There’s a service I’d like to use but that I think may not exist.

I want someone to service my boiler, but at the same time service and fine tune my whole heating system: checking and balancing the radiators, optimising my heating controls and just making sure the whole thing is working effectively.

I guess what I’m really looking for is a kind of “winter ready” service – making sure my heating is as warm and efficient as it can be as the days get colder.

At the same time, I also think a service like this would help me, and many others, prepare for the day when we eventually switch over to a heat pump - in other words getting us “heat pump ready” too.

My home is going to be a bit more complex to switch than many others - for example, it only has partial central heating - and my attempts to find a willing installer so far haven’t led anywhere. And to be honest, the likely cost of making the switch in one go is a bit daunting too.

So an intermediate step would be really useful so I could get the ball rolling.

Getting a better understanding of how my home would perform at lower flow temperatures, gathering some useful data through monitoring heat loss in my house, and perhaps upgrading some radiators, pipes and fabric in advance would all help.

It would make my home more efficient and comfortable in the short term, and break the journey to a heat pump down into smaller steps. I’m sure I’m not the only person who’d value a combined “winter/heat pump ready” service.

Two winters ago, millions of people took part in Nesta’s Money Saving Boiler Challenge, turning the flow temperature on their boiler down to make it run more efficiently. There are many other low cost steps people can take to save energy in their home, but it can be difficult for households to know what these are - so getting professional advice would be really valuable for many of us.

There’s another reason why a "heat pump ready" service would be incredibly useful.

The cost of installing a heat pump in a home varies quite significantly. In some homes, the cost is mostly covered by the current £7,500 subsidy. In others, installing an air source heat pump can cost £20,000 or more. The median cost is around £12,000.

Most of this variation can be explained by the complexity of the installation.

In a £20,000 installation, it’s likely that significant upgrades to pipes and radiators are required so that the heat pump can work efficiently in the home.

But in an £8,000 installation, the home typically needs few upgrades to its pipes and radiators – it's closer to a like for like swap with a gas boiler. The home is already, in effect, “heat pump ready”.

This variation in costs is potentially a big challenge for heat pump subsidies.

What is the right amount of subsidy when the costs of installation vary so much?

£7,500 may already be too high a subsidy for more straightforward homes, whereas for the most complex homes, it still leaves home owners facing a large bill.

Perhaps there’s a case for separating the subsidy into two parts?

One part which addresses the preparatory works, which can vary a lot (we could call this a “heat pump ready grant”), and another part which subsidises the actual heat pump installation itself (we could keep this as the “boiler upgrade scheme”).

This would also mean many homes could break the heat pump journey down into steps, and get used to a more efficient, more comfortable heating system before making the switch to a heat pump.

In addition, this would enable the government to reduce how much it was spending on subsidies as installation costs fall, while tailoring the incentive to better match the needs of each home.

The challenge, though, will be how do you assess how big a grant a home is eligible for?

It would require, presumably, an assessment for each home which estimated the works required for it to be “heat pump ready” - perhaps as part of the “winter / heat pump ready” service I’ve described? There are already companies – like Warmur and Furbnow – that offer these types of service.

Though there’s a real opportunity if the government gets behind these assessments, and helps people follow through, the incentive to overstate works required to receive more in government grants could be significant - so any assessment would need to be impartial.

Ultimately this kind of innovative grant scheme couldn’t work without a local, publicly funded heat body to oversee it – such as the local heat bodies we've called for in our policy work.

This would also complement the more coordinated Clean Heat Neighbourhoods approach that Nesta thinks we should adopt in Britain. Local heat bodies could also oversee the technical standards needed to ensure that the assessments are accurate and useful.

For example, the heat loss calculations done as part of a “winter/heat pump ready” service would need to be consistent, and trusted by everyone.

At the moment, heating engineers fitting a heat pump often lack confidence (with good reason) in any previous heat loss calculations households might have done, and so have to do their own during installation. If radiators have already been installed and a heat pump engineer disagrees with the underlying calculations, that could lead to a lot of inefficiency.

Standardising heat loss calculations, and building trust in them, would help efficiency - reducing duplication and potentially speeding up installation.

While there are barriers to making this two-stage grant work, there are big opportunities as well: better targeted incentives, breaking down the heat pump journey into steps, and encouraging uptake (by providing a service that boosts energy efficiency and saves money in the short term, but that also lays the ground for the long-term journey to a heat pump).

If we want a smoother switch to low carbon heating, we should start thinking seriously about a two stage approach.