This was never supposed to be like this.
Heat pumps were sold to homeowners as a safe, sensible step forward… cleaner heating, lower running costs and proper consumer protection if something went wrong. Trust the process. Trust the accreditation. Trust the logos. Trust MCS.
And yet, over the years, hundreds of households have been thrown under the bus.
At Renewable Heating Hub, we don’t just see statistics… we see the human fallout. We receive emails and DMs from homeowners who are cold, exhausted and emotionally broken by systems that don’t work as promised. People who did everything right and still ended up trapped in homes that never warm up, staring at electricity bills that trigger dread rather than comfort.
We’ve heard from couples pushed to the brink of divorce. From parents ashamed their children wear hoodies indoors. From people in social housing who feel utterly powerless, stuck with systems they didn’t choose, can’t fix and can’t escape. Some of those messages have bordered on suicidal despair. And that is not something anyone should ever associate with… heating.
My wife and I are not therapists. We’re not equipped to counsel people in deep emotional distress. All we’re trying to do is help people be warm, feel safe in their own homes and stop haemorrhaging money. Yet time and again, homeowners come to us because the system that promised protection has vanished when they needed it most. We do what we can, but time and time again the system fails them.
This is why I’ve coined the term Post-Traumatic Heat Pump Stress Disorder (PTHPSD). Not to trivialise PTSD, but to name a real, repeated pattern of trauma caused by prolonged cold, financial fear and institutional abandonment. For the people living through it, this isn’t theoretical. It’s daily life.
And here’s the thing, this isn’t just about bad installers. It’s about what happens after things go wrong.
Homeowners are told to contact their installer. Then the MCS. Then the consumer code. Then the certification body.
And what actually happens?
They’re bounced. Passed. Deflected. Exhausted.
MCS positions itself as the body that “sets the standards” and “ensures installations are of the highest quality.” But when hundreds of households are living with cold, unstable, expensive systems that are clearly not fit for purpose, those words start to sound hollow.
Because standards that aren’t enforced aren’t standards… they’re marketing.
We’ve repeatedly asked MCS to define what a high-quality heat pump installation actually means in practice. What performance should homeowners expect? What minimum outcomes must be met? Where is the line that says this is acceptable and this is not?
There is no clear answer. No benchmark. No usable definition homeowners can point to and say: this fails the standard.
And that’s the real betrayal.
Without clear, enforceable standards, homeowners can’t argue, they can only complain. And complaints disappear into a maze designed to protect the system, not the people living in cold homes.
Thousands of installs are excellent. Many installers do outstanding work. Heat pumps absolutely can (and do) work brilliantly.
But we cannot keep abandoning the people who were failed.
This issue goes far beyond individual cases. It raises serious questions about installer oversight, consumer protection, regulatory accountability and the government’s responsibility to address the harm already done, especially when public money has funded so many of these systems.
That’s why this video exists.
Not to attack heat pumps.
Not to undermine decarbonisation.
But to say, clearly and unapologetically: you don’t get to sell reassurance and then disappear when lives start falling apart.
If you’ve lived this, the cold nights, the arguments, the anxiety, the feeling that no one is responsible, you’re not alone. And you’re not imagining it.
Watch the video. Share it. And help force a conversation that should have happened years ago.
Such wise words. The grant we received helped. But we genuinely got our heat pump because we wanted to make a difference from an environmental perspective. If we have strayed beyond 18 degrees in the house our bill goes way beyond what we can afford. We heat the main room with a log burner. The rest of the house is sooooo cold. Not what we envisaged. I’m so glad I found this forum!
Sorry to heat that – it should be possible to improve on this situation.
‘The rest of the house cold’ suggests you are not heating the whole house, which will very likely cost quite a lot more than if you were to heat the whole house with the flow temperature correctly adjusted. Done right you should be more comfortable, the whole house should be warm, and you should be paying about the same as with gas/oil. You have to forget almost everything you learned about operating boilers (much of which was wrong even for boilers) and adopt a completely different (and more comfortable) approach.
If you want to start a new thread with a bit of a description of your house and heat pump set up, people on here will doubtless have some suggestions. Also can I suggest you read this introduction to get you used to some of the concepts.
@JamesPa Hi James – thanks so much! That sounds like utopia! When we first had system installed we tried to get everything around 20 degrees but the electricity rocketed. We got it to about 18 degrees and cost was ok but more recently we have gone even lower to try and save money. We are keen to try and get an expert in and get to the bottom of it and try and go again! I posted this earlier: https://renewableheatinghub.co.uk/forums/renewable-heating-grounds-source-heat-pump-gshps/gshp-woes-midland-based-engineer-recommendations/#post-55921 – and thanks again for positive words!
OK, I see from your other post that this is quite an old installation and things have recently changed which suggests a fault. I believe @Mars is looking for an engineer who may be able to help. If not then a fuller description of the symptoms may enable those on this forum to make some suggestions.
@JamesPa Thanks James – and yes yes – am v grateful to the @Mars and to yourself too! We have been at wit’s end! V happy to find this forum.
@johnbroome
As I say I think you probably have a fault which needs fixing. However there may also be an opportunity to tweak how it’s run. The understanding of the best way to run heat pumps has progressed a lot over tge past few years. If you want to tell us a bit more about your setup, house, the rest of tge heating system and how it’s operated there may be some suggestions you could try.
Mars
Excellent article. Love the term Post-Traumatic Heat Pump Stress Disorder (PTHPSD). I also monitor my HP “Like a Patient on Life Support".
I find the timing of my latest video and this post oddly fortuitous (it was never planned like this) because it loosely collides directly with something I said repeatedly throughout 2024/25, especially to homeowners who told me they were having heat pumps installed by Octopus Energy.
At the time, I was pleased to see a large company tackling the low-hanging fruit… simpler properties, straightforward installs, scale. But I also said something that made a few people irritated with me: you don’t really know if a heat pump system is right until it’s been through two winters.
Not the first winter, where excuses are made. Not the commissioning period, where optimism is high. But the second winter, when patterns emerge and reality sets in.
And in the last two to three weeks, I’ve started seeing something that worries me. More and more gripes. More and more “this doesn’t feel right”. More and more comments (both here on the forums and under YouTube videos) about sub-par Octopus Energy installs.
I want to be very clear here: this isn’t a pile-on, and it isn’t an accusation that all Octopus installs are bad. That would be nonsense.
But when complaints start clustering (especially during and after that second-winter mark) it’s a signal worth paying attention to IMO.
Because if poor installs start compounding on top of the already vast number of quietly bad, barely adequate or flat-out bodged systems already out there, we’ve got a much bigger problem than individual failures.
And I’ve had the same uneasy feeling elsewhere… I’ve also been vocal about my unease around Heat Geek ZeroDisrupt.
I didn’t have a good feeling about it when it launched and lately I’ve been hearing from homeowners who are either signing up, considering signing up or being actively contacted, and some of the messages being sent out by Heat Geek should make people pause.
One homeowner shared this message from Heat Geek with me verbatim: “Just to reiterate: having a heat pump installed will unlikely save you money on running costs against a gas boiler. In some cases it may be more expensive to run than a boiler, but I just want to make this clear so you fully understand this.”
I appreciate honesty.
And I appreciate that heat pumps are primarily about decarbonisation, but this is getting silly IMO.
When many of us installed heat pumps (myself included) the promise wasn’t just lower carbon. It was also lower running costs versus oil and gas, when designed and installed properly.
So I have to ask. What exactly is the incentive for a homeowner to spend thousands of pounds on a system that’s more expensive to run, especially if that cost is driven by design shortcuts, upgrade shortcuts or rushed installs?
Because “it’s greener but costs you more forever” is not a compelling proposition for most households.
Let’s be absolutely clear about this, heat pumps should offer everything when done properly: comfort, stability, low running costs, low carbon and future-proofed, electrified homes.
But they offer misery when done badly leading all kinds of stress which I covered in my video.
And my concern, based on what I’m seeing, is that 2026 may be the year where the cracks widen, not close.
I’m not being alarmist. I’m not anti-heat pump. I’m not anti-company. I’m observing direction of travel.
Scale without discipline is dangerous. And normalising “it might cost more to run” because corners were cut is equally dangerous.
So my position hasn’t changed. If you’re getting a heat pump:
You need a system that decarbonises and saves money.
Homeowners must not settle.
Because once a bad system is installed the fight to fix it is long, exhausting, stressful and lonely.
@Mars Hi Mars. I totally agree with your comments.
However, you give a list of all the things which will ensure a good system but what you miss is that the average home owner does not have the skill set to know whether they are being followed or not; they rely on the installer, good or bad.
So either the installers need to be better policed by the organisations they are affiliated to or there is an independant organisation that validates and guarantees a proposal.
@Richard24738 absolutely. The organisations that are meant to protect homeowners, every single one of them, are unfit for purpose. I genuinely struggle to see why most of them exist in the renewable heating space at all, beyond taking money from installers and then failing to properly police them.
I’ve been calling for change on other platforms for years, but realistically it’s not going to happen. Any real opportunity for disruption, like when Flexi-Orb tried to enter the market, was shut down the moment the government handed an effective monopoly to MCS.
The system isn’t designed to protect consumers. It’s designed to protect organisations and “professionals”, even when homeowners are the ones left dealing with the consequences.
@Mars Sound advice. I think the first thing should be to get a proper heat loss calculation. Then act on recommendations to reduce heat loss before proceeding with any heat pump design (or indeed any heating system at all). Also, educate yourself on how to run the system efficiently.
l’ve just read an article in The Sun. The chap was struggling with poor heating performance and high costs. The article went on to add “John is still paying off his £6,500 and hasn’t been able to afford proper loft insulation or to fill the cavity walls.”, which I find somewhat alarming.
As @Richard24738 says, most homeowners will rely on the installer to get these things right.
@Rusty agreed.
I hate to say it, but the onus is increasingly on the homeowner to educate themselves as much as possible before a heat pump install, because too many installers simply can’t be trusted to get it right. You have to be vigilant and confident enough to question decisions, otherwise you’re leaving yourself exposed to a sub-par system that you’ll be living with for years.
For me this sums up what I have learned in my 3 year journey so far. Of course ‘caveat emptor’ is universally true – if there is an opportunity to scam another human being then some lowlife will find and exploit it. It has always been that way and in my, now slightly resigned, opinion it always will be that way, because its just a symptom of the human condition.
Caveat Emptor now applies just as much, possibly more, in information space; whereas we used to have a small number of largely reputable sources of information, we now have a diverse range of often disreputable sources competing for our attention, the principal purpose of which is either to land us as advertising catch or deliberately to deceive us in order to further their own ends, which generally include dismembering or completely eradicating the few reliable sources of information that have survived.
I cant currently see a way out of this mire born of human greed, which is depressing. Religion once offered some sort of fairly universal moral baseline, albeit that some of its hierarchy used their position in ways that was less than admirable. That baseline is effectively gone, certainly in the UK. We now rely, it seems, on well intentioned (or reasonably well intentioned) people to be successful in getting into positions of power, yet the odds are stacked against them because their opponents don’t respect any moral rules.
The only hope I can see is education (which of course some of the bad actors seek to undermine). In the limited sphere of heat pumps educating consumers and potential consumers might help them to avoid the cowboys and get the rewarding experience that is possible and which they deserve.
All a bit depressing for a Monday morning!
@JamesPa, I agree with you entirely.
Greed, money and power are corrosive forces, and this isn’t a uniquely UK problem at all. I’ve lived abroad, and we still have family living in several other countries… the same behaviours exist everywhere. Different schemes, different acronyms, same human instincts.
I think the frustration here is that we expect better from the UK. Britain has spent decades branding itself as fair, regulated, consumer-focused and trustworthy. When you then see vulnerable homeowners left to fend for themselves, poor work waved through and bad actors protected by layers of “process”, it feels like a deeper betrayal of that image.
You’re also absolutely right about the information space too. The sheer volume of noise, marketing dressed up as expertise and outright misinformation makes it harder than ever for homeowners to know who to trust. Education becomes the only real defence, which is exhausting, because it shouldn’t have to be this way. That’s why forums like these are important IMO.
In the narrow world of heat pumps, all we can realistically do is exactly what you’ve said: help people understand enough to spot the red flags, ask better questions and avoid the worst of the cowboys. It won’t fix the system, but it might stop a few people being chewed up by it.
Depressing, yes, but I’d still rather shine a light on it than pretend it isn’t happening, helping people avoid unnecessary stress in the process through the info we share here.
Finger trouble …
I agree, somebody on the village Facebook site just posted with the familiar HP issues, I am trying to forward them to this forum in the hope that they can get advice, either on settings or an approach to the installer.
Sorry, it’s a bad/depressing Monday, I think I’ve detected a leak on our mains inlet pipe underneath the concrete/tiled porch. I fear an expensive and protracted fight with contractors and insurers!
Great article and so true from our perspective. We’re in a third winter with a substandard installation, fitting with the warranty company who covered ‘workmanship’ whilst they try everything in the book not to pay out.
Our system tends to fail in the cold weather but miraculously it only failed once in the past week which I was able to reset. That being said, in the very cold weather we couldn’t get many rooms about 16/17 and our electricity is over £500 as the pump works overtime to get the house to this low temp!
I also installed the heat pump to help the environment with the added bonus that our bills would be cheaper. So far that hasn’t panned out.
It is soul destroying not knowing how we will ever get the house warm in winter. We also use a log burner to keep warm which seems ironic.
@Fiona @johnbroome
I’m sorry to hear this.
Can I just ask if you have done the key things which are necessary to get a heat pump working both cheaply and effectively namely:
You are operating 24*7
Most or all of your TRVs and all your thermostats are set at least a couple of degrees above the desired temperature
All or at least most rooms are heated
You have adjusted the weather compensation curve to the lowest possible settings consistent with heating your house.
If you haven’t done these you are almost certainly paying more than you need for a lower standard of comfort.
Heat pumps need to be operated differently to how we have been (wrongly) taught to operate boilers. If you aren’t doing so you will suffer.
Apologies if you already know this and either way feel free to start a thread with some more information about your house, heat pump and heating system and I’m sure there will be plenty of offers of advice.
@JamesPa thanks. After the installers went into administration we had an independent company come out to do a report on the system. They fixed some obvious issues when they were here but their take away was that the heat pump isn’t actually big enough for the size of the house and therefore we needed a new system (something I’m reluctant to pay for in case it still doesn’t heat the house sufficiently). I’ll try setting the thermostats higher but generally in winter they never get as high as they are set. Thanks!
OK the thing to understand about setting thermostats and TRVs (much) higher is that you are actually trying to disable them altogether. You then need to operate the heat pump 24*7 and adjust the weather compensation curve (hopefully down) until the house is at the right temperature. You then leave it ticking away on the weather compensation, with thermostats and TRVs (which are largely superfluous) doing absolutely nothing. It turns out that this is, in most cases, the most comfortable and the cheapest way to operate.
If you have already done that and your house is still not getting warm then it is possible that the heat pump is too small, but actually quite unlikely because the standard tools overestimate loss.
My strong advice to you is put the thermostats and TRVs at max, leave the heat pump on 24×7 and see what happens. Leave it for 24 hrs. If the house overheats then you have an opportunity to reduce your cost and improve your comfort by adjusting the Weather compensation. If the house doesn’t overheat with these settings then we need to look deeper.
Also, check that your DHW is set to heat max twice per day, preferably only once per day, to a maximum of 48C.
If you would like to share the report Im happy to take a look.
Dont give up – heat pumps are very good if done properly, and much of the time the issue is one of configuration not what’s actually been installed. Installers don’t have the time to configure the systems properly so they just dial in some settings that they thing makes them immune from callouts.
FWIW its the same with boilers, most are set up by installers in a way that costs 10% more to run and makes the householder less comfortable, but its quick for the installer and makes callouts less likely.
@JamesPa you’re not based near the midlands are you? Happy to share the report if you want to tell me where to send it? We’re currently getting no where with warranty company. The heat pump isn’t actually on 24/7 but there are other acronyms you’ve used that I am not sure what they are. We’ve not personally touched the heat curve and have left that to the experts but it’s almost a year since the last one came out to do the report.
@Fiona, we do have a glossary thread to better understand the rather large amount of jargon ( https://renewableheatinghub.co.uk/forums/postid/51923/ ). We also have an introductory article (Heat Pump Basics & Installation Guide | Renewable Heating Hub) to help you become quickly familiar with the basic concepts underpinning much of the advice generally bandied about on this forum.
@Mars – just a comment – these aren’t easy to find unless you know to look for them. Is there some way that this could be improved? @Toodles article on rad balancing should probably have the same status.
@JamesPa, we have got this topic, which all the mods can update with whatever they think is relevant, important, etc.
https://renewableheatinghub.co.uk/forums/rules-terms-of-use/recommended-topics-for-new-members/
Hi @Fiona – you have described out exact situation! Over £500 a month and a wood burner to keep warm. I’ve just been out chopping wood as we are nearly running out! We keep the living quarters warm with the wood burner. I echo the soul destroying bit. Keep on keeping on! x
Sorry Im not. I should also be upfront in saying that Im not a heat pump professional and so restrict my activities to giving well meaning advice to be taken at recipient’s risk. My only relevant formal qualification is a degree in physics – which does help when you need to sift through the BS.
Are you able to post the report here (DM me if it has details you dont want to share publicly). It does sound like you are missing at least one opportunity to improve your comfort and possibly also your cost. What is your current heating schedule?
What acronyms dont you understand. TRV = Thermostatic radiator valve, DHW = domestic hot water, FWIW – for what its worth, BS – well you know what that means!.
Yes bang on and maybe I can illustrate that by way of example. I don’t have a heat pump yet, maybe never will, but I did have solar installed back in 2018. So I’m sufferring from post traumatic solar disorder. Ok, so I might be exagerating but let me explain. Overall I’m happy with my solar install and the money I save but I was given an illustration of the expected savings at the time of purchase. A significant contribution to the saving was from the use of the solar diverter which takes excess electricity that I’m not consuming and puts it into the hot water immersion heater. So I get free hot water. What I subsequently realised was that the estimate for that saving was based on the price of electricity which at the time was 11-15 p/kWh. Yet my house had always used gas for heating hot water which was around 3p/kWh back then. So the estimate for savings from the diverter was upto five times what I actually realised.
This only became apparent when I sat down several years after the install and tried to work out when I’d break even and compared my savings with the projections I’d received at purchase. It was only when Putin invaded Ukraine and subsequent spike in gas prices that I started to see anything like the projections I’d received.
But hang on, as part of the handover of the solar panels, I had received a lovely certificate from an organisation called epvs which stands for energy performance validation. This certificate states that “the installer has the competency to carry out accurate performance calculations, estimates and monetary savings". i.e. the estimates I had received were based on a calculation provided by epvs. I contacted epvs and to cut a long story short, they ignored my main point. I realised that without anyone to hold them to account, I was wasting my time and their main purpose was to provide solar installers with some marketing in return for a fee.
epvs are still going and provide validation for heat pumps. I won’t be using them as part of my decision making on whether to get a heat pump.
Some more examples of those that really should be benefiting from the transition being let down
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp3zlp9gyqdo
These are the people who shouldn’t have to worry about heat loss calculations, balancing radiators etc.
They just need a reliable company to JFDI, excuse my language.
I really do fear what will happen when heat pump installations ramp up…