In 2024, my wife and I thought that we would try to do the right thing by replacing our gas boiler with a heat pump. Our experience with British Gas was SO bad that we seriously considered re-installing a gas boiler. Our family, including two young children, one with cerebral palsy, was left without heating for a year, without hot water for eight months and was left at risk of contracting Legionnaire’s disease for almost three months!

No Heating for a Year

In November 2024, just as we were expecting the heat pump to be installed and after our gas boiler and radiators had been removed accordingly, British Gas pulled the plug on our installation due to a problem with our EPC. This in spite of a British Gas engineer confirming, as early as May 2024, that we qualified for the heat pump grant on the basis of our existing EPC and after two subsequent visits by British Gas engineers had raised no further issues in that respect. It then took until the end of February 2025 for the issue with the EPC to be resolved, leaving us the entire winter with no heating other than through portable oil radiators that were both expensive and inefficient to run.

Had British Gas flagged up the issue with the EPC in May 2024, this could have all been resolved well before November 2024.

Following approval of the heat pump grant, the installation of our heat pump did eventually go ahead at the end of June 2025 but due to various technical issues we still do not have any heating. So we have now had no heating for over a year!

No Hot Water for Eight Months

Similarly, we had no hot water – other than by using an immersion heater which, again, was both expensive and inefficient – for eight months (i.e. from November 2024 to the end of June 2025).

Exposure to Risk of Legionnaire’s Disease

Following installation of the heat pump in June 2025, the system notified us that it was unable to perform the disinfection cycle needed to kill any Legionella bacteria.[1] Despite raising this with British Gas and its installers at the very earliest opportunity, the problem was not fixed until late September 2025[2], leaving the entire family, including our young children, at risk of catching Legionnaire’s Disease for almost three months!

Other Issues

Not only were we left with the stress and inconvenience of having to live with these issues during all that time, but we were also left having to repeatedly chase up these issues with either the British Gas Heat Pump Complaints team or its installers with little by way of response.

There were other issues too that we were left with no resolution to. For instance, the British Gas engineers installed the thermostat to control the heating upstairs instead of downstairs. (This would have resulted in the upstairs being too hot or the downstairs being too cold, or both.) When this was rectified, we were left with damage to our walls upstairs where the thermostat had previously been positioned and, far worse, a piece of white cable trunking to the newly positioned thermostat downstairs now positioned slap bang down the middle of our newly wall-papered wall; this despite the British Gas engineer previously assuring us that the trunking would run alongside the door frame instead. When I complained to the British Gas Heat Pump Complaints Team they simply brushed it aside, like all my other complaints, stating that I had signed to say that I was happy with the installation (something the installer insisted I do and despite me making it clear that I was signing but remained unhappy about the damage they’d done to our newly decorated home).

Similarly, at one point we were left without any water pressure at all because the British Gas engineers had left one of the water valves closed. I had to have an independent plumber come to fix the problem because of the length of time it was taking British Gas and its installers to respond. The British Gas Heat Pump Complaints team refused to compensate me for the cost as, according to them, I should have waited for them to resolve the problem.

To date, British Gas has offered us no compensation whatsoever. Unless we receive suitable compensation we will, of course, be pursuing a complaint through the industry body (RECC). However, RECC will only compensate us for actual and provable loss – e.g. the additional cost of heating our home and hot water by other means –  rather than offer us any compensation for all that we have been through.

As things stand, I truly regret having chosen British Gas as heat pump installers. British Gas was more expensive than Octopus Energy, for instance, who offered to install a more powerful heat pump for less; the only reason we persisted with British Gas was because, after our issues with the EPC, we were terrified of having to incur further delay by switching installer. Had I know how awful British Gas' service and complaints handling was, I would have never gone with them.

[1] The hot water never got hotter than 53C, below the 60C required to kill Legionella bacteria.

[2] On 17 September 2025, the British Gas engineer turned the thermostat on the hot water cylinder from 3/4 to 4/5 and another engineer confirmed on 19 September 2025 that this had resolved the problem.