In the latest of our spotlight series in partnership with The Heat Pump Association, Lucy Dixon speaks to Martyn Bridges, Director of Marketing and Technical Support at Worcester Bosch Group, about low carbon heating solutions, with a focus on heat pump technology.
A relatively new member of the HPA, Worcester Bosch has been selling heat pumps for 15 years, but has only recently shifted the focus to air source heat pumps (ASHPs), as Bridges explains: “We were only selling ground source and air-to-air, but now we have a range of ASHPs, and a hybrid model too.”
Generally speaking, people understand boilers, in the sense that they know roughly what a new one will cost and what the installation will involve – and if they don’t have the money it often gets put on a credit card. Bridges points out that swapping a gas boiler for a heat pump in an existing property complicates this process, describing it as “quite a tricky thing to do” when wider changes to a property might be involved, too. He says: “With a heat pump, there’s a bit more planning to do, you have to perhaps make some changes to the heating system. You may even have to make some insulation changes as well. So there’s more planning involved, more forward-thinking is needed.”
The hybrid heat pump isn’t covered by the recently launched Boiler Upgrade Scheme (BUS), but could be an option for those hard-to-treat properties where changes to the heating system are more difficult. Bridges explains: “These projects either retain the existing boiler or fit a new boiler, generally with a smaller output heat pump. The heat pump heats the home for 70 to 80% of the time, and in the depths of winter when it’s exceptionally cold, the boiler would then come on and raise the rooms to the required temperature, which the heat pump is struggling to do because you haven’t made the changes to the house.” This approach is less disruptive to the householder during installation, and also less of an issue when it comes to finding the space. Bridges says: “Those around 17 million homes with a combi boiler don’t have a hot water storage cylinder, and possibly not the space to put one in easily – lots of people would need to steal a bit of bedroom, for example. With a hybrid system, the combi continues to generate the hot water when you turn on a tap.”
When it comes to decarbonising heating, however, it’s clear the Government would rather everyone gets a full heat pump system. The newly launched BUS coupled with the energy price crisis has created a surge of consumer interest, but typically most households only invest in a new heating system when their existing one has stopped working. Bridges says that it’s an ongoing job for the industry to be raising awareness of heat pump technology. He says: “Most end users are not really interested in their heating system. It’s unimportant to them until it goes wrong, of course, then it’s the end of the world. So, it’s a constant thing to have to champion the cause of heat pumps.”
And this championing is where the installer comes in, as the majority of people reply on their heating engineer to recommend what they need – their boiler breaks down and the engineer will make a suggestion on what should replace it. A shift in many installers’ mindset is also going to be needed to drive heat pump installations. Bridges says: “We’ve had about 60 years of installing boilers in people’s homes, and we now have something different. Something new and more expensive and probably slightly bigger. It can be a difficult sell for installers. But people are getting more sensitive to carbon savings and energy prices, and the installers are recommending them more.”
When installers are needing to recommend a heating system to their customers that’s a lot more expensive, it can make it a difficult sell, so it’s understandable that some have been reluctant to switch to renewable heat when they have no shortage of customers wanting a gas boiler. Bridges says this reluctance is definitely changing, despite a few false starts when it comes to Government incentive schemes and financing. He says: “Some installers have definitely had their fingers burned in the past, when incentive schemes are turned on and off and the workload therefore drops off as well.”
So certainty is needed that the Boiler Upgrade Scheme is here to stay, alongside the other ‘green’ incentives such as the VAT cut to energy-efficiency measures, in order to get enough installers upskilled. This need to grow the heat pump workforce is an issue Worcester Bosch are helping to tackle, with their four nationwide training centres that already see around 17,000 installers a year (not all on heat pump training, of course). Bridges says: “The interest is definitely there. Installers can see that their future is in low-carbon technologies. Boilers have an end of life, it may be 15 years away before it happens but gas and oil as we know them will be coming to an end. Our Heat Pump Association training course, is complemented by a low temperature heating design course.” There are also short, online courses for installers wanting to dip their toe in and find out more about what’s involved with becoming accredited.
A huge number of installers need to join those already trained in heat pump installation if we’re going to get anywhere near the Government’s target of 600,000 a year by 2028, as Bridges says: “There’s around 1,000 MCS-accredited installers currently, so I think to move at that speed, that growth, there needs to be more incentives or policy changes.” The Heat Pump Association investigated this further and asked all its members how many people they could train a year, Bridges explains: “We went back with between 2000 and 3000 a year, and with the other manufacturers in the group, between us we could probably train somewhere around 20,000 installers a year – so we could rapidly get to where we need to with the right mechanisms in place.”
Find out more Worcester Bosch’s heat pumps – and boilers – at InstallerSHOW and elemental in June, from 21-23 at the NEC.
