The sustainable future team at Nesta has previously collected information about people’s opinions, beliefs and attitudes towards heat pumps and gas boilers through the heat pump survey. While this survey provides valuable insights, it focuses on people in Great Britain who own their homes and use a heat pump or gas boiler to heat them. It does not encompass the views of people living in privately or socially rented housing, or under shared ownership. It doesn’t cover people who anticipate installing low-carbon heating, or may have attempted to install heat pumps in their homes but faced challenges in doing so. The heat pump survey also did not capture the opinions of engineers transitioning from installing gas boilers to heat pumps. Finally, although the heat pump survey captures a valuable point in time, without repeated surveys it cannot describe the unfolding home energy transition.
Forums and social media platforms can offer some insights into public opinion, including those who might have faced barriers that are preventing them from getting a heat pump. But social platforms are also a source of misconceptions and misinformation and their users represent a biassed sample of the population. Nevertheless, there is still value in them: they enable us to collect large-scale data (usually in real-time) from a diverse range of individuals, making it suitable for analysing current trends, emerging issues, ongoing discussions and immediate reactions to events or news. From homeowners to engineers, all of the users of these platforms have questions, face issues and share opinions online, and increased awareness of what these are will aid our wider work.
By understanding perspectives, most-asked questions and issues around the UK's transition to low-carbon heating, we can build more effective solutions to making the transition work for everyone.
Although we have some knowledge about opinions towards heat pumps and other low-carbon heating tech, our aim is to develop a more comprehensive and systematic understanding of public discourse from different actors involved in home decarbonisation in the UK. The insights we gain will help to tailor our future interventions. The project will allow us to:
- understand existing difficulties around installing low-carbon heating tech, and identify the skills/training needed by heating engineers to help them transition to low carbon heating. Similarly, we might identify unknown issues faced by homeowners when installing low carbon heating tech in their home;
- identify the common misconceptions around low-carbon heating tech;
- identify the most asked questions by engineers installing low carbon heating tech, as well as homeowners;
- track the dominant narratives about heat pumps (and other heating technologies) across traditional media and social media.
We studied public discourse on home heating and heat pumps through two online forums, Money Saving Expert, which focuses on consumer advice and money-saving tips, and Buildhub, a more specialised forum dedicated to self-building and renovation.
We made use of natural language processing methodologies to identify:
- commonly discussed topics in the home heating space, and how they’ve changed over the past 20 years
- challenges faced by homeowners during their heat pump journey
- heat pump-related frequently asked questions by homeowners (some who are self-builders)
The insights generated by this work have been made openly available to the public through the following publications:
You can also explore our codebase on GitHub.
www.nesta.org.uk/project/understanding-public-discourse-on-home-decarbonisation/
