Do heat pumps work in large or old homes? Everything you need to know
Do heat pumps work in large or older homes? We look at what experts say, the real costs involved, and how homeowners are making the technology work in practice
Heat pumps are often pitched as a cleaner alternative to gas boilers, but for homeowners in large or period properties, the question is whether the technology really works beyond modern, well-insulated homes.
Powered by electricity, heat pumps extract warmth from the air or ground to provide heating and hot water. While they can significantly cut a home’s carbon emissions, the high upfront cost – even with a £7,500 government grant – has left many owners of older or larger properties unsure whether the switch to a heat pump is worth it.
Experts say those doubts are understandable. But homeowners who have already made the change argue that heat pumps can perform well even in houses where traditional boilers struggled.
One of them is retired GP Richard Smithson, who lives with his wife in a six-bedroom Edwardian semi-detached villa in North Tyneside. They replaced their gas boiler more than two years ago, motivated by a desire to cut emissions and to prove that heat pumps can work in less-than-ideal conditions.
Their home already had double glazing, but the installation involved underfloor insulation, new radiators and a zoned heating system. The total cost came to £11,000 after a then-£5,000 government grant.
Mr Smithson said he was “pleasantly surprised” by how straightforward the two-week installation was. “This house was never that warm with the gas boiler,” he said. “I’d say it’s warmer now with the heat pump.”
Like many heat-pump households, the Smithsons keep their heating at a steady temperature rather than switching it on and off. This allows the building’s fabric to retain heat and helps the system run more efficiently — with most of the hard work done overnight, when cheaper electricity tariffs are available.
As a result, he says his electricity bill is less than they were previously paying for gas.
He added: “Some people say how long is it before you get your money back?
“That’s irrelevant, if you’re a retiring professional who’s fairly well-off, which you will be if you live in this kind of house, and you get a big lump sum, do you spend it on a round-the-world cruise or do you spend it on a heat pump.
“To me there’s only one answer – get a heat pump.”
Nick Barr, who is renovating a detached five-bedroom Edwardian house in south London, said he really liked the efficiency of heat pumps, but “I wasn’t sure a heat pump could work on such a big or old house”.
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But his installer was an engineer who understood how to calculate the heating requirements and design the system, with correctly-sized radiators, pipework, and energy efficiency improvements.
His heat pump is efficient, “elegant” and extremely quiet, he added.
“It’s not cheap, but if you’re putting something in new or if you’ve got to replace a system, it does make sense.”
And he said: “The number one thing is to get a heat-loss calculation assessment for the building. That allows you to make the right, informed decisions going forward.”
He said he has no regrets.
Andy Balaam, a software engineer, opted for a heat pump for his family’s detached, four-bedroom Victorian home in Surrey in 2021, to limit its climate impact.
He said the installation was “surprisingly OK”, but they needed a good company which came back to adjust the system in the first couple of weeks to get it working properly.
“I was worried whether it was going to make the house warm, I was worried it was going to cost a lot of money and worried if it was going to be reliable,” he said.
While the heat pump is “not attractive and it’s noisy”, it is out of the way at the side of the house, and Dr Balaam said: “It absolutely warms our house effectively, it’s much nicer than it was before.”
Leah Robson, managing director of Dr Balaam’s installers, Your Energy Your Way, which primarily deals with clients whose properties are hard to heat with heat pumps, says the level of comfort is something people “really don’t expect about” them.
“People are genuinely concerned, often they’re struggling to heat their home as it is,” she said.
“And when you turn up and say, ‘yes, you can have a heat pump and yes, you will be able to run it all day and it won’t cost you any more to run than your gas boiler’, people are understandably a little bit sceptical.”
She talks to customers about living with a heat pump, and conducts heat loss assessments and tests for draughts that can be easily fixed.
The type of installations the firm carries out are “not cheap projects”, she said, and “sometimes it’s just not the right thing but, typically, even in a solid wall house, if it’s got double glazing and reasonable loft insulation we can fit a heat pump”.
That is backed up by a demonstration project led by the Energy Systems Catapult (ESC) which found heat pumps could be successfully installed in all types of homes.
Some 8 per cent of the 742 homes which had heat pumps installed for the project were pre-1919 properties, the majority of which were detached or semi-detached, even though it was “more challenging” to install in older homes because of the constraints of the project.
Daniel Logue, from ESC, said monitoring found the house age and type did not have any impact on the efficiency of the heat pumps.
“If a trained installer says that your house could have a heat pump, and installs it correctly, it should perform well regardless of the type or age,” he added.
David Cowdrey, acting chief executive at The MCS Foundation, which oversees the certification of home renewables, said: “There is a lack of public information about heat pumps, leading to a proliferation of myths and misinformation about how and where they work.”
He urged the Government to lead a public information campaign to counter myths and encourage uptake of heat pumps in all kinds of properties.
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