The first question householders ask when looking into upgrading their heating system with a heat pump, is how much it will cost. This is no surprise. Even with government subsidies such as the current Boiler Upgrade Scheme, an air source heat pump is an expensive purchase. For information providers like heat pump installers, tradespeople hubs, or decarbonisation advocates, providing personalised cost information is all but impossible. It’s important though. Our consumer research showed that, without cost information up front, many householders are discouraged and stop exploring heat pump adoption.

A large number of factors influence cost, which until now made it challenging to estimate without detailed information about a building or even a site visit. However, a rich dataset exists that contains information about past heat pump installations including the hardware installed, the kind of home it’s installed into and the amount paid. This is held on the MCS database, which has information on every installation that has received a government grant.

In 2022, we created an experimental version of a tool that uses data from the MCS database along with a wealth of property details from domestic EPC to give householders an estimation of the price of a heat pump installation in their own home based on what people in similar properties have paid.

More recently we’ve used user research, data science techniques and software engineering expertise to guide the development of a new version of the tool based on the same underlying data, that also:

• improves the usability, relevance and accuracy of the tool
• enables it to be easily integrated with partners’ own web pages and tools
• enables a better understanding of users’ intended next steps

We've created a standalone version of the new tool that offers comprehensive functionality.

An integrated version of the new tool that demonstrates how its core functionality can be tailored to fit partners’ specific requirements and infrastructure can be found on the Get a Heat Pump website.

Get in touch to discuss options for integrating the tool with your web pages and tools, or to share your feedback with us.

The model behind this tool uses variables that have an impact on installation price to estimate a cost range. The tool compares a home to similar properties to generate personalised estimates. This means that the figures shown are estimated from what people in similar properties have paid for their heat pump installation.

Importantly, the tool can't access any information beyond what users enter and some of those details can significantly impact price. For example, factors including required upgrades to radiators, piping, or electrical systems may not be fully accounted for. This means the range of costs provided are not quotes, but guidelines to help estimate retrofit budget and start a conversation with an installer about the air source heat pump installation costs for your property.

The models behind these estimates were trained and evaluated using a dataset of UK heat pump installations registered with MCS (accessed through the MCS Installations database) combined with domestic EPC data from England, Wales and Scotland. To learn more about the modelling, you can visit the GitHub repository.