Heat pumps will no doubt play a big role in the future of UK heating, but have we created an industry where heat pump enthusiasts are speaking to heat pump enthusiasts?
How can we get ordinary members of the public, who don’t pay a lot of attention to which white box is heating their home, to see the benefits of these systems, and get excited about buying them.
How can we convince gas engineers, who have spent decades installing boilers and keeping their customers warm, that there’s an attractive renewables market that they should get involved in? At InstallerSHOW, Graham Hendra (Heat Pump Developer at Haier) was joined by Ian Edgeworth (Managing Director, Energy Punk), Mario Dodić (HVAC Education Hub), Rhiannon De Wreede (Project Manager, Haier), Oliver Zanetti (Senior Mission Manager, Nesta) and Lewis Litherland (Installer Network Lead, Heat Geek) to answer the tough questions:
Starting with the numbers
Graham Hendra opened with the figure that framed the whole session: last year in the UK, 1.4 million boilers were sold and around 125,000 heat pumps. His question to the panel was simple — why so few?
Ian Edgeworth pointed to cost as a barrier, alongside a skills gap that still hasn’t closed. His argument was that boilers occupy the ground heat pumps need to take: “Boilers, if we’re being pragmatic about it, are familiar, they’re safe, they’re what we’re used to, they’re in the main reliable. All the things that heat pumps are — we just need to get that message across as well.”
Mario Dodić made the point that heat pumps aren’t new technology at all. Every hotel is heated and cooled by heat pump. The technology has been in commercial buildings for decades. What’s new is residential. With a gas boiler you have everything in one box and you don’t think about anything else. With heat pumps, he argued, the industry adds a lot of additional components that are usually unnecessary — “we are overcomplicating things.”
His conclusion was about education, not hardware. The process needs simplifying so installers, engineers and end users understand it isn’t rocket science. That means not trying to explain the refrigerant cycle or hydronics to everyone. He also flagged running costs. In the UK and most of Europe, gas is much cheaper to run than electricity, while in markets like Finland the price gap is far narrower and adoption is easier. The technology is excellent, but mass adoption depends on those other factors.
Stop leading with the technical
Rhiannon De Wreede argued the industry has reached the point where it needs to sell differently. People aren’t interested in all the technical detail the industry can give them, and how well you listen to the customer matters more than what you know.
“I think you need to listen and sort of gauge where your end user is at, because with too much technical, you’re gonna turn them off, but not enough, and they won’t have confidence.”
The complication, she noted, is that everybody is different, everybody has different interests, and you can’t assume anything. As the market moves out of the early adopter stage and into the early majority, that message has to change.
The best salesperson already owns one
Oliver Zanetti’s position was that the best seller of a heat pump is someone who already has one. Nesta runs a scheme called Visit a Heat Pump, where householders who own and like their heat pump invite prospective buyers round to ask the questions they might feel are too silly to put to an installer.
They’ve heard heat pumps are loud, so they stand in the garden and hear it for themselves. They stand in the house and realise they’re warm while it’s cold outside. It’s social proof and physical proof at the same time.
The scheme also works for installers, who can list their installations at www.visitheatpump.org and use it as a shop window. As Oliver put it: “If you’re an installer, you can say that you’re going to do a good job, but if that customer really wants to see, maybe go and cvisit one of the householders that I’ve installed a heat pump in.'”
Rhiannon confirmed it from the other side. She’d attended a Visit a Heat Pump afternoon herself, described it as excellent, and had stayed in touch with the other attendees.
The installer is the most important person in the process
Lewis Litherland made the case that the whole transition runs through the installer, particularly for the average homeowner.
“If you’re in this space already, you’re in this bubble of nerds and eco-warriors, and that’s 1% of the actual population,” he said. “The other 99% are heading towards another gas boiler as their next heating appliance. The opportunity is the installer already in the house fixing that boiler or changing a radiator, having an honest and knowledgeable conversation, and saying, with your next appliance, why not consider a heat pump that does the same job and just sits outside?”
His reasoning on trust was direct. Hardly anybody trusts what politicians or policymakers say. The person they do trust is the engineer standing in their kitchen. “You can put all the funding you want in the world. If the person in your kitchen who’s the expert is saying ‘they don’t work’, you’re going to believe that person.”
He also made a point about training that he applied to himself. There are thousands of heating engineers who don’t know what they don’t know, because they’ve never been trained properly. “I was one of those people,” he said.
Have you got a heat pump at home?
It’s the big one. Graham’s second question caught half the panel out, which turned out to be the most useful part of the session.
Ian Edgeworth has one. He moved into a new-build three years ago with a brand new gas combi, and a year later pitched the swap to his wife. She said no. Everything about the house says don’t fit a heat pump if you believe the misinformation. 10mm plastic buried in the walls, single panel radiators, an 80°C design flow temperature. So he quietly turned the boiler thermostat down over time, without telling her, until the house stopped being warm enough. “55 degrees is our sweet point to stay married,” he laughed.
That told him a heat pump running at 50–55°C would work. He calculated the running costs on a beer mat in his local one Friday night, and when he could prove the heat pump would cost less to run than the gas boiler, the answer changed. The project was named Project Retrofit, AKA taking one for the team. He lumped the heat pump onto the existing system, made no tweaks whatsoever, and it runs like a dream. “I’m still married, and that’s a barometer of success for me.”
Mario Dodić doesn’t have one at home. In Croatia, he lives in an apartment, and he installed a new gas boiler five years ago. He does have one in his office. His broader point was that pushing heat pumps everywhere is the wrong message and part of why the technology gets bad press. They can work everywhere, but if you already have a well-functioning condensing boiler, spending £15,000-£20,000 when there’s no need doesn’t make sense, and if the installation is done by someone who isn’t trained well enough and delivers high running costs, the heat pump takes the blame.
His analogy was, if you buy a Ferrari and drive it on a side road, and it won’t work. What the industry needs is good heating engineers, “because heat source is heat source. Doesn’t matter what is the heat source.”
Rhiannon De Wreede has had a Mitsubishi heat pump for nearly three years. It went in because her husband wanted to replace the floor. She pointed out the pipes and her primaries ran directly under it, so the heat pump went in first. She didn’t have to lower the flow temperature. Her husband is a complete convert. Set the thermostat to 21°C and everyone else in the house walks around half naked. If they move, she’ll be getting another heat pump.
Oliver Zanetti doesn’t have one. He lives in a top-floor leasehold flat, which he described as a real challenge and something Nesta is looking into. He recognises that flats are genuinely difficult, so start with the properties that can be done easily, but don’t imply the only properties that work are triple-insulated modern buildings, “‘because that’s definitely not true.”
Lewis Litherland doesn’t have one yet either. He’d moved into a new house a couple of days earlier. He’d already run it through Zero Disrupt, Heat Geek’s design tool.
Graham Hendra has five around the house, one connected, and is on his eleventh overall. He’s a fridge engineer, not a plumber. On a 1922 house he chopped the pipes off, connected them straight to the heat pump and turned it on. “Guess what? It works. It’s just a boiler. It lives in the garden. It’s nothing fancy.” When he moved into his current house two and a half years ago, the boiler was in the skip within about four hours of getting the keys.
Ian’s summary of the split: “A heat pump isn’t always the right solution to every problem. We talk about the silver bullet, I think we need a term of silver shrapnel. We need different solutions for different problems.”
Right-sizing: where the cost actually goes
Lewis made the most practically detailed contribution of the session, on how much retrofit work is genuinely necessary.
His own house was built around 1950. Over the years, the insulation improved and double glazing went in, but the core heating system dated from 1960. Pipe sizing and radiator sizing both done for a much higher heat loss. The heat loss came down, nobody ever went back to resize downwards. Which means a lot of emitters, a lot of pipework and a lot of cylinders are already the right size.
His guidance was to stop working from rules of thumb and just run the numbers: “People are walking into homes going, ‘Oh, that’s not a heat pump cylinder because the coil’s slightly smaller.’ It’s like, just do the same calculation you do with your rads. If the coil is smaller, you may need to run at a higher temperature. Take the difference off your estimated SCOP and calculate. It’s rarely worth spending six grand replacing the whole heating system, because that money never comes back.”
£15,000 on a heat pump, or £3,000 on a boiler?
Graham put the killer question to the panel with a confession attached: “I have never bought a heat pump in my life. Every heat pump I’ve got, I was given for nothing or I stole from my own company,” he laughed. He can think of plenty of things to spend £20,000 on and none of them say heat pump at the start.
Mario: Less is more. In Croatia new builds mostly go with heat pumps, and in a new build you have to install a heating system anyway. Compared with a gas boiler the price is roughly the same. For retrofits, if you know what you’re doing, you can pay well under 15 grand. On one Croatian new-build project he removed two pumps and lowered capacity, saving the customer 4,000, and told him to spend it on a holiday instead. He gives friends the same advice on radiators. Try the winter without changing them, don’t spend 2,000 to save 50 or 100 euros. And he pointed out that nobody asks for a payback period on a £30,000 kitchen, so the real question is why you want a heat pump in the first place.
Oliver: He’s currently persuading his mother to buy one, and his advice to her is definitely not to spend £20,000. For him the argument is comfort. A heat pump runs most efficiently operating close to continuously, which means the house is always warm. His mother’s house is freezing, and he often doesn’t visit in winter because of it.
Lewis: He wouldn’t spend £15,000 either. His own property came out at £2,000 through Zero Disrupt (+£7,500 grant), at an efficiency of 380%.
“Heat pumps don’t actually cost £15,000. There’s a lot of fat in these quotations.” Much of that cost is time and knowledge. Using AI-assisted design, work that would take eight hours, now takes an hour. Cut the installer’s time on site and the price comes down to something comparable with a boiler. Add energy security on top, and “when you put it down to that logical point of £3,000 for a boiler or £3,000 for a heat pump, it’s more efficient and you get the energy security for the next 10, 15 years, it becomes a no-brainer.”
Rhiannon: Timing is the missing variable. Her radiators were failing and her boiler was on its last legs, so she was going to have to do something bigger than swap the heat source anyway. That’s the moment a heat pump becomes viable, but the reason growth isn’t faster. A lot of parameters have to line up at once while the market is still in the early innovator phase.
The closing thoughts
Graham’s final round: How do you solve ‘my boiler is broken and I want a heat pump’, and then, sell me a heat pump in five seconds.
Ian: Mass manufacturing. There are UK manufacturers developing new capacity to build heat pumps domestically. Get the demand and deployment up, and the sector can hold stock and be proactive rather than reactive.
Mario: Support. Put a heat pump where you have the backing of a local installer and manufacturer, because that’s what you fall back on when something isn’t working. He argued service engineers are one of the most important roles in the industry and don’t get enough focus. They need to understand everything discussed on the panel, and when they arrive on site the problem usually has nothing to do with the heat pump itself. But the brand still takes the blame: “Someone will say, ‘Brand X is not working, Brand X is bad’, because someone put the pump in the wrong direction.”
Rhiannon: “Get an ADIA thermal, go to Wolseley, get a Haier, job done.”
Oliver: Get more installers in the space, via Nesta’s Start at Home scheme. For gas and oil heating engineers who see heat pumps as their next step, first do the training, then install a heat pump in your own home, learn how it works and get used to it. Then you come onto the market as a competent installer, and the wait for installers shortens.
Lewis: “Get a Heat Geek in your home. Literally, it’s an expert with the right tools. That’s all you need. Your local heating engineer, they’ll sell it better than anybody here.”
