I voted price and efficiency. It's all a comprises. No use paying over the odds for 0.1% better efficiency.

Brand reputation is a little misleading, because of the amount of badge engineering that goes on. I bought a Maxa heat pump, no-one had heard of them in the UK. But one of the biggest manufacturers of heat pumps. If I had bought through a normal purchase route it would have said Viessmann on the badge and I would have paid an extra £3k for the same equipment with a different sticker .

It's been a while now since we had our heat pump installed, but I'm still well aware of the choices we made.

One of the options I picked above was brand reliability, but that's not quite right. Reliability and customer service were absolutely at the top of our list since we were delving into the unknown and had drawn up a shortlist of manufacturers who seemed to be delivering. However, "brand" per se was irrelevant; that's just a bit of marketing. We were also well aware that whilst Vaillant (to pick one example) were demonstrating excellence in all areas with their oil-fired boilers we couldn't bank on that excellence being present in a completely different technological offering. What we needed, then, was some evidence-backed good advice from someone who did actually know what they were talking about.

Net result is that we weren't picking a brand of heat pump; we were trying to find and start a relationship with an installer who we hoped would still be supporting us years later. If, having found someone who kept the alarm bells quiet, we were recommended one heat pump over another and given evidence as to why that was right for our situation, we'd go with that and, as it happens, that's exactly how things unfolded.

Was price of the unit important? No, but the cost of the whole installation was. We wanted a good job for a fair price and so were prepared to pay a bit more for good quality work but not get fleeced.

Was noise important? Absolutely, for our neighbours' benefit. However, we didn't want figures that looked good, we wanted something that was quiet enough to be unobtrusive but also put out the quality of sound that could easily be ignored - the right pitch and tone as well as a reasonable decibel figure.

Was efficiency important? Of the heat pump, no. Of the overall system as installed, definitely.

All this points to why I also ticked the "Other" box. Our overriding decision was based on what was available from and recommended by the installer we finally chose. We did our best to get the professionals right first and then let everything else fall into place behind that.

Posted by: @majordennisbloodnok

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Net result is that we weren't picking a brand of heat pump; we were trying to find and start a relationship with an installer who we hoped would still be supporting us years later. If, having found someone who kept the alarm bells quiet, we were recommended one heat pump over another and given evidence as to why that was right for our situation, we'd go with that and, as it happens, that's exactly how things unfolded.

Was price of the unit important? No, but the cost of the whole installation was. We wanted a good job for a fair price and so were prepared to pay a bit more for good quality work but not get fleeced.

Spot on, same here.

Wot he said!

The installer laid out the various options in terms of make and his reasons for or against each. Ultimately it came down to the best tool for the job and it also helped that it was a local (Scottish) manufacturer which was a philosophical bonus. 

@abernyte Somewhat the same here; though I suppose we did have a gentle nudge as to which make by the fact that our first full survey was with Octopus who favour the Daikin range. In addition, we ruled out some brands due to the refrigerant gas used and limitations on siting with some gases employed. Finally, a further nudge came from brands supplied and supported by our shortlisted installers. Regards, Toodles.

Posted by: @abernyte

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local (Scottish) manufacturer

Who makes heat pumps in Scotland?

Posted by: @johnmo

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Posted by: @abernyte

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local (Scottish) manufacturer

Who makes heat pumps in Scotland?

You learn something every day!

I knew @abernyte had a Mitsubishi Ecodan, so I did an Internet search and found they make them in a factory in Livingston so they definitely qualify as a Scottish manufacturer despite the obviously non-Scottish parentage of the company.

Posted by: @johnmo

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Who makes heat pumps in Scotland?

Aye Mitsi! They have had a manufacturing plant at Livingston since the early 1990s,  originally doing AirCon then also Heatpumps. New training centre just opened too,  for installer training and local school and colleges to learn about renewable tech.  I think there are two in England as well. 

Posted by: @abernyte

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Posted by: @johnmo

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Who makes heat pumps in Scotland?

Aye Mitsi! They have had a manufacturing plant at Livingston since the early 1990s,  originally doing AirCon then also Heatpumps. New training centre just opened too,  for installer training and local school and colleges to learn about renewable tech.  I think there are two in England as well. 

That's good to know, every day a school day.

I plumped for brand reputation but that doesn’t really fully encompass it. All of the above might have.

For me

mitsubishi or Vaillant yes

daikin or LG possibly (we wouldn’t be able to be certain of the 8kW daikin so would have been pushed to the 9/10 ugh)  LG a friend is struggling to get a good local service guy 

midea or Samsung never The first no given concerns on trade wars the second on number of complaints about noise and lack of support reported on forums such as this

Others: ran out of time to contemplate considering more!

@judith did you see the link I posted yesterday in my 2 choices thread 'my new toy' ? It's worth checking for Daikin - you can set up the pump model & size with water tank size and obtain some data I haven't seen anywhere else - it's the EU installer portal. 

There's some interesting charts where you can play with flow temps to see power input and heat output. Unfortunately they only have it for UFH or fancoil - no rads - but I used the former.