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Thinking about a heat pump or solar panels?

It is a lot of money, the advice is confusing, and almost everyone offering an opinion is also trying to sell you something.

This site is here to help you work it out for your own house, in plain language and with calculators that show what they did. There is nothing to sign up to and nothing for sale.

Where do I start? Work out what my house needs

Where are you with it?

Somebody still weighing it up wants different things from somebody about to sign, and both want different things from the person doing the work. Pick whichever sounds like you.

What would your house need?

Give these your postcode and roughly what you spend on energy, and they will tell you the size of system that would suit your home, what it would generate or save, and how that compares with a quotation you have been given.

What size solar system do I need?

Works out the array a home needs — capacity, panels, battery and what it saves — from a postcode, a roof direction and a year of electricity use.

Work it out

What size heat pump do I need?

Estimates a house's heat loss and the heat pump that covers it, from a year of gas or oil bills, and says whether a quoted size looks plausible.

Work it out

There are eight more for checking a single figure on a quotation, such as the shading on a roof or the noise a heat pump makes at a neighbour's window.

New to all of this?

Nothing here assumes you know the vocabulary. These take about five minutes each and make everything else on the site readable.

Beginner Basics

What wears out, and when

Panels, inverters, heat pumps, batteries and cylinders all have different lifespans. Knowing which is which stops a normal replacement feeling like a failure.

5 min read
Beginner Basics

Reading your electricity bill

Three numbers on your bill do all the work, and finding them takes about five minutes. They are also the numbers every calculator here asks for.

4 min read
Beginner Basics

What a kilowatt-hour is

Bills, quotations and savings on this site are all counted in kilowatt-hours. What one is, and how to find out how many your house gets through.

4 min read

If you are weighing it up

Longer pieces, still in plain language, on whether each of these suits a house like yours.

Guide Heat pumps

Should I get a heat pump?

What changes in a house that gets a heat pump, the conditions it needs to work well, and how to tell early on whether yours is a good candidate.

8 min read
Guide Heat pumps

What to sort out before a heat pump

The things worth doing before you spend anything, because each one makes the machine you end up buying smaller, cheaper or better matched to the house. Most of them cost nothing.

7 min read
Guide Solar PV

Should I get solar panels?

What a roof will realistically generate, why the direction matters less than you think, and why the same panels are worth more to some households than others.

7 min read
Guide Solar PV

What to sort out before solar

Less needs doing than for a heat pump, and one thing people expect to have to do turns out not to matter at all. What is worth checking before you get anyone out.

7 min read

Or browse by subject

Basics

The vocabulary, the units and the bills. The things everything else on the site assumes you already know.

Heat pumps

How they work, how they are sized, and what makes one cheap or expensive to run.

Solar PV

What a roof will generate, how that figure is arrived at, and what happens to the electricity.

Batteries

What storage does for a house that already generates, and what it does not.

MCS and standards

What certification covers, what it does not, and what a certificate is evidence of.

Paperwork and permissions

Planning, building control, the network operator, and the documents an installation should leave behind.