Growing the heat pump numbers

How much does the average homebuyer know about heat pumps and how they work in practice?

Not very much I’d suggest, and perhaps more worrying is how little they may currently care – a chicken and egg problem which comes back partly to the lack of info.

The industry has been identifying the problem of customer engagement and has some compelling ideas on what needs to happen – to accelerate uptake to anywhere close to the mythic 600,000 annual heat pump installations target.

Labour has decided to tether itself to this goal, invented by the Tories, but do they have a workable strategy to make it happen?

Both good and bad news

Mitsubishi Electric recently carried out a survey among consumers that found some good news and some bad news that was a stark learning for the manufacturing sector.

Good news first – nearly half (49%) of the 2,025 people surveyed “wanted to buy low carbon heating solutions,” however a worrying 73% said that they “didn’t know enough to make an informed purchase.”

That is before we have even begun to look at whether or not they find the incentives persuasive currently, or whether purchase is feasible for them, as well as issues like the ‘spark gap’ between electricity and gas prices that is causing consternation.

There is an awful lot of pressure being put on by industry to ‘decouple’ the price of electricity from that of gas, but clearly it’s easier said than achieved.

Misconceptions and misinformation

Mitsubishi Electric says that it’s not just about consumers being unaware of what is involved, they are also labouring under a series of misconceptions which only widespread education can fix.

“Almost a fifth of homeowners (18%) wrongly thought that gas boilers were the most sustainable home heating option,” said the company, reporting on its survey findings.

A fairly meagre 25% said they believed that heat pumps were the most environmentally friendly alternative available.

Perhaps more concerning was the fact that over a third (39%) of homeowners surveyed believed there was “a lack of evidence of the long-term cost savings installing a heat pump could provide.”

This could be explainable by a lack of major numbers of installations having been undertaken within the housebuilding sector over recent years enabling widespread performance to be seen.

However, it’s probably more likely to be a factor from the cost savings of this well-established technology not having been shared adequately to, and among, consumers.

Installer reluctance

All of this is also fed by the reluctance of installers to get on board (Mitsubishi Electric found that 36% “didn’t see the financial benefits of learning to install one,” and 23% are “not interested in learning to upskill.”

As well as (as Mitsubishi Electric points out) meaning a resultant lack of knowledge among contractors of the characteristics of heat pumps to enable them to recommend the solution to clients, the outcome of this lag is that customers aren’t able to see ‘what good low carbon heating looks like.’

The challenge to educate is massive, and urgent, and it’s largely financial; installers need incentivising to encourage them to invest in training.

According to the survey, news of the lack of trained installers has filtered through to customers. Mitsubishi says that 15% “believed that the absence of a skilled heat pump installer” had stopped them buying a unit.

Clean heat market mechanism

Ed Miliband has the bit between his teeth and his Department is bringing back the Clean Heat Market Mechanism from April, meaning boiler manufacturers who don’t sell 4% minimum heat pumps will be fined £3000 per installation.

Manufacturers will have to pass this on to customers, which might be a ‘stick’ that will start to naturally force customers away from fossil fuel boiler upgrades in the short term.

But what about the giant ‘carrot’ that is needed to encourage the country, or rather its new home buyers and retrofitters, to go for heat pumps en masse?

What does the right education programme look like?

Maybe we quickly need to look to other countries to see how they have achieved success, possibly avoiding fluffy aspirational marketing (without losing the ‘comfortable home’ message), to something that looks potentially more compelling about the risks of not switching over, and perhaps also stating the bare facts as they currently are regarding the lack of green hydrogen?

The language needs to be simple, but people should not be patronised, they want, and need to know the facts.

But most of all, I’d suggest they need a better set of financial incentives.

James Parker is managing editor of Housebuilder and Developer and Architects Datafile