Heat pump installations in the UK have already exceeded last year’s total, setting a new milestone for the Microgeneration Certification Scheme (MCS) with three months still to go in 2024. By the end of September, 42,000 installations were completed—outpacing 2023's total by approximately 4%.
The UK government is launching the Warm Homes Grant in 2025, an exciting initiative aimed at helping homeowners make their properties more energy-efficient. This fully funded scheme is available to those who meet certain criteria and could significantly reduce your energy costs while lowering your home's carbon footprint.
This week, the UK's last coal power station closed, signalling that the country’s energy landscape is undergoing a massive transformation. For over 200 years, coal was king, powering industry and homes alike. But today, renewable energy sources like wind, solar, and hydro are rapidly replacing fossil fuels in the national grid. With that change comes a new challenge—and opportunity—for those of us in the heating and plumbing industry.
With the UK election out the way and a new government in place, we feel it’s important to explore the potential implications for the heat pump market now that Labour has taken the helm. For plumbers, particularly those considering diversifying into heat pump installations, Labour's anticipated measures could present significant opportunities in the evolving green energy sector.
The UK remains overly dependent on natural gas, according to the National Infrastructure Commission (NIC), which provides independent recommendations to the government.
In its recent annual assessment, the NIC highlights the urgent need to reduce reliance on high-cost, high-carbon natural gas and accelerate the adoption of heat pump technology to meet the ambitious net zero targets by 2050. According to the Commission, decarbonising buildings is a critical aspect of this transition and represents the single biggest challenge on the path to net zero.
Alto Energy has been hand picked by Samsung to participate in the Clean Heat Streets project due to our extensive heat pump design and commissioning experience. As an Oxfordshire based company, this is an important project for us and we’re excited to help Oxford transition to a net zero carbon city.
Air source heat pumps are becoming increasingly popular in many UK households for their energy efficiency and low carbon emissions. However, to ensure their optimal performance, it is important to regularly clean, maintain and service them. One of the key things you can do as a Samsung air source heat pump owner is to keep the filter clean.
In the rare event that your Samsung Gen6 stops working and leaves you without hot water, you can use the heat pump control panel to turn on the immersion heater to produce hot water. The immersion heater is essentially a back up electric boiler that can produce hot water at times of need. It should not be left running permanently and should be used sparingly due to the significant increase in costs.
The last few Autumns and Winters really have been a bit crazy when it comes to heat pump and hot water cylinder stock. Before the pandemic hit, most manufacturers had no ongoing stock issues however from 2020 onwards there has been a dramatic change, meaning we can no longer assume there will never be any issues with the supply chain. We therefore decided to make a big change to our distribution strategy. We extended our warehouse capacity so that we could significantly increase the quantities of both heat pumps and hot water cylinders from various manufacturers so that we could hold in stock ourselves.
The last three months of the year are always the busiest for any heating business. The start of the winter heating season is always the time when any gremlins in the heating season reveal themselves; it’s also the time when it becomes important to get new heat pumps commissioned, switched on and getting heat into the property. As a result, the demand on our team of heat pump engineers is higher than at any other time.
In today’s blog, we wanted to recap of our recent outing with our Commissioning Engineer, Martin, who took us through the process of commissioning an Air Source Heat Pump for one of our customers. If you didn’t already know, we design, supply and commission Heat Pumps and the purpose of this video was to give you an idea of what’s involved in the final process.
Here at Alto Energy, we’re always reviewing the product range that we offer our customers. Every project is different, meaning that the same product will not always be suitable to the application. Furthermore, supply chain diversity has never been more important than in 2022. The heat pump industry is a victim of the global chip shortage, as well as the more general materials shortages that have affected many industries.
The new GEN6 Samsung air source heat pump builds upon the strengths of the previous GEN5 model. Now featuring environmentally friendly R32 refrigerant, up to 65C flow temperature and an upgraded internal LCD controller and user-friendly interface. Alto Energy is an approved Samsung installer meaning we provide our full wrap-around support for Samsung air source heat pumps, as well as a 7 year parts warranty on the product.
