Home heating is responsible for about 15% of the UK’s carbon emissions. As such, heat pump installers are the green workforce who’ll be critical in our journey to net zero. However, there are currently only a few thousand heat pump installers in the UK compared to 130,000 of their counterparts who work in gas.

To help the sector grow, we need to know more about the experience of existing heat pump installers. It’s important to understand what’s going well, the challenges installers face and the areas where innovation can help drive progress. This is becoming particularly important as home heating decarbonisation becomes more prominent on the policy agenda and the urgency for heat pump adoption grows.

This project aimed to gather the opinions of those currently installing heat pumps in the UK through a survey led by the installer community. We worked in collaboration with two industry experts – Emma Bohan, general manager at IMS Heat Pumps, and Nathan Gambling, an educator, industry expert and host of the BetaTalk podcast and director of Jouln. The value of this collaboration was in bringing together industry experience from Emma and Nathan, and the practical knowledge of survey design and data analysis that Nesta offers.

Over October and November 2023, we ran a survey of the heat pump installer sector in collaboration with Emma Bohan, Managing Director at IMS Heat Pumps, and Nathan Gambling, educator, industry expert, and host of the BetaTalk podcast. You can explore all the questions we asked in the survey on our heat pump installer survey Miro board.

We had 345 complete responses and we’re grateful to all those who were able to make the time to complete the survey. We spent the first half of 2024 analysing the data and interpreting the findings.

In June 2024 we published our findings in a report: How to install more heat pumps: insights from a survey of heating engineers.

We’ll be focusing our time on sharing the findings with the heat pump industry and government. We look forward to discussing potential solutions to the issues revealed by the survey, and how improvements can be effectively implemented to better support heating engineers to increase their rate of heat pump installations.

We’ll also explore the data on themes that we didn’t discuss in our report, and may publish additional findings if the results are noteworthy.