In the UK, the way we heat our homes is a significant contributor to the UK’s carbon emissions. In fact, home heating is responsible for about 15% of the UK’s total emissions. (If you’d like to find out the impact of your home heating, try our carbon calculator). To put it into perspective, this figure is similar to the amount emitted by domestic cars and motorbikes. The reason home heating is so polluting is because, in the UK, almost all homes are heated by burning gas to warm the water that flows to our radiators. The gas we burn is called methane and when it is burned, carbon dioxide is released.

The solution is to stop using gas and replace it with electricity. Electricity is relatively easy to produce without generating carbon. By building lots of new wind farms and installing solar panels, the UK has been really successful at decarbonising its electricity generation over the past few years. In fact, the government aims to fully decarbonise it by 2035.

Some argue that gas could be made more environmentally friendly, for instance by converting our gas grid from methane to hydrogen. At Nesta, we’re not convinced. We think that in most cases, electrification of heating will be the quickest and cheapest way to cut carbon emissions.

For many people, electric heating has a bad press. It’s associated with old-fashioned storage heaters that have minds of their own, or expensive fan heaters pumping hot, dry air out into the room. We think these approaches should be confined to the past. Instead, we reckon heat pumps will be the solution for many of us. Heat pumps are units that collect heat from the air outside, concentrate it, and bring it into your home.

Heat pumps can collect heat even on days when it feels cold. In fact, they’ve been used for decades in Scandinavian and Nordic countries that have much colder winters than we do in the UK. Because they collect heat rather than generate it, they’re really efficient. A gas boiler turns about 80% of the energy it gets from gas into heat for your home. For a heat pump, this figure can be 250% – so it produces 2.5 units of heat for every unit of electricity it uses. In some cases this can go higher still.

Sounds good, so how should you get your hands on one? This is where things get complicated. A heat pump can be more expensive than a boiler replacement, although from April 2022 a government grant of £5,000 will help close that gap. You might need a bit of extra insulation or to replace some radiators to make it work at its best. Also, the UK market is quite new and there aren’t many installers. This means it can be hard to find someone to put one in for you as heat pumps are popular right now with people future-proofing their homes.

At Nesta, we’re putting innovation methods to work to make it easier for people to get heat pumps. We’re working on our own and with partners to create improvements and develop solutions that will lower costs and reduce complexity for everyone. If you’re ready to get a heat pump now, then we say go for it. And if you’re not quite ready to switch yet, there are still things you can do. Plugging drafts and increasing insulation can reduce your heat need and make you more comfortable, and a simple change to your boiler’s settings can make it run more efficiently, reducing carbon emissions and saving you money. And why not make a start on looking into a heat pump now? That way, when your boiler starts to falter you'll be ready to replace it with something greener.