The timeline of our air source heat pump install

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 permission which took ages to resolve. Not all installs need planning permission, but we did due to the pump being close to a boundary. It looked like the council wanted us to carry out an onerous LA90 noise survey. They didn’t, but clarifying this was painful. Octopus wrote to the council, I contacted the planning office, and all we got was silence. In the end our local (Green) councillor stepped in. Within 48 hours she kicked the right person and we had our answer.

Second, we didn’t give our structural engineer enough options to be able to do their job first time. Octopus make a site visit and spend half a day doing a lot of planning and measurements. Part of that was determining the location of the water cylinder. The assumption was it could go where our existing cylinder was located (makes sense), but when the contract arrived that was subject to a structural engineering assessment. The structural engineer didn’t like what they saw, leading to a round of further visits by Octopus and a second visit from the structural engineer. The end result was a better placement for everyone, but it was a huge time suck.

The doubts over the planning lead us to pause spending more on the structural engineering, compounding the delay. Overall, the schedule ended up like this:

Uploaded image — Timeline overview (might be easier to see via the source). “Drip tray” was getting a builder to drill a drainage hole. “Asbestos survey” was an Octopus-funded check to find out if they were cutting through nasty stuff (they weren’t). Not included on this chart: upgrading loft insulation, us clearing the loft, and clearing space in the garden and around radiators in the house.

Two lessons we’ve learned

If you need planning, make friends with your local councillor and get them to help you at first sign of delay or confusion.
If you need a structural engineer, make sure you have detailed options to give them. Ask the pre-install surveyors: “if not here, exactly where else?”. We ended up abandoning Plan A, going with Plan B, but we had a Plan C in our back pocket too.

There are benefits to the dance we did. More eyes on the property was helpful to refine the install, and the final cylinder placement visit introduced us to an installer. We liked her, and asked that she lead the install having seen what she’d be facing, and that all worked out well for all.

All well worth it. Ever though we had the install during the coldest snap of winter, our house is now much more comfortable. Plus we’re not burning as much stuff as we used to.

* * *

Here’s our referral link for Octopus which gives you £100, and us £100 in energy credits. If you’re not using Octopus, I’m told Heat Geek are very good.

heat-pump