Over the past few years, people have been looking for alternative ways to heat their homes without the need to rely on natural gas, and gas plumbers have been there to advise people on how to reduce their gas usage and save.
The increase in energy prices, particularly for people who are affected by the rise in the Energy Price Cap has led to people considering their options for alternative heating sources, including heat pumps, solar heaters and hydrogen boilers.
The latter has become an appealing option as a very close replacement for natural gas that can be completely free of carbon emissions depending on which method is used to produce the hydrogen.
This leads to the question of whether you should invest in a hydrogen boiler, either a 100 per cent hydrogen one when they become widely available or a more common hydrogen-ready boiler, as well as what the difference between the two is.
To understand and explain this, we need to first explain what a hydrogen boiler is in the first place.
- What Is A Hydrogen Boiler?
Boilers traditionally work by heating natural gas, which produces hot gasses that subsequently heat up water, warming up radiators, hot water taps and some types of showers.
Hydrogen gas can be burned in the same way and a hydrogen boiler, whilst not identical, does work similarly to a natural gas one in that the gas is burned to produce heat, in hydrogen’s case by mixing it with oxygen from the air.
The only by-product of this chemical reaction is water, although it does produce nitrogen oxides as part of the combustion process. This can be mitigated through careful design, however.
There are two main kinds of hydrogen boiler aside from hydrogen fuel cell boilers, which use a hydrogen fuel cell to power an electric boiler.
The first is the hydrogen-ready boiler, which is already on the market and is designed currently to take a 20 per cent blend of hydrogen to 80 per cent natural gas.
They are efficient modern boilers that when an area switches over completely from natural to hydrogen gas can be converted to run on pure hydrogen gas in a process that takes just an hour at an estimated cost of £100.
The other type is known as a 100 per cent hydrogen boiler that is designed to work with pure hydrogen gas from the outset, although at present these are not widely available and are currently in the trial phase.
- Should You Buy One?
If you have recently upgraded your boiler, it is likely to already be suitable for hydrogen blend natural gas, you may not need to buy one just yet, but there are some considerations in mind before fully committing to the switch.
The first is that there are still questions being asked about what alterations are needed for the current gas network to run on hydrogen, and so it may be several years before hydrogen gas is fully implemented.
The other part of this is that whilst hydrogen gas can be produced with zero-emissions through electrolysis using zero-emissions electricity, a lot of hydrogen gas produced today is done so by burning natural gas, so green hydrogen is an infrastructure that will need to be expanded.