Is it worth using an SEAI grant to install a heat pump in your property? 

The zero carbon technology is the future of home heating, as it takes absorbs heat from the air, ground or water and then disperses it through your home. 

It essentially does the reverse of what an air conditioning unit does to your home. 

Currently, the SEAI offers homeowners who install one a grant of €9,500 for an apartment or €12,500 for other properties. 

On The Claire Byrne Show, Muireann Lynch of the ESRI said people are “generally favourably disposed” but fail to understand the building requirements. 

The SEAI only offers grants to homes with a Heat Loss Indicator which is equal to or less than 2.3 W/(K.m2).

In practice, this means a house must already be well insulated - which often requires other costly upgrades. 

Ms Lynch added that once this is explained to homeowners, then the “willingness to adopt a heat pump falls way off”. 

“This is stuff that's nothing to do with financial barriers at all,” she said. 

“Now, this is not to say that the financial barrier isn't real and not to say that we don't need to increase investment in this area. 

“But it does concern me that the focus still seems to be so much on the costs and the payback. 

“What we're seeing very clearly in the data is that financial barriers are only one barrier and we can't address this problem simply by giving more and more and more grants.”

Ms Lynch continued that there is often a misconception that green tech automatically leads to higher bills, as quite often people simply respond to cheaper costs by increasing their usage. 

“What we find is that people actually spend a comparable amount, they use a comparable amount of energy, but their thermal comfort goes way up,” she said. 

“So, what that's telling us is that before people retrofit, they're actually underheating their home.”

More generally, long-term savings are impossible to predict because of the highly volatile nature of fossil fuels. 

“Before the likes of the war in the Middle East, we would have seen payback times of something like 15, 20 years for a solar panel, whatever,” Ms Lynch said. 

“Now they've been slashed ever since electricity prices went so high. 

“So, it's impossible to say now what the payback time will be because you'd have to know what your electricity bill is going to be in 15 years time.”

Main image: A heat pump installed in the garden of a home in Ireland. Picture by: Alamy.com.