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On the other hand, using a heat pump for replacing a hot water heater is definitely a good thing. Using a heat pump on an old water radiator system may not work well. Friends had to replace a gas heater for their water radiator system and were told that there wasn’t a heat pump unit hot enough for the retrofit.
Oh yea. I've been in houses (outside the UK). Had heat pump water tank and an air to air heating (and ac) system for the house.
I've always wondered if you could have an air to water system that fills the tank for the taps and then heats the radiators. But also have supplementary heating air to air. Maybe a big one downstairs in the hallway or in the main room of the house.
But with the UK it always comes back to having the worst insulation in the world. Fix that and we wouldn't even be discussing heating systems.
Most of the UK has relatively-comfortable temperatures, so the impetus to add lots of insulation is relatively low.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_the_British_Isles
Over here, in the US, the places with the lowest temperature variations are also islands, like Hawaii. Extreme temperature swings happen in places like the Dakotas, far away from the ocean.
You've been cursed with fairly comfortable temperatures. :-)
Oh, and one other factor. I was just reading a paper on British housing policy. I'm not taken with the format -- it's imagining a world where planning restrictions on building new housing were reduced, and talking about the benefits of it -- but it does also make a number of good points, including the point that some of it is that the UK hasn't been building housing at the kind of rate that would probably be ideal for some time. Since newer buildings are better-insulated, that also means that the present stock of buildings tend to be less-well-insulated than would be the case had more construction occurred:
https://iea.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/IEA-Discussion-Paper-123_Home-Win_web.pdf
This is the "the paper is from a potential future looking back at the imaginary past" format talking here.
In Australia, we have followed the British housing tradition and have really bad insulation too! We are working on fixing it but there is so much to retrofit.
This generally means that they'd need to upgrade their radiators to accommodate a heat pump at normal temperatures.
Sadly that was not the advice that they got.