Last month I sat with a heating engineer in Leeds who had just finished his 14th air-source heat pump install of the quarter. His gas-boiler review flow was predictable: swap done Tuesday, five-star Google review by Thursday evening. His heat pump reviews, when they came at all, arrived three to five weeks after commissioning, and roughly one in four opened with the phrase “still learning how it works”.
If you have run a gas-only heating firm for any length of time, you know the rhythm. The boiler goes in, the customer runs it that evening, hot water works, radiators heat, the review either arrives quickly or does not arrive at all. It is a same-day verdict that heat pumps do not deliver. Instead, the homeowner needs a full heating cycle, sometimes a cold snap, before they trust the kit. They need to understand flow temperatures, weather compensation curves, and why the radiators feel cooler to the touch than they used to. Until they get that understanding, they hesitate to review, and when they do review, they mix technical uncertainty into their feedback.
This shows up in what buyers do next. The Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative’s 2026 home-buying study, which analysed 1,027 recent home purchasers, found that 84% of homebuyers seek energy efficiency yet often do not receive the information they need. Even in listings, heat pumps are mentioned only 8% of the time, while a third of homes with solar do not advertise it. If sellers who own the kit will not talk about it, ask yourself what the homeowner two houses down understands about the system you just installed?
The 2024 Aurora Solar residential trends report captured the installer-side view: 38% of solar professionals said homeowners being reluctant to commit to quotes was their biggest problem, and the share of homeowners who said it was hard to know which companies to trust jumped from 22% in 2023 to 44% in 2024. That is the problem I keep hearing about from UK installers dipping into renewables.
Trust is a measurable variable
A 2020 study in Business Strategy and the Environment found that trust has a direct influence on whether households switch to green electricity suppliers, and that reputation, perceived environmental impact, and perceived risk all operate through trust as a mediating variable. A 2023 review in Renewable and
Sustainable Energy Reviews went further, linking public acceptance of energy transition policies to a broader trust deficit in government and industry. For UK installers, that political weather also affects your business.
Cost expectations sit right next to trust. The Aurora 2026 snapshot found 49% of homeowners cite high installation costs as a top barrier to installing heat pumps, while 36% cite uncertainty about the return on investment. When trust is thin and cost is high, the homeowner waits for someone else on their street to go first. That stall is the gap you have to engineer against.
Where UK installers are losing the trust battle
I have spoken with dozens of UK plumbing and heating firms over the last year. The pattern is consistent: they are excellent at the install but are often poor at the fortnight that follows it. Here is where the trust bleed happens.
• The commissioning explanation is rushed. The homeowner nods along, doesn’t really understand the controller, and calls two weeks later confused about running costs.
• No follow-up at day three, day 14 or day 30. The homeowner is left to interpret the system alone.
• The review request goes out on the wrong day. For a boiler swap, asking the same afternoon works. For a heat pump, asking the same day means the customer has not yet decided how they feel. Marketing guides recommend asking within 48 hours of completion, but that window is wrong for renewables.
• No visibility on the engineer’s arrival time. The customer has taken a day off work and that anxiety while waiting colours everything that comes after. A UK heat pump skills gap study from the University of Strathclyde laid out the workforce side of this, and the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero literature review documented the wider capacity challenge. But no policy paper is going to fix the homeowner’s uncertainty about the whooshing noise their new unit makes on a cold Tuesday morning – fixing that is on the installer.
What the data tells you to do
Google reviews for home services behave differently than most contractors assume. Recent HVAC review guidance has been consistent on one point: recency, volume, and response patterns matter more than raw star rating for buyer confidence.
A firm with 180 reviews averaging 4.6 stars, with the most recent one from last week and a response from the owner, converts better than a firm with 40 reviews averaging 4.9 stars where the last review was seven months ago. Prospective heat pump customers read deep into your review history. Here is the playbook I would give any UK renewable installer.
• Give your homeowner a proper en-route notification with the engineer’s name and photo. Homeowners rate the day of the install partly on how anxious they felt in the two hours before you arrived. Reduce that anxiety and you have already banked good will before anyone has touched a spanner.
• Split your review request timing by job type. A combi swap can go out the same evening. A heat pump install should not. I would send a warm check-in at day three, a running-cost sanity check at day 14, and only then ask for the review. Then you are asking after the customer has formed a real opinion.
• Build a comprehensive commissioning handover including a written summary, short video walkthrough, one-page cheat sheet for the controller. The homeowner will forget half of what you said so give them something to reread at 9pm when they are worrying.
• Respond to every review, particularly the mixed ones. A three-star review from a heat pump customer that says “still figuring it out” is not a complaint. It is an invitation to reply publicly, explain the settling-in period, and offer a free follow-up visit. Prospects reading that exchange learn more about you than they would from any five-star review.
• Track the data you already have. Most operators say the single most-overlooked feature in their first year is the dashboard view, and the shops that build a habit of checking weekly job count, revenue per tech, and aging receivables tend to catch problems before they become quarterly surprises. The same discipline applies to review data. If you don’t know your review-request to review-received rate broken down by job type, you cannot fix the renewables gap because you cannot see it. From contractors I work with directly, those who get the most out of leads management are the ones who consistently log their lead source, so they know which marketing channel is funding their growth. If you can’t see that your heat pump referrals are lagging your boiler referrals, you will misdiagnose the problem as “renewables don’t pay” when the actual problem is your review pipeline for renewables jobs is 30 to 45 days behind your boiler review pipeline.
Every UK installer I talk to says the same thing after they cross 50 heat pump installs: the technical side got easier faster than the customer-communication side did. The customer-communication side is where the next five years of profitability will be decided for this industry. www.fieldpromax.com
Joy Gomez is an engineer and the Founder of Field Promax.
Almost half of homeowners cite high installation costs as a barrier to installing heat pumps, with 36% citing anxiety about the return on investment.