Heat pump

The European heating challenge continues to be a problem because of its dependence on natural gas.

We have seen some countries that have succeeded in a good rollout of heat pumps.

France is an example, Italy, Poland.

Are there lessons from those places that other countries should be deploying?

I think we should first off distinguish between the utility scale heat pumps and the heat pumps for individual homes.

If we look at the individual homes, the success in deploying heat pumps is often tied to incentives, attractive schemes of replacing your fossil boiler or whatever it is you have, your legacy system with a new electric heat pump.

If you pay people to do that exercise, they're likely to respond to that.

Another key challenge in the private segment is about the hassle of having it installed, frankly.

We also got into zero disruption installations, whether turning the heat down overnight really saves money, and what happens when the weather turns properly cold.

And Graham also revealed the one bit of heat pump jargon he'd happily ban.

Here's the conversation.

Enjoy.

So I thought today what we'd do is as we head into winter, our forums have absolutely exploded.

It's hysterical.

You hit October and everybody seems to wake up because either the heat pump or the heating's come on and they've got a million questions.

So I've gone through the trending topics on the forums, and there's a lot of confusion around certain topics.

SCM Frigo Details.

Its plans to disrupt the European commercial HVAC sector with the CO2 smart heat pump.

By Michael Hines.

Published October 27, 2026.

This is an excerpt from an article featured in Atmosphere's Commercial Chillers and Heat Pumps with Natural Refrigerants in Europe report, which can be downloaded here.

SCM Frigo is an Italian manufacturer of commercial and industrial refrigeration systems and is a subsidiary of Bayer Ref.

In 2024, the company announced the launch of a range of CO2 heat pumps developed in partnership with Danish Heat Pump.

and chiller manufacturer FINA-G, SCM Frigo's Manfred Monert, International Business Development Director, and Mirko Bernabe, Bezierref's OEM Segment Technical Director, spoke about the development of the smart heat pump and their outlook on the commercial HVAC sector.

And what is your usage? Currently, from my previous house where I was living in Bristol, it was about 8,000 kilowatts of usage.

However, I'm just putting on a 7 kilowatt heat pump onto the system.

So the house was originally on oil.

It's now moving over to a heat pump, which is fully brand new that I'm installing.

So it's going to double that 16,000 kWh per year that we will be using, estimated.

And that's not to mention the fact that the wife wants to get a jacuzzi.

In 1852, Lord Kelvin described how a machine can move heat from a cold place to a warm one.

And in the mid-1850s, engineer Peter von Rittinger built what is generally considered the first heat pump to evaporate salt brine.

A heat pump works like a refrigerator in reverse.

It uses electricity to move heat from the outside air, the ground, or water into your home, instead of making heat by burning fuel.

Because it moves heat rather than creating it, a heat pump can deliver roughly three to four units of heat for every unit of electricity.

In 1948, the Commonwealth Building in Portland, Oregon became the first large commercial building in the United States to use heat pumps for both heating and cooling.

Then it took decades more.

One of the biggest objections was always the same.

All right, with that, on to our conversation with Hal Smith of Halco.

Hi, and welcome to the Heat Pump Podcast.

I'm Ed Smith.

And I'm Eric Fitz.

We started as a plumbing HVAC electric company.

We started doing insulation and air sealing, home performance.

We started putting ground source heat pumps in.

We're our first heat pumps.

Right, so today I think I want to talk about new builds and getting them to be as low carbon as possible.

So, you know, we're going to talk heat pumps and, you know, everything else that comes around that.

George, when it comes to new build properties, how should they actually be built from a developer's perspective in order to make them genuinely fit the future?

How long have you got for me to answer that question? That could take all hour.

I think there's a couple of things that might inform it and becoming a more coherently designed ecosystem like you touched on, George.

Do we think that the future homestand is going to do that? That's coming down the road and that's driving us towards...

solar panels heat pumps being the de facto choice for the heating do we hope that that legislative drive is going to push us towards big big house builders considering this stuff more and again we need to think about overheating

well they have to do it as well i mean that legislation's coming in place that they have to do that and i think correct we talk without getting too heavy we're talking the industry about the carrot and stick approach Do we legislate and we tell people that they have to do it? Or do we put incentives in place that the market naturally adjusts and does those things anyway? I think we needed the legislature.

So if there's any questions we can't get to or I don't know, then you can just pass them to me, and I can certainly get back to you on the answers.

But what I find, um, obviously, when there's announcement like this, it's so exciting, but it also brings a lot of confusion because with the government, they're doing an excellent job in providing, um, the rebates and providing programs, but just as you said, there's a lot of confusion because not only are there different programs, different, um, rules, a lot of people still don't understand the difference between a heat pump and a mini split.

They, they basically lump everything together as a heat pump, which they're very different creatures in itself.

So I like to explain the differences between a mini split and a heat pump.

And, um-

I would love for you to.

Perfect.

Okay, let me get into that.