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Are We Sleepwalking Into Another Race to the Bottom?

 
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Government Schemes, Regulations, Training, Planning & Organisations
Last Post by Mars 2 hours ago
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Mars
 Mars
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Topic starter 15/12/2025 8:51 am  

@ksim, I agree with you that HG has essentially evolved into a software-led company trying to solve a systemic problem and the UK probably does need better design tooling, better standardisation and fewer installs that rely on “that’ll probably be fine” as a design principle.

Where things get uncomfortable, and where I think the podcast ‘friction’ came from, is that software confidence doesn’t always translate cleanly into real-world pricing or homeowner outcomes. The messaging leans hard into “less disruption, lower cost, faster installs”, but the lived experience for some homeowners (including yours) doesn’t always line up with that promise once you get past the headline numbers. When someone arrives expecting a £2-4k marginal upgrade and instead lands on a £7.5k “that’s just what heat pumps cost” conversation, that gap is important.

Your example is especially interesting because you’re not a typical homeowner wandering in blind. You know your heat loss, you know your flows, you know how your house behaves thermally, and you went into the process expecting the software and survey to reduce scope, not inflate it. From a technical perspective, your logic is sound. If anything, your case is exactly the sort of property Zero Disrupt is supposed to excel in. Yet even there, the final number snapped back to the gravitational pull of “normal heat pump pricing”. 

That’s the bit I keep circling back to. We now have two universes forming in the heat pump world. On one side, the big, software-led, volume-driven players trying to compress time, cost and friction. On the other, smaller installers who design deeply, move slowly, charge more and often have long lead times. ZeroDisrupt is clearly trying to bridge that gap, but in practice it’s still constrained by installer economics, risk, warranty and the simple fact that turning theory into a working system in a real house still requires skilled humans on site for multiple days.

None of that makes ZD pointless. As you say, it’s a tool. But tools don’t set prices, installers do. And until the cost structure of installs genuinely changes, there’s a risk that ZeroDisrupt becomes more of a framing device than a price revolution. For homeowners like your friend, or like you, the danger is that they get close enough to the idea of a heat pump to be intrigued, but still bounce back to a boiler when the final number lands because it’s not going to be as cheap as initially communicated to them.

I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and say it’s not done in bad faith or hype for the sake of it. I think it’s about a collision between ambition, software capability and the messy reality of retrofit installations.


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