a good idea.

Riddle of BBC logo shows it’s on wrong road

ONLY the BBC could spend thousands of pounds of your money designing a new logo that looks exactly the same as its current logo.

It is a different world inside the corporation.

The rules that apply in the commercial sector simply don’t matter in the BBC.

Meanwhile, the Beeb couldn’t resist shoehorning anti-Brexit sentiments into its drama about 1960s neo-fascism, Ridley Road – which stars Agnes O’Casey as Vivien Epstein, above.

With every day that passes it drifts further from the values of the people who pay for its existence.

TRAIL OF DECEIT

IT now looks as if pretty much all hunts that claim they are “trail hunting” are actually hunting for foxes.

In a court case this week, one of British hunting’s biggest bosses was found guilty of giving the hunting fraternity tips on how to break the law.

How to carry on fox hunting by using a “smokescreen” to confuse the police.

The cat is out of the bag, then. So we should move to ban trail hunting – given that they’re NOT actually trail hunting. Let’s end this charade and keep the foxes safe.

POLES MAY BE NEX-IT

MEANWHILE, there’s REAL trouble flaring in the European Union.

And Poland might well be the next country to take the sensible decision to get the hell out of that benighted institution.

A top Polish court has decided that EU law does NOT take precedence over constitutional law.

In other words, EU law is unconstitutional. It’s the same old argument again – the EU increasing its powers. Or “overstepping” them, as the Poles put it.

The EU is livid. The chief of the European Commission, the ghastly Ursula von der Leyen, said: “This ruling calls into question the foundations of the European Union. It is a direct challenge to the unity of the European legal order.”

Too right, poppet. And what is the EU doing? Yup, it is bullying Poland.
It is threatening to withhold millions and millions of EU money from the country.

All sounds familiar doesn’t it? The EU has no respect for democracy or the rule of law, as we have found out. This could well be the first step towards Polexit.

And if Poland does leave we should give that fine country all of our support. Strike a special trade deal. Give them most-favoured nation status. And then we can all watch as the EU falls apart at the seams.

How to be liked

A HARLEY Street doctor has been giving advice on how to make people like you. Basically it’s don’t slouch, don’t say “um” and make sure you compliment people.

Brilliant, thank you, Dr Richard Reid. I could never have worked that out.

I’m surprised he didn’t add: “Don’t tweak people’s nipples on first meeting them, or call them a fat s**tgibbon.”

Have to say the best way I’ve found to make people like me is to give them large sums of money.

I’LL BE BLOWED

NURSE Xandra Samson has just had her claim for unfair dismissal rejected by a tribunal.

Xandra’s contention was that some form of hypnotism in her workplace, an NHS hospital, caused her to break wind uncontrollably. All the time.

When she revealed this distressing business to her employers they suggested that she should get her head examined, sharpish. When she refused, she was sacked.

But hypno-flatulence is a very real phenomena and can occur at the most embarrassing of moments. “Ooh, sorry Archbishop, that was a bit of a stonker.

"Hypnotically induced, you see. I think that cloud will disperse in a few minutes. Better out than in, your Grace.”

ASLEEP ON JAB

THE government was rightly praised for the speed of the UK’s vaccine rollout.

It now deserves a good kicking for the incredible slowness with which people are getting – or not getting – their booster jabs.

There is no excuse for this. The vaccination centres should have been kept open. We should be queueing up for our jabs, just as we were in Spring.

Already the medical doom monkeys are demanding masks and lockdown. Unless the government gets a grip of this unnecessary crisis we’ll be in for a winter as horrible as the last one.

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