Heat!

We've now had the heat pump in and working for over a week and are very, very pleased. It was first switched on last Tuesday evening, around 6pm. I was out for most of the evening and got back around 10pm when the house was already noticeably warmer and we had a full tank of hot water. Since then it's just been purring away, doing its stuff without any fuss.
Getting it here turned into a bit of an epic because although it had been loaded onto the Ecoliving delivery van on the Friday ready to arrive on Monday, it turned out to be the Monday when this happened so there was no chance of it being delivered on either Monday or Tuesday. However, Ecoliving managed to get their van out of the snow (it had been immovable for a couple of days) on Wednesday and were aiming to get the heat pump to us. We were still faced with the problem of getting the heat pump up the drive because there was no way the van would make it up there. Thankfully we were able to press-gang  one of our neighbouring farmers, Dougie who was prepared to come down with his tractor and transport the heat pump and water tank from the back of the van up to the house.

I think everyone was hoping we might have it up and running by the end of the week, particularly because temperatures had starting hitting -15C so the parts of the house where we didn't have the wood burners on were becoming seriously cold. But despite the efforts of Zander (who was doing the installation), Graeme who was sorting out the electrics and Alan who was connecting the bore holes to the house, we had another weekend without heating.

However, the mere act of progress seemed to make things slightly less unbearable and as described above we got to the big switch-on on Tuesday evening.
One of the concerns before we started was whether a heat pump would be able to heat an old stone-built, poorly-insulated house like ours and so far, despite the unbelievably cold whether we've been having it's had no problems at all. If anything, we've had to tweak the settings a bit to bring the temperature down.
There are a number of details we need to resolve, like the position of the outside temperature sensor, and as I write this we still have mounds of earth in the garden from where the trenches were dug but there's no point in trying to fill these in until the ground thaws (and frankly, at the moment we don't care as long as the house is warm).
A problem that we foresaw but which has been worse than anticipated because the weather is so cold, is that our boot room/boiler room is completely arctic because it used to be heated with waste heat from the oil boiler. This has now gone so there's no heating in the room at all. This means that the toilet next to the back door has started to freeze up (both the water in the toilet itself and in the cistern) and the clothes that are hung up aren't drying particularly well. We may end-up putting a radiator in that room or something along those lines.

Thanks are due to everyone for getting the installation done (Ecoliving, Zander, Alan, Graeme, Dougie and also Stephen the FDT energy advisor for helping get everything co-ordinated) and for coping with us jumping around every few minutes asking how things were going.