It might seem an unlikely way to stop overheating, but many owners have found the tech a lifeline in hot weather
“If it is 35C outdoors, I can get the temperature down to 21C,” says Andrew Ingram of the sanctuary that his living room has provided this summer.
“On the nights I’ve slept in there, you have to put your thick pyjamas on,” jokes Ingram, who lives in Maidenhead, Berkshire, with his wife, Sue.
“When I post on Facebook about it, people say: ‘That’s air conditioning’ and I say: ‘No, it’s the heat pump.’ It’s just working the other way around.”
Rather than generating heat from burning fuel, a heat pump transfers heat energy from one place to another. However, despite the name, heat pumps can be used for cooling, too.
The energy is released through an “emitter” such as a radiator or underfloor heating. The Ingrams have an air source heat pump. It extracts heat from the air outside and uses it to warm the radiators of their three-bedroom house (this is called an air-to-water system).
In 2023, when the Ingrams ripped out their gas boiler, the firm suggested they consider whether they wanted to cool any rooms.
“We thought about it because the sitting room gets really hot, and that’s the room we spend time in,” Ingram says.
“It’s been a revelation. We bought it on the basis that there might be a heatwave, and it’s been an absolute lifeline this year.
“You know those times when you are really feeling exhausted and want to sit somewhere cool. We turn it right down and then let the temperature drift back up again.”
The couple have radiators throughout but the living room also has another “emitter” – called a fan coil unit. This is an appliance that blows air over hot or cold pipes. The whole new home energy system cost roughly £18,600, with the cooling aspect accounting for £1,700 of that.
“If you’re pumping cool water around a property, it’s a bit like putting cool beer in a glass on a warm day,” says Ingram of what is potentially one of the pitfalls of cooling this way.
“You get loads of condensation, so you either have to wrap pipes in quite sophisticated trunking or do what we did, which is have them outside.
“We used the cooling a bit in 2024, and, guess what, in 2025 even more – and in 2026 we’ve been a rather popular place for people to visit.”
The government’s boiler upgrade scheme offers grants of £7,500 to assist homeowners in England and Wales with the cost of installing an air-to-water or ground-to-water system (a heat pump that extracts heat from the ground through buried pipes).
