Nesta and The MCS Foundation worked in partnership in the first half of 2024 to develop and enhance the Get a Heat Pump (GaHP) website, Nesta has said. The work focused on user experience and functionality, expanded content, and providing accurate, personalised information to potential heat pump adopters1.
The beta version of Get a Heat Pump was launched in November 2023, with the aim of testing the tool with real users. Nesta tracked user behaviour and satisfaction to understand what users found useful, what was missing and how the prototype could be improved. Within four months of launch, the website had over 35,000 views and hundreds of pieces of feedback from users1.
The partnership objectives set out by Nesta were to develop and relaunch an improved version of the service, to set up a long-term delivery partnership with The MCS Foundation to maintain, keep up to date and grow service usage and impact, and to ease evaluation, feedback and performance reporting. Further objectives were to improve the quality and consistency of information provided about heat pumps by the sector, and to improve the reach of the website via backlinks, advertising and organic searches1.
"In the first half of 2024, Nesta and The MCS Foundation worked in partnership to develop and enhance the GaHP website"
The wider project ran from June 2023 to October 2024. Between June and November 2023, Nesta carried out user research into the needs, motivations and pain points of potential heat pump adopters, generated ideas for the beta service, built a prototype using paper prototyping and digital wireframing, tested it with potential adopters, and then launched the beta service with analytics to track behaviour and gather feedback1.
Nesta said earlier foundational work with the Energy Saving Trust in 2021 showed demand for better information on heat pumps, particularly online. Its research found that information was often confusing, spread across multiple sources and overly generic, and that many potential adopters abandoned their heat pump journey at an early stage. Nesta also said users need real examples of installations, transparency around cost, certainty about the installation process and information that enables concrete steps towards getting a heat pump1.
The sources do not report the cost of the website work, the number of users of the relaunched version, or any change in heat pump installation numbers attributable to the site.
Why it matters for households
For a household weighing up a heat pump, the practical obstacle is often not the technology but the information around it: what an installation involves, what it costs and who can carry it out. Nesta's account describes a body of research finding that this information is fragmented and generic, and that people drop out of the process early as a result1.
A single service that consolidates that information bears on a home's energy independence in a narrow but real way. Households that cannot establish what a heat pump would cost them, or how the installation would work in their property, are less able to judge whether moving away from a gas boiler makes sense for them. The stated aim of the enhanced site is to give accurate, personalised information and to help users take concrete steps towards installation1.
The partnership with The MCS Foundation, which runs the certification scheme for renewable installers, is described as a long-term delivery arrangement to maintain and update the service. That points to the site being kept current rather than run as a fixed pilot1.
What happens next
Nesta states the project started in June 2023 and ended in October 20241. No further dated steps are reported.