Tulloch PriestCo-founder, Gas Engineer Software · Co-founder of Gas Engineer Software

They Busted This Heat Pump Myth

30 Oct 2025 · 1 min

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0:32

In this brief video, the speaker challenges the common belief that uninsulated homes cannot effectively use heat pumps. Using a simple "bucket with a hole" analogy, they explain that heating is simply a matter of compensating for heat loss: the heating system must supply heat at a rate equal to the house’s peak heat loss. By accurately determining a home’s peak heat loss—through estimation or data—the heat pump can be sized appropriately to meet that demand. The speaker emphasizes that once the heat pump is large enough, it can provide sufficient heating, and the remaining considerations are its operational efficiency and cost relative to a traditional gas boiler.

Chapters

There's this kind of myth that if you've got an uninsulated house, you can't have a heat pump. And I think that we just need to kind of simplify it. It's all about heat loss. Your house is a bucket with a hole in it. Your heating source just has to fill that bucket as fast as the water's escaping or as the heat's escaping. And a gas boiler, you know, we know what the peak heat loss of a house is. You know, we can learn that, whether we can estimate it or use the data. We just need to make sure the heat pump's big enough. As long as the heat pump's big enough, it's going to be able to put enough power into that house. The next step is just making sure it does so efficiently and does so at the same Prices of the gas boiler.