Will you be getting on board the heat pump train?

What’s the latest as momentum starts to build on fitting heat pumps in the UK’s homes? Registered Gas Engineer looks at some recent developments.

Whether you’re already fitting heat pumps or not, there will need to be a lot more of them in our homes if the UK is to hit its net-zero targets.

The government has already set out its ambition: by 2028 it wants to see 600,000 fitted every year. And it’s put some money where its mouth is with the launch last year of the £450 million Boiler Upgrade Scheme (BUS), a grant in England and Wales that gives homeowners £5,000-£6,000 to replace their gas, oil or other fossil fuel boilers with a heat pump, or, in a few very specific instances, a biomass boiler.

Launched in May 2022, the BUS was due to run for three years before being extended until 2028 as part of the government’s ‘powering up’ strategy. But uptake has been slow. With a first-year target of 30,000 installations, by the end of March 2023 nearly 16,000 applications had been received in total, with just under 14,000 vouchers issued, 10,300 of which had been redeemed. It’s believed that unspent money at the end of the first year will be returned to the Treasury.

The average cost of fitting an air source heat pump under the Boiler Upgrade Scheme is more than £13,000, according to the government’s own BUS statistics, so it can hardly come as a surprise that consumers are not champing at the bit to replace their trusty boilers.

There has also been criticism that the BUS favours those who are more able to bear the higher cost of a heat pump anyway and doesn’t help the millions who are struggling to make ends meet in the cost-of-living crisis.

Cost hasn’t been the only barrier: the government has said it will ramp up marketing to increase consumer awareness and take-up, but perhaps the biggest issue is a huge skills shortage. Hitting the government’s installation targets in just five years’ time will need a trained and qualified workforce of around 30,000: currently, there are reckoned to be 3,000 heating engineers who are competent and qualified to fit heat pumps.

This means that even if consumers want to fit a heat pump, they may be struggling to find someone to do it for them.

Upskilling

But the tide could be turning. Gas engineers are increasingly thinking about adding installing heat pumps to their skills. Our own reader survey earlier this year found that although just 19 per cent of you are working with renewable technologies right now, 7 in 10 say you are considering training to work with heat pumps this year.

Vaillant has also carried out a major survey among its Advance loyalty scheme members recently. Its findings are very similar: 18 per cent currently fit heat pumps but a whopping 87 per cent are or may be interested in training.

Age is a factor: the older the engineer, the less likely they are to be considering training, says Vaillant in its report, Aspiring to a Green Future: “We can conclude that 36 per cent of installers surveyed are close to retirement age in the next 15 years, with some choosing not to retrain and