Bodge Buster

Heat pumps work. Bad installations don’t

A well-designed air source heat pump can heat your home comfortably, efficiently and reliably. A poorly designed system can leave you facing cold rooms, excessive electricity bills, constant faults and an installer who insists that everything is perfectly normal.

Bodge Buster has been completely rewritten and expanded for 2027 to help you avoid that nightmare.

This is the homeowner’s guide to challenging weak designs, recognising cowboy installers and protecting one of the largest investments you will make in your home. It takes you through the complete installation journey, from the first sales conversation and heat loss survey to commissioning, handover and first-winter support.

You do not need to become a heating engineer. You need to understand what good work looks like, which questions expose a weak proposal and what evidence should exist before you sign a contract or release the final payment.

Based on our own difficult heat pump installation in a rural Victorian farmhouse, years of troubleshooting and the experiences shared by hundreds of homeowners through Renewable Heating Hub, this book gives you the knowledge we desperately wish we had at the beginning.

Inside, you will discover how to:

- Identify installers who can genuinely design and support a complete heat pump system
- Interrogate a room-by-room heat loss calculation and challenge questionable assumptions
- Compare quotations properly instead of being distracted by headline prices and grant discounts
- Check whether the proposed heat pump is correctly sized for your home
- Understand radiator upgrades, minimal disruption proposals and the effect of higher flow temperatures
- Assess microbore, primary pipework, pumps, buffers, volumisers and hydraulic design
- Decide whether your existing hot water cylinder can be retained
- Examine workmanship, pipe insulation, drainage, electrical work and outdoor unit placement
- Demand meaningful commissioning figures instead of a page filled with unexplained ticks
- Understand controls, weather compensation, backup heating, monitoring and first-winter optimisation
- Protect warranties and establish who will provide servicing, technical support and repairs
- Build a proper evidence file in case promises, equipment or designs change during installation

Avoid the cowboys. Challenge the design. Protect your home.

Bodge Buster gives you the vocabulary, confidence and practical knowledge to hold installers accountable without drowning you in unnecessary technical jargon.

Heat pumps are proven technology. The challenge is making sure the people designing and installing yours allow it to work properly.

Fully revised and expanded for 2027, with a refreshed foreword by heat pump veteran, tester and enthusiast Graham Hendra.