I’ve written books about choosing heat pumps, understanding them and navigating the extraordinary business of getting one installed. With Dad’s Outside with the Heat Pump Again, I wanted to follow the homeowner into the bit that comes afterwards. The installer has left, the heating is on, and somebody has to explain to a visiting relative why a perfectly comfortable room contains a radiator that has failed the hand test.
That somebody is Martin Hughes.
Martin has done his research. He wants a greener home and a better future for his children. He has chosen an installer, persuaded his family to give up the gas boiler and acquired enough information to feel reasonably confident. Then October arrives and he discovers how much information can fit into the gap between turning the heating on and being satisfied that it is doing something.
The book follows Martin, his wife Claire and their children, Sophie and Ben, through their first heating season. It is a fictional, satirical account of the questions, adjustments, anxieties and family negotiations that can accompany learning to live with a different heating system. Martin supplies the research. The rest of the household supplies several reasons why the research cannot be conducted under specific lab conditions.
His brother-in-law keeps touching the radiators and looking disappointed. A routine cloud of vapour reaches Facebook, where the explanations become considerably more alarming than the heat pump. Four screens offer four confident accounts of the electricity, and Martin develops a spreadsheet to establish which one deserves his trust. Naturally, the spreadsheet needs more information.
Ben would like a shower after football. Sophie would like her bedroom left out of the dataset. Claire would like to eat dinner while it is still dinner. Martin would like everyone to appreciate that he is doing all this so they can stop thinking about the heating.
By January, there are bills to worry about, a battery that finishes work before breakfast and two bedrooms that need attention from the installer. Later, an error code introduces Martin to a filter he hadn’t known he owned. There are manuals, forum replies and eventually three artificial intelligences. He had hoped asking more people would produce fewer questions.
Anyone who spends time on the Renewable Heating Hub forums will recognise the territory. There are real problems to resolve, unfamiliar behaviour to understand and occasions when the most urgent fault is that someone has been looking at the app for too long. Martin’s difficulty is deciding which sort of evening he is having.
That is what interested me in writing this book. Alongside the engineering, there is the experience of being the person who recommended the change. You want the house to be warm, the bills to make sense and the decision to have been worthwhile. You would also quite like your brother-in-law to stop conducting an inspection every time he comes for lunch.
Dad’s Outside with the Heat Pump Again is a British comedy of low temperatures and heated opinions, written for anyone considering the switch, anyone already checking the app constantly and anyone living with somebody who won’t stop explaining it.
It may also solve the Christmas present problem for the person in your life who already has a favourite flow temperature and a folder on their computer with heating spreadsheets.
Available now on Amazon. Copies will also be available soon directly from Renewable Heating Hub, with free shipping.
