| By Olivia Rudgard Jonathan Saunders is a pretty typical 37-year-old resident of Broadstairs, Kent, a seaside town in southeast England. He enjoys walking on the beach with his daughter, tending to his garden and fixing computer hardware as a side hustle. Yet he also finds joy in what many Britons still see as an esoteric piece of equipment: a heat pump. Four years ago, Saunders replaced his home's old gas boiler with the more environmentally friendly device. Ever since then he's been eager to share his love for the technology with literally anyone who wants to hear about it. Now he has a good excuse: Saunders signed up for an initiative called Visit a Heat Pump, run by UK charity Nesta. The program offers people the opportunity to see a home heat pump in the wild before investing in one themselves, and gives enthusiasts like Saunders a venue for fielding questions on the installation process, the weather dependency curve, flow temperatures and more. "If I could chat about this stuff with someone who I know is interested because they're there for that reason, that's much better than me boring someone at a dinner party who really, really doesn't want to talk about this," he said.  Visitors check out a heat pump at a house in Brighton. Photographer: Jose Sarmento Matos/Bloomberg Heat pumps, a type of highly efficient electric heating already common in some parts of Europe, are unfamiliar to most in the UK, where more than two-thirds of people still heat their homes with gas boilers. In pursuit of climate targets, the government offers consumers a £7,500 ($9,400) grant and sets a minimum number of heat pumps boiler companies must sell each year. But rollout has been slow. Uncertainty about how heat pumps work and the hassle of installation, as well as misconceptions about the types of homes they can be installed in, are among the factors putting people off, according to a survey by the utility Eon. Nesta, which has a stated aim of promoting innovation, launched the program last spring to get homeowners more comfortable with the technology. Since then over 1,000 people have taken part in a visit and more than 400 people are signed up to host. Survey results published by the charity in November suggest it's working. Post-visit, 79% of people said they could imagine having a heat pump in their home, up from 21% before a visit. A little more than 160 kilometers (100 miles) from Broadstairs in the south-coast town of Hove, Ollie Williams and his partner Louis Stupple-Harris are also taking part in Visit a Heat Pump. Williams, a social impact manager at a video game company, and Stupple-Harris, who works for Nesta but not on this project, had a heat pump installed in December. On a cold, wet day in January, the couple opened the door of their three-bed terraced house to a little more than a dozen strangers. Over oat milk hot chocolate, Williams and Stupple-Harris showed visitors the unit in the garden, escorted them upstairs to examine the hot water tank in a cupboard on the landing, and hosted a Q&A in the living room. Even with temperatures outside of around 45F (7C), more than one visitor commented on how warm the house was inside.  A Brighton homeowner takes questions about the experience of having a heat pump. Photographer: Jose Sarmento Matos/Bloomberg The group's questions focused on what the install had cost the couple (£1,745, after the £7,500 government grant), how long it had taken (four and half days), and how much extra insulation they'd needed to add (none — the home already had double-glazing and cavity wall insulation). Some attendees were experts in efficiency performance and refrigerant types, but others were almost completely new to the technology. Most were homeowners. One visitor was considering a heat pump for his new Indian restaurant. Elizabeth King, and her husband Stephen, both 43, had traveled 40 miles from Tunbridge Wells to see the heat pump for themselves. They are renovating their home and were concerned about the noise and space the unit would take up in the garden. At the end of the visit, they found themselves convinced.
"The house is lovely and warm, and everything feels normal," Elizabeth said. "So it's an absolute no-brainer." Another visitor, Katie Dennis, 62, who lives nearby, had heard a rumor that heat pumps only worked with underfloor heating. They do work well with underfloor heating but can also be paired with radiators, as in Williams' and Stupple-Harris' home (though sometimes radiators need to be replaced). "I'm really delighted about the fact that you haven't got to rip all the floors up. I think that was the thing that we were worried about," Dennis said.  Katie Dennis Photographer: Jose Sarmento Matos/Bloomberg For Saunders in Kent, tackling false narratives is one reason he signed up for the Nesta program in the first place. Saunders says he was frustrated by what he saw as negative news coverage about heat pumps that didn't match his own experiences. "We all live in a media storm, but personal experience trumps everything, always," he said. Saunders' enthusiasm convinced at least one visitor to his home. A retired architect, Lawrence Gage, 81, has known about heat pumps for a while, and designed his own home 24 years ago to be well insulated. But he was doubtful about getting a heat pump for himself, in part because of cost and in part because he worried about a future of lukewarm showers. "I didn't think it was going to produce enough heat," he says. That concern melted away the moment he stepped into Saunders' toasty home on a Visit a Heat Pump session last year. Gage started calling around to find an installer the next day, and his heat pump was put in last summer. So far, all is going well. "We are nice and warm," he says, "and my showers are just perfect." Read and share this article on Bloomberg.com. Do you love your heat pump? We'd love to see it and hear your story. Send photos and comments to orudgard@bloomberg.net | 
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