Do heat pumps actually work?

Almost every homeowner I sit down with asks the same thing first. Not about price, not about timescales, not about which brand. Before anything else, they want to know: “Will it actually heat my home properly?”

It’s the right question. And I’d rather answer it properly than gloss over it, because it’s the thing everything else hangs on.

The honest answer is yes — a heat pump will heat your home. But it’s not a straight swap for your boiler, and understanding how it works differently is what gives people the confidence to make the switch.

It’s not a boiler. It’s a completely different way of heating your home.

Most people are used to an intermittent system — your boiler fires up, blasts high-temperature heat through the radiators for a few hours, then shuts off. You’ve lived with that rhythm for years. A heat pump works the opposite way.

It takes air from outside and — using a process similar to a refrigerator working in reverse — turns it into heat for your home. It runs continuously, at a lower, steadier temperature, maintaining a consistent warmth throughout the day. It’s weather-compensated, so it quietly adjusts to how cold it is outside without you having to think about it. On a sharp winter morning, it works a little harder. On a milder day, it eases back.

Most people, once they’ve lived with it for a few weeks, wonder why they didn’t switch sooner. No cold spots. No waiting for the house to warm up. Just a home that’s consistently comfortable.

Why I treat every home like a box.

When someone tells me they’ve “heard mixed things” about heat pumps, I already know what’s happened. The system wasn’t designed properly. And that comes down to one thing: someone guessed.

You cannot guess what size heat pump a property needs. Before I recommend anything, I strip the emotion away and look at your home almost as if it’s just a box. I need to know exactly how much heat is leaking out of it — and exactly how much needs to go back in.

That means a full, room-by-room heat loss survey. I take three-dimensional measurements, look at every window, door, wall, roof and floor. I work out the U-values of your insulation, the age of your glazing, the construction of your walls. All of it goes into a detailed calculation that tells me, precisely, what this home needs — not what I think it might need.

We prove the system will work on paper before a single tool is lifted. That’s not a sales process. That’s just how this should be done.

Bigger isn’t better — and here’s why that matters.

Sometimes a homeowner will ask me to size up — “just to be safe”, or because they’re planning an extension down the line. I understand the instinct. But in heat pumps, oversizing is a real problem.

If the system is too large for your home, it heats the space too quickly, shuts off, starts again, shuts off — a cycle called short cycling. It sounds efficient. It isn’t. It actually uses significantly more energy than a correctly sized system running at a slow, steady pace, and it puts unnecessary strain on the unit. Higher bills, less comfort, shorter lifespan.

The sweet spot — the system sized exactly to your home’s real heat loss — is where efficiency lives. That’s what the calculation is for.

“Is my house even suitable?”

Almost certainly, yes. I’ve heard this concern more times than I can count, usually from people in older properties who’ve been told heat pumps only work in new builds, or that you need exceptional insulation, or that you’ll have to replace every radiator in the house.

Most of that isn’t true. I’ve installed systems into 1930s semis, Victorian farmhouses, listed buildings, rural cottages with poor insulation. There is no home that can’t be heated by a heat pump — as long as the system is designed correctly for that home. Some older properties need a slightly larger system, or a few radiator upgrades. We’ll work that out at survey stage and show you exactly what’s needed — and what it will save you — before you make any decision.

When I visit your home, you’ll leave with a full heat loss calculation, a room-by-room breakdown, a performance sheet showing projected running costs, a comparison against what you’re paying now, and full details on the Boiler Upgrade Scheme — which currently offers £7,500 toward the cost of switching. All of that before you’ve committed to anything.

The best answer I can give you is to show you.

We’ve been doing this — only this — since 2006. Thousands of homes across East Anglia. Systems that have been running quietly and reliably for five, ten, fifteen years. We don’t do gas. We don’t do oil. We don’t do anything except heat pumps, because we genuinely believe it’s the right technology for heating homes — and we want to be very good at it.

If you’re still not sure, I’ll arrange for you to visit one of our installations. A real home. A real homeowner. A system you can stand next to, listen to, and feel working. Because sometimes the most useful thing isn’t an explanation — it’s just standing in a warm room.

Heat pumps work. The question is just whether yours is designed well enough to prove it. If you want to start with an honest conversation and a proper calculation — not a sales pitch — that’s exactly what we’re here for.