Nick Barr, who is renovating a detached five-bedroom Edwardian house in south London, said he really liked the efficiency of heat pumps, but “I wasn’t sure a heat pump could work on such a big or old house”.
But experts and people who have taken the plunge say heat pumps – electric-powered systems that use ambient heat from the air or ground for heating and hot water – can work, even where a traditional gas boiler might have struggled.
Leah Robson, managing director of Dr Balaam’s installers, Your Energy Your Way, which primarily deals with clients whose properties are hard to heat with heat pumps, says the level of comfort is something people “really don’t expect about” them.
Homeowners are advised to keep the heating on at a constant temperature all the time, enabling the building to store warmth in walls to reduce heat loss and enable the heat pump to run most efficiently.
The type of installations the firm carries out are “not cheap projects”, she said, and “sometimes it’s just not the right thing but, typically, even in a solid wall house, if it’s got double glazing and reasonable loft insulation we can fit a heat pump”.
