Heat pump installer Stockholm syndrome. It sounds flippant, even funny, but the more time I spend talking to homeowners, the more convinced I am that it describes something very real (and deeply troubling) in the UK heat pump market.
The premise is simple. Once you have handed over £10,000, £15,000, £20,000 or more for a heat pump installation, the system you have bought effectively traps you in a relationship with the installer who fitted it. If that installer turns out to be incompetent, careless, overstretched or simply dishonest, escaping them is far harder than most homeowners ever imagine. What follows is often not resolution, but endurance: months or years of half‑arsed fixes, vague reassurances, seasonal bodges and a creeping acceptance that this is “just how heat pumps are”.
That acceptance is not accidental. It is shaped by the way complaints are structured, by the way warranties work, by the reluctance of other installers to touch someone else’s work and by the sheer psychological weight of having sunk a huge amount of money into something that is supposed to be the future of home heating. Homeowners don’t defend bad installers because they like them. They defend them because the alternative feels worse.
We are only one month into the new year and I have already received over 100 emails and direct messages from distressed homeowners. That is unprecedented for me. Our forums are heaving with new members, many of them posting for the first time because they are cold, stressed, out of pocket and out of options. I have been warning for years that it would take a couple of winters for poor installs to fully reveal themselves. Those winters have now arrived.
What is particularly worrying is that this is no longer just about bad installations. It is about abandonment. Installers who were happy to bid aggressively a year or two ago are now ghosting homeowners entirely. Emails go unanswered. Phone calls ring out. Promised call‑backs never come. In some cases, the installer has simply folded as a business. In others, they are still trading, just not engaging with the problems they created.
One homeowner contacted me recently after NIBE flagged serious issues with pipework and contamination in a relatively new system. The manufacturer made it clear that corrective work was required to validate the warranty. The original installer? Completely silent. Both the homeowner and the developer have been ignored. The homeowner is now being told to find another installer and pay out of pocket for work that should never have been necessary in the first place, just to preserve what little warranty protection remains. They are not angry so much as exhausted.
Another message came from a new‑build homeowner who moved in late last year. The heat pump has never delivered adequate heat. Flow temperatures collapse when the weather turns cold, leaving the house slowly cooling day after day. There were no handover documents. No system explanation. No installer contact details. Several engineers have visited, changed settings, shrugged and left. No one has properly diagnosed the issue. No one has done the maths. The homeowner is living in a brand‑new house and dreading winter.
A third homeowner wrote in panic about electricity consumption spiralling out of control. Their air source heat pump appears to be running almost constantly at high temperatures. An immersion heater may be firing when it shouldn’t. Bills have jumped dramatically compared to previous winters. An engineer has visited but is too busy to investigate properly. The homeowner is not technical and is terrified of the next bill landing. They are not asking for optimisation. They are asking for survival.
These are not isolated cases. On the forums we see the same patterns repeating. Systems that are expensive to run yet struggle to maintain modest indoor temperatures. Installers who dismiss concerns or blame the homeowner’s expectations. Manufacturers who point back to installers. Installers who tweak controls but never address underlying design flaws. When homeowners push too hard, communication slows. When they escalate, relationships sour. When they suggest bringing in a third party, they are warned about warranties, liability and “opening a can of worms”.
In one particularly disturbing case, an 80-year-old couple in Scotland contacted me after what can only be described as a complete breakdown of every safeguard that is supposed to protect homeowners. Their heat pump installers allegedly ripped skirting boards off walls with crowbars, smashing electrical sockets and leaving bare live wires exposed for months.
They say the work was carried out by a group of plumbers who intimidated them, including explicit threats of kneecapping and violence if they complained. Fixtures in the home were damaged on the way out. TrustMark is aware of the case.
Despite this, three MCS certificates were issued over consecutive months. The contractor has since denied ever setting foot in the property. MCS, the body that claims to uphold standards, told the couple it could do nothing because they no longer had the paperwork. An elderly household, left frightened in their own home, living with unsafe electrics and a dysfunctional system, and the entire framework designed to protect them simply shrugged and walked away.
And that is where the Stockholm syndrome sets in.
In these cases, other installers are understandably reluctant to touch someone else’s work. The moment they do, the system becomes “theirs”. Any latent issues, any historic design flaws, any future failures risk landing on their desk. Many will politely decline. Others will quote eye‑watering sums to make the risk worthwhile. £5,000 to put things right is not uncommon. In some cases, homeowners are told it would take longer, and cost more, to fix the existing system than to rip it out and start again.
Faced with that reality, homeowners retreat. They accept repeated visits that achieve nothing. They tolerate systems that “sort of” work. They convince themselves that low SCOPs, high bills and lukewarm radiators are normal. After all, if they admit otherwise, what then?
This is not a failure of individual resilience. It is a failure of system design.
The complaints landscape is slow and intimidating. MCS processes are opaque and heavily procedural yielding no meaningful results. They focus on paperwork compliance rather than lived outcomes. Cases drag on for months or years. In the meantime, the homeowner still has to live in the house. Still has to pay the bills. Still has to rely on the same installer they are complaining about to keep the system running through winter.
That dynamic alone discourages escalation. Why antagonise the only person who might turn up when the system fails on a freezing January or February night?
Meanwhile, government and industry messaging continues to focus on installation numbers rather than installation quality. Low‑hanging fruit installs were always going to dominate early deployment. That was obvious. What is now becoming obvious is that we have done very little to prepare for the long tail of underperforming systems and abandoned customers that follow.
None of this is anti‑heat pump though. Properly designed and installed systems work exceptionally well. But pretending that the current ecosystem supports homeowners when things go wrong is fantasy. Right now, it rewards installers who do just enough to keep complaints at bay, and punishes homeowners who dare to push for proper remediation.
The tragedy is that many homeowners blame themselves. They assume they don’t understand the technology. They assume their house is “hard to heat”. They assume they are asking too much. That self‑doubt is reinforced every time an installer says “it’s within tolerance” or “that’s just how these systems behave”. Over time, expectations shrink.
This is how poor standards become normalised.
If we want heat pumps to succeed at scale, this has to change. Homeowners need genuine exit routes from bad installations. Independent remediation pathways that do not punish the second installer for touching a flawed system. Faster, outcome‑based complaints processes that prioritise warmth, efficiency and running costs over box‑ticking. And a regulator that understands that captivity is not consent.
Until then, heat pump installer Stockholm syndrome will continue to flourish. Not because homeowners are foolish, but because they are trapped. They have paid serious money for a system they cannot easily replace, cannot easily fix and cannot easily escape. They cling to the installer they have because the system has taught them that letting go is even more dangerous (unless you’ve been threatened by a kneecapping).