How to Get More Heat Pump Customers as a UK Installer

How UK heat pump installers win customers: MCS listing, the Boiler Upgrade Scheme, manufacturer networks, Google, trade partners and bought leads, costed.

Hugo BibbyPublished 2 November 202621 min read

Heat pump installers in the UK get more customers by being easy to find where homeowners check for a certified installer, and by making the Boiler Upgrade Scheme simple to use: an up-to-date MCS listing, BUS registration, a place in a manufacturer's installer network and a Google Business Profile with steady reviews. On top of those come referrals from plumbers, heating engineers and solar firms, and the paid routes: your own ads, quote-comparison sites and bought heat pump installer leads.

What decides which mix pays is the survey. Every heat pump job needs a home visit and a heat loss calculation before you can quote, so a route that fills your diary with homeowners who were never going ahead costs you days, not just pounds. Below: each route and what it costs, a way to compare them per install, and a first-call script that protects your surveyor's time.

How do you get more heat pump customers?

Eight routes, roughly from the slowest to build to the quickest to start. The "free" ones are paid for in hours.

MCS's costs are from its becoming certified page, which says certification body fees vary. Quote-site terms are from Heatpumps.co.uk's page for suppliers and Boiler Guide's renewables leads page.

How do you find heat pump customers for free?

None of these routes charges per lead or per click. What they cost is time, and most need months before they send steady work.

1. Keep your MCS listing right, BUS box included

Gov.uk's steps for the Boiler Upgrade Scheme begin by telling homeowners to get quotes from MCS certified installers, and link straight to the MCS find an installer search. A homeowner can narrow that search to air source, to their nation and region, and to firms "Registered for the Boiler Upgrade Scheme?". The listing they then read gives your certification number, phone, address, regions, certification body and a yes or no for BUS.

Check three things on yours: that air source is listed, that the regions are ones you'll really drive to for a survey, and that you show as BUS registered once you are. A firm without the tick won't appear when a homeowner filters for the grant.

If you're not certified yet, MCS sets out the route: a Technical Supervisor who signs off every installation, an application to a certification body, and an assessment that includes at least one fully compliant installation for each technology. After that, each installation you register with MCS costs £30.

MCS is also moving every certified firm onto its redeveloped installer scheme, and your certification body will contact you when it's available to you. Its 18 June 2026 update says the transition runs until 31 March 2027, when every certified installer must be working under the new scheme. Under it, consumer code membership is no longer mandatory, and DESNZ has accepted the redeveloped scheme for Boiler Upgrade Scheme work, so installers certified to it no longer need a consumer code for BUS jobs.

Homeowners may still ask about one. Gov.uk's find a heat pump installer page, published in July 2022, still says MCS installers must be registered with a consumer protection scheme such as RECC or HIES. Know which scheme version you're on, so you can answer in a sentence.

2. Make the Boiler Upgrade Scheme easy to say yes to

Expect the grant to come up early in any conversation, so know its current rules exactly. As gov.uk and Ofgem publish them, read on 2 November 2026:

• £7,500 towards an air source (air-to-water) heat pump, the same towards a ground source one, and £2,500 towards an air-to-air heat pump, which Ofgem limits to residential properties;
• until 31 March 2027, £1,500 more towards an air or ground source heat pump where the home is heated by oil or LPG and has no mains gas connection, which Ofgem lists as a £9,000 grant (what you can get);
• open in England and Wales only;
• the grant is for the property's owner, which includes a business, a second home or a home let to tenants, and the heat pump must replace fossil fuel heating such as oil, gas, electric or LPG (eligibility);
• one grant per property, and none for most new builds, social housing, homes that have already had government funding for a heat pump or biomass boiler, hybrid systems, or replacing a low carbon system.

Your side is set out in Ofgem's guidance for installers. Your business must be MCS certified for the technology, you open a BUS installer account before applying, you apply for the voucher on the owner's behalf, and you pass the full value on as an upfront discount. Gov.uk tells homeowners the grant is taken off what they pay, and that their installer will tell them whether they're eligible.

That makes the grant part of your sales process. The quote shows the price with the grant taken off, and the eligibility check is yours. Say "if you're eligible" every time, and check before you quote.

Working in Scotland? The Boiler Upgrade Scheme doesn't apply there. The Home Energy Scotland Grant and Loan offers up to £7,500 in grant towards a heat pump, plus up to £7,500 as an optional interest-free loan, and a £1,500 uplift for rural and island homes. The order is different: the homeowner applies, starting with a call to Home Energy Scotland, and no work can start until they have the funding offer in writing. Your firm and the product must be MCS certified.

3. Join a manufacturer's installer network

The brand on the outdoor unit can send you work. Two examples, as their own pages describe them on 2 November 2026:

• Daikin's Sustainable Home Network. Registering your business with Daikin makes you a member. After product training and three supported installations, you're a Sustainable Home Installer and appear on its installer locator. With MCS certification and Level 2 diagnostics training, you can become a Sustainable Home Expert, which you keep by registering eight Daikin installs a year. Members can ask through the partner portal to receive Daikin sales leads, which it lists as "subject to status" (Sustainable Home Network).
• Mitsubishi Electric's Partner Programme. Its Find My Ecodan tool lets a homeowner check whether an Ecodan heat pump suits their home and ask to be contacted by an installer. That request reaches the installer by email as a "Referral", and only installers in the Partner Programme can view them (Find My Ecodan request page terms). Partners apply to appear on its find an installer tool with their Partner ID (listing form).

Ask your area sales manager what their scheme passes on, how enquiries are split between installers in the same area, and what you must register to stay in. The leads come with the brand, so they suit you best if you'd fit that brand anyway.

4. Set up a Google Business Profile for a heat pump business

You survey and fit at the customer's home, so Google's Business Profile guidelines treat you as a service-area business. Hide your address (Google's own example is a plumber working from home), keep to one profile, and keep the whole service area within about two hours' drive. You can list up to 20 service areas by town or postcode, but not as a radius.

Two rules catch heat pump firms out. The business name can't carry extra information, so "Northfield Heat Pumps" stays as it is, never "Northfield Heat Pumps £7,500 Grants". And Google asks for as few categories as possible, chosen to describe the core business, not to work as keywords.

Nobody can buy a higher place in Google's local results: its help on local ranking says so directly. What moves you is relevance (how well the profile matches the search), distance from the searcher, and prominence, which counts your reviews and the sites that link to you. So list every service you fit, and add the photos and videos Google recommends from real jobs: the outdoor unit in place, the cylinder cupboard and the controls.

5. Ask for reviews, and let prospects hear a unit running

Ask every customer the same way, at the same point: a few weeks into their first heating season works, once they've lived with the system. Google suggests a link or a QR code. Its contribution policy rules out offering anything in return, discouraging bad reviews, picking only the customers you think will be pleased, and requesting that specific content be included, so don't ask them to mention the grant or their bills. Under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, fake reviews and reviews that hide an incentive have been banned practices since 6 April 2025, as the CMA's unfair commercial practices guidance sets out.

Heat pumps have one referral route most trades don't: a working unit. A homeowner worried about noise or an old house will learn more from standing next to a neighbour's heat pump than from a brochure. Ask a few past customers whether a prospect could visit, keep it short and at a time that suits them, and if you thank them for hosting, keep that apart from any review request.

6. Work with plumbers, heating engineers and solar installers

The trades already in the house see a heat pump coming before you do.

The second row comes with rules. MCS's post on umbrella schemes, from January 2021, says such arrangements can comply if they're properly run. The homeowner's contract must be with the MCS certified firm, which raises the MCS certificate. That firm must also have a written agreement with each subcontractor, check their competence and insurance, and supervise their work. Daikin's network page points uncertified installers to umbrella schemes, including some run by Sustainable Home Centres and merchants. If you're the certified firm, that's a source of customers from local heating engineers. If you're the engineer, it's a way in while you work towards certification. MCS is redeveloping its scheme, so check the current rules with your certification body before you set one up.

Write the terms down before the first referral: who rings the homeowner, who holds the contract, and what any fee is and when it falls due.

Do paid ads work for heat pump installers?

They can bring enquiries within days, but heat pump ads carry one particular risk: the grant. Two ASA rulings from summer 2025 show where the line sits:

• Aira Home's Meta ad said "£7,500 grant available". On 6 August 2025 the ASA ruled that the eligibility criteria were material information the ad left out, and that putting them at the bottom of the landing page wasn't prominent enough.
• Octopus Energy advertised installs "from £500". On 30 July 2025 the ASA upheld complaints, finding that the funding being subject to specific criteria was material information.

So put "if eligible" in the ad itself, never show a price that only exists after the grant without saying so, and leave out savings figures you can't back. Then make the form ask what the survey will need: ownership, current fuel, mains gas, combi or cylinder, and outdoor space. Reply within minutes (speed to lead explains why), and judge the campaign on surveys booked and installs, not form fills, which is what our lead feedback loop guide sets up.

Are heat pump installer leads worth buying?

There are two kinds to weigh.

Quote-comparison sites. The homeowner asked to compare, so expect to be one of several quotes. Heatpumps.co.uk says each lead is shared with a maximum of three competitors, at a fixed price per lead plus any subscription costs, with no long-term contract or minimum spend. Boiler Guide offers renewables leads to up to three companies, says it speaks to every customer first, and lets you choose leads one by one or take every lead in your area automatically. Joining costs nothing, and there's no monthly subscription.

Bought leads from a lead supplier. These range from shared web enquiries to exclusive, phone-checked leads and booked surveys. We've compared 13 UK suppliers of heat pump leads on exclusivity, price and bad-lead terms, and set out what heat pump leads cost, including when buying is the wrong move.

Buying makes sense when you have survey slots free and a designer who can turn round a heat loss calculation this week, you're MCS certified and BUS registered, so a homeowner counting on the grant can have it, someone can call within minutes, and you log every install against its source. Before you buy, ask who else gets the lead, whether the homeowner is counting on a grant or paying for it themselves, and what the ad told them about grants. Our guide to exclusive vs shared leads covers the first question.

How do you compare routes on cost per install?

For heat pumps, the hours that matter most are survey hours. Count them with everything else:

Cost per install = (route spend + every hour on the route, surveys included, × your hourly value) ÷ installs it produced

Here's an invented installer over six months, valuing an hour at £45 and counting each survey, with its heat loss calculation and quote, as five hours. Every figure is invented to show the method. None is POCKLA data, or a forecast or price for any route or supplier, including us.

Referrals are cheapest per install because the engineer has already done the persuading, but they stop at three. Bought leads add the most installs and cost the most each, and most of that cost is survey hours, not lead fees. If better screening had cut the bought leads' surveys from 18 to 10 with the same six installs, their cost per install would fall to £950, close to the Google route. That's the lever: screen before you survey.

To find your own figures, add a "how did you hear about us?" question to every enquiry and survey booking, and keep a monthly tally of spend and hours per route. After two quarters you'll have enough installs per route to compare. Our guide to cost per lead vs cost per job shows which stage of the funnel is costing you.

What should you say on the first call? A heat pump sales script

A survey costs you half a day, so the first call is where you decide whether to spend it. Below is a call for Northfield Heat Pumps, an invented installer. Adapt the wording, and where the form or a WhatsApp exchange has already answered something, read it back to them instead of asking twice.

1. Open

"Hi, is that Mark? It's Dan from Northfield Heat Pumps. You asked about an air source heat pump for your home in Lincoln yesterday afternoon. Have you got ten minutes now, or is there a better time?"

If now's no good, book a time and end the call there.

2. Check the form

"Your form says you own the house, it's a 1930s semi and it's heated by a gas boiler about fifteen years old. Is that all still right?"

3. Ask what the survey will need

1. "Is the boiler still working?" If it has failed, they need heat now. Be straight about how far away your next survey and fitting dates are.
2. "Does your hot water come from a combi, or is there a cylinder in a cupboard?" Form answers to this aren't always right, and the design depends on it.
3. "Where could an outdoor unit go: the side, the back garden, under a window?" Siting is easier to talk through now than to discover on the day.
4. "Has anything been done to the loft or the walls?" Insulation changes the heat loss.
5. On an oil or LPG home: "Is there a mains gas connection to the house at all?" The extra £1,500 needs there to be none.
6. "Is anyone else involved in deciding, and could they be at the survey?"

4. When they ask about the grant

"We're MCS certified and registered for the Boiler Upgrade Scheme, so we apply for you, and if you're eligible the £7,500 comes off our quote. I can't promise it on the phone, because we confirm eligibility before we quote. The main checks are that you own the home and that the heat pump replaces fossil fuel heating, like your gas boiler."

Only say the first sentence if it's true of your firm. If the home is on oil or LPG with no mains gas, tell them about the extra £1,500 and its 31 March 2027 end date as a fact, never as a reason to sign this week. Gov.uk tells homeowners that installers "should never put pressure on you to sign a contract or offer cheaper deals if you sign up today".

5. Have answers to gov.uk's six questions

Gov.uk's find a heat pump installer page gives homeowners six questions to ask you. Have a true answer to each before you ring:

• how long the installation takes, and how long they'll be without heating or hot water;
• whether they need to upgrade their electricity supply, and what that would cost;
• what changes to the home could cut their bills or let them have a smaller heat pump;
• whether other trades are needed, or you do the whole job;
• whether you can self-certify that the work complies with building regulations;
• how often the heat pump should be serviced.

6. Book the survey

"The next step is a survey. Our surveyor goes through the house room by room, looks at the radiators, the pipework, where a cylinder would go and where the outdoor unit could sit, and works out the heat loss. Allow about two hours. Could you both be in? I've got Tuesday at ten or Thursday at four."

"If you can find a recent gas bill that shows what you use in a year, it helps our designer check the figures. I'll text you the time and the surveyor's name now."

7. If they're not ready

"No problem. Would it help if I checked back after the winter, or when the boiler's next service is due?"

Put that date in the diary, ring once, and take a second no as final. Leave running costs and savings out of this call: they depend on the survey, and a number given now becomes the number you're held to.

Where POCKLA fits

Of the paid routes above, POCKLA is a lead supplier. We sell heat pump leads: homeowners looking into an air source heat pump, found through our own Meta and Google campaigns aimed at your postcodes. We don't generate ground source leads. Our ads don't promise a free heat pump, a grant or a saving, and we don't send grant-dependent enquiries or commercial projects.

Each lead carries the homeowner's own answers on the form, which can include the property's type and age, the current fuel and boiler, combi or cylinder, insulation as they describe it, outdoor space for the unit, their timeframe and whether they asked about the Boiler Upgrade Scheme. That last one is a screening answer, not eligibility. We check the phone number is live and the postcode is in your area, and we check MCS certification before launch if you advertise it.

You pay per qualified web lead, with an indicative band of £20–£50. That's a range, not a quote: your criteria, area and volume set where you land, and the figure is agreed on a call. There's no setup fee, monthly fee or minimum term (pricing). Each lead is sold to one buyer only, and an invalid number comes back with no time limit. Each enquiry is followed up on WhatsApp from your brand's number, or by free SMS nurture, and reaches your CRM or POCKLA Desk, where calls made from Desk get free call analytics.

Treat bought leads as a way to fill survey slots the free routes leave empty. Whether they're worth it comes down to one figure: your cost per install from them, with survey hours counted, against your margin on an install. Measure it for us the same way you would for anyone else.