Over the next 4 months, we will continue research activities with the Start at home installers. We will touch base with all participants through a second round of qualitative interviews at the end of April and in May to see how they are doing with the heat pump side of their business and assess the impact of doing a first installation at home on reported levels of knowledge and confidence. To gather additional insights, we will survey all participants, which will provide useful indicators and complement the findings from the interviews. We’ll reveal the final findings from the Start at home project at Installer Show 2025 – make sure to come along to the Nesta stand if you would like to learn more about the outcome of the project.

We want the learnings from this project to inform existing and new efforts to train an active and skilled workforce which will be ready to respond to the growing demand for heat pump installations. Alongside the research activities, we will continue to engage industry actors to think about the different ways to scale this scheme to all heating professionals in the UK. If the UK is to meet its current net zero goals, the low-carbon heating industry must expand. Helping existing plumbers and heating engineers transition to working with heat pumps is the quickest way to ensure the sector has the engineers needed to successfully move the UK’s heating system away from fossil fuels. To help us think about scaling, we will continue meeting with members of our scaling group which includes national and devolved governments, manufacturers, training providers and other industry organisations, to deliver ways to design and deploy a broader scheme based on the Start at home model.

To support our engagement with industry experts, we have put together a devoted team to specifically explore and support routes to scales, as we believe that the Start at home scheme has the potential to offer existing plumbers and heating professionals the help they need to confidently enter the heat pump sector. If you want to take part in these discussions, get in touch with the Start at home team ([email protected]). In the meantime, stay tuned for more findings in the coming months.

We would like to thank our partner SNIPEF and the Nesta project team (Robin Parker, Benoit Siberdt, Oliver Zanetti and David Bleines) for their support on this project.