Buying a home with a heat pump: what a surveyor looks for

With energy prices being so volatile, the encroaching winter months and the cold that comes with them are the cause of anxiety to homeowners. Couple this with the drive to look for cleaner ways to heat the home and minimising heat loss from the property, ways to achieve this goal become a priority.

Every property sale has to provide an independent Energy Performance Certificate as part of the particulars provided by the estate agent. This confirms how efficient the home is at using energy, particularly with respect to how the home is heated and how much of that heat is lost.

Measured heat loss might reveal problems with the doors and windows or the insulation in the wall cavities and loft (and even a cellar, if there is one). These are all things that will show up in the survey that every buyer should take out before committing to buy a property.

But what about the cost of heating a property and its effectiveness?

With the climate change crisis hitting every country on the planet, better ways of heating a property need to be found. Everyone doing their bit, while small individually, would help enormously when added together. The problem is that most heating systems rely on fossil fuels (usually natural gas, sometimes oil, perhaps wood or coal) to generate the heat necessary to make the home comfortable.

In the last few years, the idea of installing a heat pump has come to prominence, with various schemes in place to help cover the cost. Requiring only electricity to run, the heat pump unit usually sits outside the property. It captures heat from its immediate environment, be it the ground, the air or even water, which is then passed through a device within the heat pump called a heat exchanger. The benefit is that it doesn't require any fossil fuel to produce the heat.

Within the heat pump, the heat is absorbed by a refrigerant, which is then compressed to raise its temperature. That heat is passed through the system to warm the water that flows through the property's radiators and underfloor heating, as well as the water stored in the hot water cylinder.

This process works in all types of weather and temperatures, even in freezing and icy conditions, because there is still heat energy in the air, ground and water that the heat pump is designed to use as its source. Indeed, heat pump efficiency at low temperatures has been shown to be up to twice that of traditional heating methods. This, of course, feeds directly into savings on heating costs each year for the householder.

The technology is improving all the time and the problems reported with the noise they make have been addressed to the point that a heat pump now makes about as much noise as the fridge standing in the kitchen.

When you are looking at putting in an offer on a home, which is dependent on the findings in a survey, the chartered surveyor will check the whole property including the condition of the electrics, plumbing, construction and structure and, of course, the heat pump where one has been installed.

They will look at the property and its suitability for the installed heat pump, and particularly where other issues with the property might reduce its effectiveness (for example poor retention of built-up heat, poorly fitted windows and external doors or a lack of insulation in the loft). They will look at the condition of the heat pump unit and its fittings and how it delivers heat into the property.

As with anything connected to electricity or gas, the surveyor will not open up or move anything connected with the heat pump, since they are not qualified to do so. But they will use their expertise and experience to identify any possible problems with the heat pump system, making a note on the survey report that it should be investigated further where there are concerns. This means that you get an expert and independent view of the heat pump and how well it heats the property.

These pointers from the survey will allow you to get a heat pump engineer to look the system over and verify its condition. Any issues they confirm could give you good grounds to renegotiate the asking price with the vendor.

The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) is broadly supportive of the Government's Net Zero Strategy, but recognises that installing a heat pump will only pay dividends if it is accompanied by other energy efficiency improvements in the home.

You should therefore look to the EPC and the chartered surveyor's report on the property to understand what your future investment might look like, whether there is a heat pump system currently installed or not.

Whatever your plans for moving home or buying your next property, make sure your budget includes a survey. Surveyor Local connects you with our nationwide panel of chartered surveyors, all of whom are RICS members, who will work hard to identify all kinds of problems, including how well the heating system and insulation are performing.

Call to discuss the property you're buying, or get a free survey quote online. Once you accept the quote, we'll do the rest.