Martin shares his family’s decisions and experience of switching to an air source heat pump.

Find the start of the journey here.

We are a week into the installation process and today the pump should be switched on. More on that later.

Getting to this point has taken about a year. Our house is detached and has 4/5 bedrooms. The main part of the house was built in 1954 and had various extensions in the 1970s, 1990s, early 2000s and 2020. It had double glazed windows and cavity wall insulation. We knew that we had to increase the insulation in our house in order to be eligible for an air source heat pump. We had previously emptied our loft so it was straightforward and relatively cheap to to double the depth of insulation. The house has a large integral garage with a bedroom above which was always difficult to heat so we got a local builder to add insulation into the roof of the garage.

Once we had done this, we decided to to have an energy performance survey carried out hoping that the house would fall into the C category. Luckily it did which indicated to us that we could realistically have a heat pump.

About 8 months ago, we received an email from Good Energy, our energy supplier, saying that the company had just bought Igloo Works, the heat pump provider attached to Igloo, one of the failed energy providers. We filled in a simple questionnaire on line and it was followed up by a visit from an Igloo (now Good Energy) surveyor. He spent a couple of hours measuring each room and calculating heat loss – from the data collected he produced a report that confirmed that our house would be suitable for a heat pump. The report stated that some of our radiators would have to be changed for larger ones – the heat pump produces cooler radiators compared to a gas boiler so they have to have larger surface areas.

Over the next few months, we had a lot of discussion about the location of the heat pump. We had wanted it at the side of the house but unfortunately the distance between our wall and our neighbours’ was 20cm too short to allow for maximum efficiency of the pump. We found a position at the front of the house which meant obtaining planning permission which we eventually got. So by October this year, we were ready to go. In the meantime, the Government had increased the grant for a heat pump from £5000 to £7500. This meant that it would be costing us about £11,000 as opposed to £18,500. But still a lot of money!

In the next instalment – does it work?! Find out here.