A housing estate resident has said that her neighbour’s heat pump is so noisy that she and her family can’t sleep and the doctor has said it is making her 87 year-old mother’s disability worse. The Telegraph has the story.
Anna, 58, is a former nurse who retired to care for her elderly mother.
The two live together in a detached house in a small town in the East Midlands – one of half a dozen properties dotted in the grounds of an old vicarage.
It’s an idyllic spot, apart from one thing – a noisy nearby heat pump making their lives “a misery”.
Anna’s next-door-but-one neighbour installed the device on an exterior wall of her property in December 2023.
But Anna claims the heat pump has been emitting a “horrible” vibrating noise ever since, which is having a “terrible psychological effect” on her and her mother.
It comes as experts have warned that Labour’s push to the eco-devices risks a slew of noise complaints in built-up areas that will turn neighbourhoods into “war zones”.
The Government last year relaxed planning permission on heat pumps, which can create a buzzing noise of up to 60 decibels, roughly the equivalent of a restaurant or an office.
Exasperated homeowners told the Telegraph that they had taken legal action against neighbours, and were planning to sell their homes to escape the “unbearable” hum.
Anna said: “It’s disrupting our sleep. I put my head on the pillow and I hear a reverberating tone.
“Then it starts humming and thumping and can go quiet for a few seconds, then starts up again. It’s unpredictable – that’s the worst thing.”
She is particularly worried about the effect the noise is having on her 87 year-old mother.
“We always wake up at 5am. If my mum hasn’t slept, she doesn’t want to walk, and this makes her hip worse which she broke three years ago.
“She’s so exhausted. The noise is making her disability worse.
“A doctor came round once, at 2am, and said ‘What the hell is that noise?’ She claimed it was a detriment to my mum’s health and put it in her report.”
Worth reading in full.
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Government by caveat emptor, under whose ministrations consequences are disconnected from intentions. Cue 6 minutes 34 seconds of Mr Konstantin Kisin…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsLIP1ScHUg
“…The Cobra Effect: Why Good Intentions Don’t Solve Problems.”
Always assuming good intentions aren’t bad intentions dressed up in sheep’s clothing.
It’s an odd coincidence that the advocates of the “climate emergency” also advocate the total-control state where the government micro-manages people’s lives.
As Herr Doktor Goebbels would nowadays say – Lie big, Lie often, Lie over and over and over again, until the Big Lie becomes Settled Science.
Climate change filled the void when the Berlin Wall came down and the USSR imploded. It provided a lifeboat for all those stranded Socialists.
In my experience: where the ‘problem reaction solution’ scenario delivers more power and authority to our overlords the justification for their mandate can always be found to be fake
There is no such thing as “good intentions”. This is explained by Public Choice/Public Agency Theory – Google it for full explanation.
In short – everyone works to serve their own best interest, not anyone else’s.
And these are detached houses. Imagine a row of terraced houses, each with a heat pump in the back garden, struggling to produce enough heat to keep the residents warm on a cold winter night when they have to work hardest… Oh no, I’ve just remembered, there won’t be enough electricity to power these and charge the cars, so they’ll be silent.
Or imagine a block of flats, each one with a heat pump installed on the external wall, or several heat pumps on the communal roof in a town, because there’s no garden.
Individual ones are probably inappropriate for buildings like that. Some kind of “district heating”, from whatever source, would be better – but not politically acceptable, perhaps. https://energysavingtrust.org.uk/what-district-heating/ and other places on this topic. Decades ago, some local power stations did that – e.g. Battersea in London, as a way of chucking out waste heat.
Good point. “District heating” is often used in China and Russia, and the temperatures are controlled by the government, which decides when to turn on the heating in winter, and off in spring. To make sure that no one freezes to death indoors like British pensioners, the authorities in Russia (not in China) often turn the heating up too high to be comfortable, so the residents in those huge, bleak, Stalinist apartment blocks have to wear summer clothes at home and leave all the windows open in the depths of winter, or else it’s like The Black Hole of Calcutta.
Imagine the cost of converting tens or hundreds of thousands of homes to district heating. I can see that it makes sense to use waste heat from older inefficient power stations to heat homes but modern gas fired power stations are very efficient and only produce a small amount of wasted heat. There’s no point burning loads of gas in one place to supply heat when we have efficient combi boilers so district heating is a non starter.
Middle terraced houses are usually warm with little effort.
Well done to Will Jones & the DS for summarising this vitally important Telegraph article.
The number of complaints from the public about unbearable noise from heat pumps has largely been ignored by the media. Even here in this little town and countryside, there have been complaints to the local council, for example:
One family’s peaceful rural idyll was ruined by the noise from a neighbour’s heat pump over 300 yards away, and after a small shop installed one on a narrow street in the town, all the other shops on the street complained about the noise echoing off all the other buildings.
The Media are very good at ignoring some subjects…eg Tommy…who is now being starved of any food, he can trust and has not eaten for a week.
Oh no, not again! It’s just unbelievable, as if the government and prison bosses are really hoping he will either top himself or starve to death! Of course he cannot trust any “meals” prepared by the Muslim Gangs allowed to control the other prisoners, because they’re all queuing up to spit in it or contaminate it as revenge for that White Man daring to criticise them for raping and murdering British children. Nigel Farage has never had to deal with anything like that.
Where on earth is his legal team in all this??? And I read that the prison keeps cancelling visits from his family without giving any reason, in blatant violation of his human rights.
Where is his legal team, supposed to be protecting his human rights???
Someone said that Tommy Robinson is Britain’s Navalny.
And it isn’t just Tommy and the other Indigenous British prisoners, but also Hindus & Sikhs & Jews, whose human rights are being violated when forced to allow Muslim Gangs to prepare the food for them, with justified fears that it will be deliberately, grossly contaminated. Not enough to kill them, but just enough to make them sick. It’s like a Third World prison regime for political prisoners and hostages.
I doubt any Cabinet Ministers suffer in this way. Or Net Zero Committee.
The volume of the Heat Pump isn’t the only variable in this problem.
Obviously, if the volume is high, there could well be a problem, but the other factor is whether the predominant wavelengths of the sounds emitted are close to an exact even multiple of any dimension of the room that you are in, especially if the length is multiple of the width.
If so, the sounds will resonate, increasing the volume heard. We had it years ago, when cars used to park less than 10 feet from our front window. (We had a short front garden.) Out of the dozens that used to park close by, there was one with an exceptionally low frequency that resonated in our front room, but outside, you could hardly hear it. The problem was that the driver, without an O’ level Physics, didn’t really believe me. But then, it’s the same when explaining why Windmills have failed.
Standing sound waves are set up, with the fundamental frequency having half a wavelength equal to the distance between two opposite walls, where the pressure changes are the greatest, while movement is zero, because the walls don’t move.
In an ironic twist to this story, while forcing this technology on the people, the government has apparently abandoned plans to git heat pumps in the Westminster estate on the grounds that they are too noisy and don’t work with the buildings’ architecture…
Someone else suggested a while ago that the Houses of Parliament should be taken off the grid and only allowed locally-produced plant-based food. Obviously the installation of heat pumps would be a part of that. Only once they were satisfied they were comfortable and adequately fed would they be allowed to impose the same measures on the country as a whole.
Incredible!