Cruising the Norwegian fjords on holiday convinced John Taylor he was making the right move installing an air source heat pump at his home in Matlock, Derbyshire. “I was surprised at the number of heat pumps I saw in the places we visited,” the 72-year-old retired broker says. “I thought, if they work in Norway, mine will work even better in Derbyshire.”
Heat pumps began appearing in Norway after the 1970s oil crisis, when a government-funded installation programme was introduced, according to Rolf Iver Mytting Hagemoen of the Norwegian Heat Pump Association.
As concerns grew over the environment, the Norwegian government introduced generous subsidies, along with high fossil fuel taxes. These measures, plus low costs for electricity and a total ban on gas and oil boilers since 2020, have firmly embedded the heat pump into Nordic homes.
Taylor, who lives in a two-bedroom, grade II listed 17th-century barn conversion with his wife, Christine, 73, believes his investment has been worthwhile. In September 2022 he paid £11,500 for a Vaillant aroTHERM plus 7kW air-to-water heat pump, including installation by the Sheffield-based IMS Heat Pumps, plus increasing the size of nine radiators at a cost of £600, claiming back £5,000 from the government’s boiler upgrade scheme (BUS).
If he had waited 12 months or so he would have gained another £2,500. As of October 23, in England and Wales the BUS payout has increased to £7,500 for homeowners swapping fossil fuel boilers for heat pumps. In Scotland a grant of £7,500 (£9,000 in rural areas) is available, plus an optional £7,500 interest-free loan. Northern Ireland, meanwhile, has suspended its boiler replacement scheme.
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Mike Foster, chief executive of the Energy and Utilities Alliance, a not-for-profit energy industry trade body, believes that if countries such as Norway and Sweden can teach us anything about heat pumps, it’s that the promise of government funds will always act as a carrot to homeowners.
These countries have a history of state support for heat pumps. According to research in March by the European Heat Pump Association (EHPA), Norway offers grants for ground source heat pumps only, of up to €1,000 for both new buildings and renovations, while Sweden offers 30 per cent tax rebates on the labour costs of retrofit installations, up to €5,000 a year.
“Countries do have different subsidy schemes, and there is political pressure [in the UK] with Covid and the cost of living crisis,” Foster says. “If the government isn’t going to pay something towards the average cost of installing a heat pump, which can be about £11,500, that’s going to be a barrier for a lot of people.”
However, Foster says that in terms of technology there is “not a lot that the Scandis can teach the UK about heat pumps. I’ve seen them rolling off a production line in Derbyshire [where Vaillant has a factory, in Belper] and actually being sent to Scandinavian countries. We have the technology and heat pumps are now a globally traded commodity.”
Persuading people in Britain to buy them is a different matter, however. Internationally heat pump sales are breaking records, with 2.98 million sold in 2022, a year-on-year increase of 38 per cent, according to EHPA. “We see particularly strong relative growth in Belgium, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, followed by Poland. All of these have nearly doubled total heat pump sales in 2022,” EHPA says.
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Of 21 European countries surveyed by EHPA, the UK was bottom of the list for buying heat pumps. Finland came top, with 69.46 heat pump sales per 1,000 households, followed by Norway on 59.87 and Sweden with 39.34.
EHPA says that the UK sold just 1.90 heat pumps per 1,000 households in 2022, a rate almost half that of the second-from-bottom country, Hungary.
Crucial infrastructure differences are the cause of this gulf between the UK and Scandinavian countries, Foster says: “If we look at Denmark, 45 per cent of energy is provided by [centralised] district heating to serve towns. In some areas of Denmark apartments are the common type of house, where we might have Victorian terraced houses — a block of flats lends itself to heat pumps. You would have space restrictions on a row of Victorian terraces, with heat pumps on the back. And indoors you need a hot water tank; 60 per cent of British homes don’t have one.”
Henrik Juhl Hansen, director of the Vaillant Group, recognises such challenges: “There are a number of countries where part of the market will over time require different solutions, and there is constant research going into this area.”
There are also some fundamental gaps in knowledge. The predominant heat pump in the UK is the air-to-water type, which uses air to heat water that is then pumped into radiators, underfloor heating and showers/taps. Many Scandinavian homes use an air-to-air pump (the cheapest heat pump option, according to Hagemoen, typically costing €1,500 to €3,000), which provides heating only. These work by blowing hot air into rooms using fans or via air ducts. Hot water is supplied separately, by immersion heater or water heaters positioned under sinks, for instance.
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Another avenue not often explored in the UK is to pair a heat pump with a fossil fuel burner. These hybrid systems are often the failsafe in Scandinavian countries, with a boiler backing up the heat pump when temperatures outside plummet in winter.
The shortage of qualified heat pump installers is a Europe-wide issue, and particularly in the UK. There are only 3,000 trained heat pump engineers in this country, according to 2022 research by the innovation charity Nesta — to meet government targets on installations (600,000 per year by 2028) at least 27,000 trained installers will be needed by 2028.
The government is offering UK heating engineers grants of £500 towards training (the typical full cost of a course is £600, according to the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero) to become qualified heat pump installers through its £5 million Heat Training Grant.
However, it’s not just about money, Foster says: “It’s a misjudgment to try and compare one country’s use of a heating appliance with another. Geology matters. Had we had not had the benefit of North Sea gas, we might not have a gas network serving 85 per cent of homes in the UK, or if we had endless amounts of hydro power producing electricity, as in Norway, heating our homes might be different.
“Most importantly, our housing stock is different. Homes in these Scandinavian countries are on average more energy efficient than a typical home in the UK. If your housing stock is different, no wonder you have different solutions.”
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Alex Bardell, chair of the Green IT specialist group at the British Computer Society, agrees. His experience of travelling in Europe and Scandinavia, especially in his marketing role for Baufritz, a German modular homes company known for its systematic approach to energy efficiency, has given him a broad perspective on what we can learn from our neighbours.
“In Scandinavia the mindset and the lifestyle of people living there is different [from the UK]”, he says. “They don’t live in very hot houses — when their house reaches its optimum temperature at 18 to 19 degrees, they are happy. I would describe it as ambient. They aren’t sitting there indoors in their shorts or pyjamas in January, expecting to bask in temperatures of 23 or 24 degrees.”
No amount of government subsidy can account for household habits. Bardell believes that the deregulation of the gas industry in the 1980s, leading to competitive practices from suppliers, ushered in an unsustainable — in all senses — era of cheap home heating. Brits, he argues, are still hooked on the immediate high a gas boiler and a set of radiators will deliver: “From a freezing house to rocket hot in a matter of hours”, as he puts it, rather than accepting the steady warmth provided by a heat pump system.
There is resistance to heat pumps among homeowners in the UK, Hansen admits: “Replacing something you’re happy with is always easier than redoing it into something totally different. Sometimes convenience will prevail. We will get there, but that will require a dialogue with installers, a bit of a behaviour change.”
https://nuk-tnl-deck-prod-static.s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/ec76e676814db1a62db226475465befc.png However, as Bardell puts it, many traditionally constructed UK houses “haemorrhage heat” because they are draughty, often with high ceilings and poor insultation. This runs counter to successful ambient heating. “I remember going to stay in a house in Sweden. It was more compact than a typical draughty Edwardian terraced house, the ceilings were lower. Upgrading our housing stock would mean a huge retrofitting programme. The heat pump is only part of the solution — you need a heat pump plus insulation, ideally plus air management through an MHRV [mechanical heat recovery ventilation] system.”
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When it all comes together it works. So says John Taylor, who is seeing savings on his energy bills. Thanks to the feed-in from the 3.74kWh photovoltaic solar panels on his roof, his electricity costs, including charging his MG4 EV XPower electric vehicle, are about £100 a month, through Octopus Energy’s Intelligent tariff.
Octopus Energy is known for its heat pump-friendly tariffs and in December plans to launch its own heat pump, the 6kW Cosy 6, aimed at a typical three-bedroom UK house, and potentially available for free if no new radiators, pipes or water tanks are required, or about £3,000 for homes needing such extra work. This cost takes in the government’s £7,500 BUS grant and is about the average cost of a new gas boiler and installation (between £2,000 and £4,500 according to Checkatrade).
Taylor points out that his home has 2ft thick stone walls and double glazing throughout, is exceptionally well insulated, with thick Rockwool laid in the loft, and had a new back door fitted recently to prevent draughts.
“Saving money is not the main reason why I’ve done what I’ve done,” Taylor says — he has an adult son and daughter, four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. “Our resources — oil, coal — are finite. For the sake of our children, and the future of the planet, we have to find an alternative.” That’s one lesson the UK could certainly learn, and not only from Scandinavia.
