What is the £5000 boiler heat pump payment?
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Currently, only 1.3 heat pumps have been sold per 1,000 households in the UK, giving Britain the lowest installation rate of any country across Europe. But data from the Government and Ofgem indicates that nearly one in four house owner-occupiers — nearly 3.6 million households — are likely to want to install a heat pump. With initial installation costs easily reaching £10,000 and over, some potential customers are getting put off.
Jon Stokes is one of those customers.
He wrote on Twitter: “The new boiler has been installed. Did I consider a heat pump? Yes, I did.
“I did a lot of research and decided a straight oil boiler to oil boiler swap was financially the best choice.
“A heat pump upgrade would have cost £8,000 to £13,000 more.”
And Mr Stokes is not the only one astounded by the eye-watering installation costs.
Some Brits have even reported being quoted up to £16,000 to replace their boiler with a heat pump.
Heat pumps are a low carbon alternative to boilers which move heat from the air or ground outside a building to its inside, through the circulation of a refrigerant.
Instead of purchasing this alternative, data also shows that far more Britons are just opting for new boilers to replace their old ones.
In fact, up to 1.7 million gas boilers were sold in the year 2018 alone (the last year for which accurate, pre-Covid figures are available) — the equivalent of 16.2 boilers per 1,000 homes.
This is despite the Government offering a £5,000 grant to help cover the initial installation cost of heat pumps under the Boiler Upgrade Scheme.
But even this only covers around half the typical installation cost.
The upgrade scheme is also set to be followed by a ban on the sale of new gas boilers from 2036, as part of the Government’s net-zero pledges.
While the costs may be alarming to those scrambling to replace their boilers before the ban is put in place, Octopus Energy has claimed it can get the price of a typical heat pump unit down to just £1,000.
Octopus Energy CEO Greg Jackson told Express.co.uk: “First of all, the hardware needs to get cheaper, today a typical heat pump unit costs about £3,000.
“We feel we can get that price down to not much more than £1,000.
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“We will get the hardware [price] down by a factor of three, with volume, and these are going to be better heat pumps, and cheaper.”
But the public will need a lot more convincing, as around 85 percent of UK households still use gas boilers, according to estimates.
Lee Hermitage, the advanced materials marketing director at Honeywell, has urged the Government to do more to get the price down.
He said: “Can I tell people who are struggling with their energy bills that they need to be spending £10,000–£12,000 on a heat pump? I think the answer is you can’t.
“If the Government is really serious about decarbonising, about reducing its reliance on Russia oil and gas, on really removing fossil fuels — the Government has to support people.
“At the moment […] the majority of consumers will not be able to spend this amount of money without the Government either offering interest-free loans or increased subsidies.
“It has to be something that the Government tackles.”
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