- Worcester Bosch is offering £2,500 on top of the government’s £7,500
- The scheme, which will start in April, is open for pre-registration
- Experts say heat pumps can save as much as 25% on your energy bill
Homeowners with a gas boiler can get a record £10,000 to have a heat pump installed – if they choose one from Worcester Bosch.
Heat pumps collect heat from the air or ground and can replace traditional ways of heating homes using fossil fuels, reducing energy bills.
But the devices cost between £8,000 and £30,000 to buy and fit, with the wide price range reflecting what type you buy and what type of property you own.
To encourage homeowners to make the switch, the government is offering boiler upgrade grants of up to £7,500 towards the purchase of a heat pump.
Now consumers could top that up to £10,000 thanks to a Worcester Bosch offer of up to £2,500.
Worcester Bosch’s ‘Clean Heat Cashback Pledge’ is offering the cash in return for choosing a Bosch heat pump, or £1,000 if they choose a Bosch hybrid system.
Helpful: Worcester Bosch offers to pay £2,500 on top of £7,500 government grant
A hybrid system is a heat pump that is installed next to a fossil fuel heat source, such as a gas boiler.
The scheme is linked to the government’s proposed market mechanism for clean heat, also known as the ‘boiler tax’.
The government plans to launch the Clean Heat Market Mechanism (CHMM) in April, which will provide credits to any manufacturer of gas and oil boilers for installing a certain number of heat pumps per year.
If manufacturers do not meet their individual targets, they face fines of £3,000 per missing credit.
The aim of the scheme is to reduce CO2 emissions in Britain and increase household energy efficiency by encouraging more heat pump installations.
But boiler manufacturers such as Baxi, Ideal, Worcester Bosch and Vaillant have said they will have to pass on the cost of these fines to consumers in the form of higher prices.
The government program aims to create a ‘market incentive’ for the number of heat pumps installed in Britain, and to meet the target of installing at least 600,000 heat pumps per year in British homes by 2028.
Worcester Bosch said it could accommodate around 60,000 heat pumps per year, while more than 1.5 million boiler systems are installed annually.
The £2,500 grants from Worcester Bosch will be introduced at the same time as the boiler tax.
The boiler and heat pump company is also giving £500 to installers as part of the deal.
Carl Arntzen, CEO of Worcester Bosch, said: ‘By our company offering a total of £3,000 Clean Heat Cashback on eligible installations to support consumers and installers, we hope more households will see heat pumps as a viable alternative to their current heating systems, and future-proofing their homes for low-carbon heat.
“We believe that these types of incentives are exactly what the boiler levy resulting from the Clean Heat Market Mechanism should be used for,” Arntzen said.
Worcester Bosch introduced a £120 levy on the installation of gas and oil boilers in December 2023.
The proposed government program will start in April and run until the end of March 2025, while the Worcester Bosch pledge open for customers to pre-register.
Heat pumps use heat from the ground or air to heat homes, and can last up to 20 years, compared to 10 to 15 years for conventional gas or oil boilers.
According to experts, heat pumps can reduce your energy bills by 25 percent because the environmentally friendly devices require less power than traditional boilers.
Worcester Bosch says an air source heat pump costs around €8,000 to install, but a ground source heat pump costs €20,000.
It also says that these figures depend on the type and whether an existing heating system can be used.
Competing manufacturers such as British Gas and Ovo are offering heat pumps for as little as £499 and £500 respectively, when installations qualify for the Government’s Boiler Upgrade Scheme grant.