o, you want to do your bit for the environment, and you took the Government at its word when it told you that ditching your perfectly well-functioning gas boiler for a heat pump is the way to go. But what do you do if you can’t find an engineer prepared to install one of the devices in your home because, in all honesty, they know it wouldn’t actually keep you warm? 

I don’t want to sound negative. I would much rather heat my house with an electric heat pump than its existing, smelly oil-fired boiler, and I would have made the switch years ago if I could be convinced it would keep the property warm. But to judge by the experience of many people, the air-source heat pumps being marketed en masse at the moment simply aren’t up to the job. They are an effective way of raising the temperature in your home when you don’t really need it to be heated, but if you live in an old property, and you have no other form of heating, you are likely to find yourself shivering on the coldest days. 

There isn’t a lot of heat to extract from the air when it is minus 10C outside. There is more heat to be found underground, but to tap into that requires a far more expensive and space-consuming ground source heat pump. To spend £10,000 on a heat pump which turns out only to be effective as background heating seems a poor deal when you can buy a gas boiler which will do the whole job for a fifth of the price.

The heat pump farce has finally been exposed