Reading: Cold and expensive v hot, cheap and eco-friendly: the contrasting histories of home heating in the UK and Sweden, The Conversation, 16 February 2026. A longish read, describing the 1940s fork in the path that took Sweden and the UK in different directions for heating homes.  Post-war in the UK, the focus was on...

It's the first anniversary of our air source heat pump install. It's been good: our house is more comfortable; our bills have dropped by £500/year; and we're not burning gas anymore. Cost savings We've aimed to optimise running costs. It's tricky to compare this year to last year: our electricity unit cost went up...

What I’d like to do is: (a) gather some stats over time of how our heat pump performs; and (b) optimise the cost of running the pump via automations.  All the good people on the internet point me to Home Assistant—software you can run on a Raspberry Pi to program and tinker with this kind of thing.I finally made a...

Our energy supplier has given confusing labels to the different rates they charge at different times of the day. So that I can remember them, they are: Green: “Day rate” — super expensive, avoid. Also called "peak rate" which makes more sense. Light pink: “Off peak” — a standard rate. Sometimes also called "day rate",...

You can get a heat pump installed for around £500 from Octopus, if you have a straightforward job. Our was deemed to be more complicated, and it cost us £1,940 after the £7,500 government boiler upgrade scheme (BUS).  That covered all the main steps: surveys and re-surveys, handling the planning permission, decoding the...

From quote to the last engineer leaving, it has taken 463 days to get our heat pump installed. That must be way over the average. There are two main reasons for this, both of which are due to our lack of experience. They likely cost us five months, so do learn from our mistakes. First, we had a query over planning...

This is our air source heat pump install week. More on that another time, but one of the choices we have to make is what energy tariff to switch to. This is problematic as we have an EV tariff called “Go” that gives us 8.5p kWh at night and we have trained ourselves to shift energy into that time slot. Moving away from...