Homeowners could get £10,000 for fitting a heat pump under new scheme

• Worcester Bosch is offering £2,500 on top of £7,500 from the Government
• The scheme, set to commence in April, has opened for pre-registering
• Experts say heat pumps can cut as much as 25% off your energy bills

Homeowners with gas boilers could get a record £10,000 for getting a heat pump fitted – if they pick one from Worcester Bosch.

Heat pumps gather heat from either the air or ground and can replace traditional ways of heating homes using fossil fuels, reducing energy bills in the process.

But the devices cost between £8,000 to £30,000 to buy and fit, with the big price range reflecting which sort you buy and what type of property you own.

To encourage homeowners to make the switch, the Government offers Boiler Upgrade Scheme grants of up to £7,500 to get a heat pump.

Now consumers could top that up to £10,000 thanks to a Worcester Bosch offer of up to £2,500.

Worcester Bosch’s ‘Clean Heat Cashback Pledge’ will offer the cash in return for choosing a Bosch heat pump, or £1,000 if they pick a Bosch hybrid system. 

A hybrid system is a heat pump installed alongside a fossil fuel heat source such as a gas boiler.

The scheme is tied to the Government’s proposed Clean Heat Market Mechanism, also known as the ‘boiler tax’.

The Government plans to launch the Clean Heat Market Mechanism (CHMM) in April, which will give each manufacturer of gas and oil boilers credits for fitting a certain number of heat pumps per year.

If manufacturers do not meet their individual targets then they face fines of £3,000 per missing credit.

The aim of the scheme is to lower the UK’s carbon emissions and increase the energy efficiency of households by encouraging more heat pump installations.

But boiler makers such as Baxi, Ideal, Worcester Bosch and Vaillant have said they will have to pass the cost of these fines on to consumers in the form of higher prices.

The Government scheme is intended to create a ‘market incentive’ to the number of heat pumps installed in the UK, and to meet its target of installing at least 600,000 heat pumps in UK homes per year by 2028.

Worcester Bosch said it fits around 60,000 heat pumps a year, whereas boiler installations top 1.5million per annum.

How do heat pumps work?

There are two kinds of heat pump.

Air source heat pumps convert air from outside to water which heats your home via radiators or underfloor heating. 

Ground source heat pumps transfer heat from the ground outside to heat your home. 

Of the two, ground source air pumps are the most expensive to install and require more outside space.

Worcester Bosch’s £2,500 grants are set to be introduced at the same time as the boiler tax.

The boiler and heat pump firm is also giving £500 to installers as part of the deal. 

Worcester Bosch chief executive Carl Arntzen said: ‘By our company giving up to a total of £3,000 Clean Heat Cashback on qualifying installations to support consumers and installers, we hope that more households will view heat pumps as a viable alternative to their current heating systems, as well as future-proofing their homes for lower carbon heat.

‘We believe that this kind of incentive is exactly what the boiler levy arising from the Clean Heat Market Mechanism should be used for,’ Arntzen said. 

Worcester Bosch brought in a £120 levy added to the installation of gas and oil boilers in December 2023. 

The proposed Government scheme is set to launch in April, and run until the end of March 2025, while Worcester Bosch’s pledge is open for customers to pre-register.

Heat pumps use heat gathered from the ground or air in order to heat homes, and can last up to 20 years, compared with between 10 and 15 years for conventional gas or oil boilers.

According to experts, heat pumps can cut 25 per cent off your energy bills, as the environmentally friendly devices require less power to run than traditional boilers.

Worcester Bosch says an air source heat pump will cost around £8,000 to install, but a ground source heat pump will set you back £20,000. 

It also says that these figures are dependent on the type, as well as whether an existing heating system can be used.

Competing manufacturers such as British Gas and Ovo are offering heat pumps for as little as £499 and £500, respectively, when installations are eligible for the Government’s Boiler Upgrade Scheme grant.