To reduce carbon emissions from home heating, we need to shift away from gas and oil boilers towards low-carbon technologies such as heat pumps. Heat pumps are relatively novel technologies to the UK market and innovation is needed to mature the market and make heat pump adoption easier and cheaper for householders.

A central element of work in Nesta’s sustainable future mission is to generate and deploy innovation that will reduce carbon emissions from domestic home heating. According to figures from the Committee on Climate Change, space and hot water heating in homes is responsible for about 15% of the UK’s carbon emissions.

Heat pumps are a good solution for the UK’s homes. In many cases they can be linked up to existing radiator systems with not too many modifications. They are highly efficient, much more so than a gas or oil boiler and, if they’re powered by renewable electricity sources, they can be considered completely zero carbon. However heat pump uptake is at present very low, around 30-35,000 installs per year. What’s more, consumer awareness is low and the challenges of getting a heat pump are many and diverse. The aim of our collaboration with the EST is to better understand these challenges so we can work out the best ways to reduce them.

The partnership with the Energy Saving Trust is made up of two approaches.

The user journeys project

This project looked at the process that people go through to obtain a heat pump. We need to know more about what it’s like for householders who choose to adopt heat pumps. We want to understand the challenges that householders who already have heat pumps have faced, as well as those faced by current and potential future waves of heat pump adopters.

By identifying any barriers or attrition they may generate, we’ll be able to better identify where innovation can improve the heat pump adoption process and make it easier for more households to get heat pumps installed.

To do this, we’ll be deploying Nesta’s analytical and design teams alongside experts in customer experience at the EST.

The user profiles project

In this project we used knowledge about who has already installed a heat pump to see what it could tell us about who might take up a heat pump in future. By using data sources such as the database of Energy Performance Certificates issued in the UK alongside other relevant data, we wanted to experiment with building predictive models that might help us identify or target the next wave of heat pump adopters.

To do this, data scientists from Nesta’s Data Analytics Practice worked alongside those from the EST to examine this problem from different angles.

The aim of this collaboration was to build new, actionable knowledge that will help Nesta, the EST and other innovators in the space to improve levels of heat pump adoption. At Nesta, we will use the findings from our work in conjunction with the EST to create new ideas for innovation. We also commit to working in the open, both by sharing our findings and by showing how we got to them, so that other innovators can make use of the work we’ve done.