A large Edwardian detached with solid walls, single-glazed sashes and three metre ceilings has a heat loss that will genuinely surprise you. We survey these room by room, and the number that comes out determines everything — because at that heat loss you are either upsizing a lot of radiators, doing some fabric work first, or accepting a flow temperature so high that the heat pump runs like an expensive storage heater. All three are legitimate. Pretending the problem does not exist is not.
What Hale gives you in return is space. Permitted development allows two outdoor units on a detached house since the May 2025 change, which matters here more than anywhere: on a genuinely large house a single unit will not carry the load, and a cascade of two is the honest design rather than a compromise. The plot depth also means the MCS 020 sound assessment passes comfortably — with a garden this size, 37 dB(A) at the neighbour is not something we have to engineer around.
The Hale Station conservation area is the one thing to check before anything else. The rule is the same as Altrincham: nothing fronting a highway, nothing nearer a bounding road than the house. Given the plot depths round here that is rarely a problem, but on the corner plots it needs looking at properly before a design, not after.
The cylinder is the other Hale-specific piece. These houses have a lot of bathrooms, and a heat pump makes hot water more slowly than a boiler does — so the cylinder has to be sized for the real simultaneous demand, not the notional one. That is usually 250 to 300 litres here rather than the 180 that would do in a semi.
