When Adam Chapman decided to fit a heat pump in his 97-year-old home last year, there was no shortage of heating engineers willing to do the work. But as the founder of Heat Geek, a startup that matches homeowners with trained installers, he was unlikely to have struggled.
“I was swamped with offers,” he says. The job was done by a small team of vetted, highly skilled installers certified as “Heat Geek Elite” after completing the training offered by Chapman’s startup. They were also good friends.
“In the end it took us eight hours,” Chapman recalls. “And there was a barbecue somewhere in the middle, with some beers.”
Chapman is the original “heat geek” – a heating industry veteran turned blogger who used his social media profile to help installers, and at least a dozen government officials, understand how heat pumps can run more efficiently than any gas boiler.
Heat Geek works by offering homeowners the assurance that its accredited installers can offer a guaranteed level of efficiency from their new heat pumps. It also offers self-employed installers rigorous training and access to a pipeline of potential clients. (Heat Geek charges a small fee on each installation.)
Aadil Qureshi, a techie who had worked for IBM and Apple, stumbled upon the tutorials Chapman uploaded to Heat Geek’s YouTube channel while renovating his home. He arrived two years ago as chief executive, turning Chapman’s “clunky” plan into a viable disrupter.
“He had the same idea but with a lot more forethought and a vision for how Heat Geek could scale massively,” says Chapman. “Today everything is digitised: we’re ready to explode in scale and help decarbonise the whole country. That’s the plan.”
So far, fewer than 200 installations have been done through Heat Geek, but Chapman says about 30,000 homeowners have expressed an interest, and 750 have begun the process of connecting to an installer who will replace their gas boiler.
Heat Geek’s potential market is huge. According to official estimates, the UK will need to accelerate its heat pump rollout 11-fold to meet the government target of 600,000 installations a year by 2028.
Qureshi points out that Britain’s shift from coal-fired heating to town gas and then North Sea gas was driven by independent tradespeople “in the heart of the communities they serve, working with people they met down the pub”.
“Big companies like Octopus, Aira and Hometree have a role to play,” he says. “But I think the vast majority of this work will be done by independent tradespeople. It’s our mission to empower them to get this done.”
The company does not expect to remain the only installation company of its kind for long. But data on completed jobs prove that its installations are typically about 50% more efficient than the average British heat pump.
Chapman is so confident that, with the right installation, any home can use a heat pump that Heat Geek guarantees their overall efficiency to any homeowner who contracts one of his accredited “geeks”.
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This evidence-based proposition is a rare positive note in Britain’s burgeoning heat pump market, which has been dogged by confusion, misinformation and mistrust.
Plans to replace millions of gas boilers with heat pumps have met scepticism: some claim that their benefits are a lot of hot air and that they are wholly unsuitable to heat draughty old British homes.
‘I like to fix problems,” Chapman says. “I have been a heating engineer for 20 years. The truth is, we have the solution to decarbonising home heating – and it’s heat pumps. The problem is getting them to work well in all situations, and all that’s needed to make this happen is in our training. To understand that is to understand the whole problem. Everything else is just noise.”
His journey from heating engineer to heat pump evangelist has taken him from offering advice to fellow installers in online forums to posting almost 100 videos for the 55,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel. A government grant then enabled Chapman to launch the Heat Geek online learning platform, teaching installers the physics of an effective heat pump system.
“Everything has been driven by my desire to do what’s right – whether that’s for the environment, or finding the most efficient way of solving a problem. I’ve been like this since I was a kid: always trying to streamline things, strip them down, make them less complicated.”
Chapman puts this down to his childhood struggles with ADHD and dyslexia, which meant he left school with a single GCSE.
“I left school thinking I was basically stupid,” he says. “But in the heating industry, and the community around it, I felt empowered for the first time and was able to help other installers develop and set up their own businesses.”
Empowerment is an idea Chapman returns to often: “That’s what Heat Geek is really about. We’re empowering individual engineers with the skills they need to work for themselves. But we need to empower homeowners too. They don’t have access to good information on heat pumps or a clear visualisation of what they’re buying. So at the moment we still have an ‘innovator’ or ‘early adopter’ market.
“Our goal, which I think we can achieve very soon, is to open up to people like Doris in Doncaster – a single mum of three who hasn’t got the time to learn about heat pumps. We want to make it the norm for everyone.”
CV
Age 38.
Family “Four strong women”: partner of 17 years, identical twins of six, and an eight-year-old.
Education Self/peer-taught.
Pay “It’s all reinvested in the future, but at 38 with a young family, I know it’s time to start taking back.”
Last holiday “Currently in Cancún at an all-inclusive resort, absorbing little to no culture.”
Best advice he’s been given “It’s not the opportunities you take that make you successful, it’s the ones you turn down” (from his late father, Terry).
Biggest career mistake Undervaluing self-care.
Phrase he overuses “There’s no panacea.”
How he relaxes “Meditation and immersion in anything sensory.”