Octopus gave us a quote (not an estimate) based on a few questions about our house and neighbouring houses. We didn’t even have an EPC at the time, though we did have to get one to proceed. The EPC said we needed cavity wall insulation before we could have the 7.5k grant for an ASHP. Turns out we didn’t as we already had it but the surveyor hadn’t seen it as we’d just had the house repointed. Anyway, several months after expressing interest and paying a £500 deposit, they came to survey the house. The surveyor was recently qualified to work alone having been trained to then shadowing / working with another surveyor. In fairness he said the amount of enquiries that they’d had was incredible hence the delays while they trained staff.
The survey suggested we needed a 9kw heat pump, and that we need to replace several radiators: 4 regular rads, one towel rail and one fan convector. At this point I’d paid £500 for the survey but would have got a full refund if I’d decided not to go ahead. A friend also had an octopus survey, and also paid for a local outfit to do their own survey. In his case he’s decided to go with the other guys: the cost of their survey is offset against the cost of the fitting, which is more expensive than octopus, but also more adaptable: they’ve agreed to wall mount the ASHP above head level to preserve floor space (which octopus won’t do) and have a lower figure for the requirements calculation because they were willing to exclude the rarely used conservatory, as opposed to octopus who said “triple the size of the radiator in there, or disconnect them and cap them off completely if you want to exclude the conservatory”. The local guys were thus able to recommend a smaller pump than octopus for him.
We decided to go with octopus anyway and the wait for fitting was thankfully much shorter than the wait for the survey. The fitting is now complete.
There have been some minor issues like the team going ahead and fitting a radiator with visible damage rather than saying “this is damaged, we’ll get another”. Same guy also dropped some hot flux on the floor and burnt the lino. They’ve subsequently replaced the chipped radiators and paid for replacement flooring, which is fair enough. The replaced towel rail radiator is now rocking slightly as the bracket is loose, so they’re coming to fix that at some point.
The 9kw unit they fitted is actually a Daikin 14kw unit that’s software limited to 9. It’s pretty darn quiet when it does run
Can share figures for radiator sizes if anyone wants to see them
We went through the tunnel which I can honestly say I’ve never seen open before. We followed everyone else’s tracks and like everyone else ended up WAY off piste. Great skiing though!