Artificial Irrelevance? Or can AI enable boiler-price heat pump installs?

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1:03Hello and welcome to another episode of the Everything Electric podcast. Coming to you today partly from Australia, but although my guest today is in the UK, the world can be a very confusing place. What isn't confusing is that we are in the middle of an incredible industrial shift if you like we are now starting to see the building blocks because we're only at the very beginning of this transition the building blocks of technologies that don't require us to burn fuel but to still do the things that we need to do like not freeze to death in the winter you know that would be quite an important one as well you know this is not about electric cars this is about heat pumps now we're talking to someone that we have spoken to before on the on the show adam chapman who is one of the the big brains behind heat geek heat geek is just an incredible organization and it's really worth checking them out we'll make sure i've put links to their website in the show notes to this episode but also adam is just an incredible enthusiast for that technology from a really good place from a place of trying to decarbonize homes and trying to save people money because strangely enough in drilling big holes in the ground extracting gas storing it in big tanks then shifting it down pipes and then putting it on boats quite often on big right around the world and then burning it once not hope not incredibly efficient way of heating places whereas generating electricity offshore on in solar on land with uh you know hydroelectric with nuclear that's a lot more contained a lot more less dependent on importing endless you know billions and billions of pounds worth of fossil fuel and so uh and then using electricity to heat your home and in an incredibly efficient machine called a heat pump and that is what adam is talking about but there is an addition which i'm not going to talk about now because what they're doing now is truly extraordinary which is why we really wanted them to have them on the show again So I'm not going to say any more about it.

3:17I'm going to let Adam explain. So please welcome to the Everything Electric podcast, Adam Chapman from Heat Geek. Our three free YouTube channels on EVs and clean energy tech are funded by our fun-packed test-drive-tastic events in the North, West and Greater London, and our events down under. Next up, Everything Electric Sydney 2026. Plus, check out everythingelectric.store for merch and much more. Adam, thank you so much for joining me. And this is so exciting. I just think what I'll just try and do my take on these things is that for years, decade, all our lives, really for the last 150 years, we've had really the basic system, which was you burn stuff and it does things which have been really good.

4:08I'm not saying it's bad. It's been really helpful. It's helped the human race move on. And then you've got a lot of other stuff that's there as a result of you burning stuff. And in the last, I kind of think it's 10 years, it's become genuinely plausible to do the things that we need to do, which is not freeze to death, move around in machines, you know, all those sort of things, where we don't have to burn anything. And I think what you're doing has pushed that to, you know, because I think it's opened the world to a whole new lot of technologies and systems and ways of thinking about things that literally didn't exist, you know, even 10 years ago.

4:48There just were, there might have been some stuff about it in a sci-fi novel, but not in the real world. And now it's in the real world. Bloody extraordinary, excuse my French. I'm so glad you're as excited as I am. And that means you realise what not only we're doing, but it is available. Like what's quickly become available to us has just come around the corner so quickly. And I suppose our new thing that we're launching is just a great example of it and how technology, the combination of technology and humans together, because we're not leaving humans behind, or certainly not in the plumbing and the heating industry anyway.

5:27We're going to need those for a while. It's one of the most secure jobs left. So I guess the best way for me to start explaining, perhaps, what we're doing is to explain the before. so heat geek are known as the best uh heating uh heating engineer training sort of service right train heat engineers to be able to do totally beautiful bespoke systems with the absolute highest efficiencies right how to calculate all of your radiators and pipe work and when you when you do all these extra calculations you can really get these super super high efficiencies um it's very manual uh there are the software out there but it's still doing a manual thing it's still just uh you know uh basic maths really and um uh with all of that is a lot of fat so you have to assume on christmas day for example uh we we've got we have to keep your house hot and warm on christmas day obviously yeah uh so so we're going to assume that your windows open to to let some fresh air in we're going to assume you need extra hot water so we end up oversizing we have all this sort of fat and contingency right i see i'm with you yeah And so HitGeek are kind of known for the training, but also we do installations and all heat pump installations.

6:46And so we're known for probably, well, the most efficient and probably the most expensive installations that you can get. Great. Not very helpful when you're trying to transition an entire country. And that is our aim. so what's happened in the last year since i last spoke to you was uh is we've been actually secretly well not secretly we've definitely got permission from the homeowners been collecting data on on all of our installations right so we've got the the both sides of the equation we've been in and we've scanned their house i think i talked to you about the scanning software we have for so we have a digital image of their house and now we've got three years of measuring thousands of homes to see how it performed in real life.

7:26And what we saw in that was pretty astounding. It's that we were overperforming left, right and centre. And actually, to get these same efficiencies, we can install way less. We were throwing in stuff. We knew there was a bit of gap, you know, a bit of fact, but we did not know it was that much. So what we've developed is a piece of AI software called Zero Disrupt. It's an AI-assisted algorithm, I'm told, is the correct way to say it. I'm not the tech person. I'm just the heating person. There's much more close people than me and my company. And it analyzes our thousands of installations that have been in and running and the thousands of designs and looks at any one house after we've scanned it and says, well, actually, you probably only need to replace this radiator here and you can reuse your old tank and you can hit this efficiency or you could select a different efficiency and it might change a different radiator or swap the cylinder so now it's just putting in what you need for any one efficiency anyone who may have bought a heat pump before you have to go through this long-winded conversation of flow temperatures and we're going to try and design your system for this flow temperature it's a bit of a strange concept for homeowners why do they care what flow temperature their radiators are they want to know what their efficiency is because that's what pays back on the bills yeah and so we've designed this around shifting the paradigm from flow temperatures and complicated speak to this is the efficiency you're going to buy uh and this is the absolute minimum you're going to need to do to your house to get that efficiency right and in doing that we've gone from the most expensive in the industry to the cheapest with the same high quality installers uh literally overnight so we're in like a bit of a whirlwind over here uh our sales have tripled great great for us but it's more importantly for us it's about decarbonizing homes uh we know that we're on a um uh we we found the the solution um so our average install has been uh or our average base install without any of the like uh pretty extras that you could buy on top is three grand so we're now the average boiler install is three and a half grand so we're now cheaper than boilers this is phase one uh we're still learning from these installs and we're still tuning the system this is going to go down in price over the next year.

9:43I don't think it's going to go down loads, but it's definitely going to start carry on going down. This is the first stab. So what's come out the other end of this, taking us from 10 grand installs down to three overnight, has been just... That's insane. I knew it was going to be good, but I did not know it was going to be that. AI is really good, turns out. so is it and can i just yeah i just quickly ask is that essentially you're using the physically you're using the same equipment it's not like you're you've got like oh i suddenly found a heat pump that costs 40 quid as opposed to 5 000 or whatever you're using the same stuff it's just that the system is so much more efficient to install the core the the core thing you're you're going to need is a heat pump to replace the boiler uh if you don't have a cylinder hot water cylinder subscription you're going to need another hot water uh a hot water cylinder installed however typically we would uh to get to some kind of whatever efficiency we'd normally swap five six seven eight nine radiators we definitely swap the cylinder and we'd also put a quite big um super super high efficiency cylinder this thing has broken down all the different vagaries between much cheaper cylinders and gone well actually the cheap cylinder is still going to hit the hit the efficiency you don't need to get this super sassy one right so why why are you paying for the extra if you're looking for the uh this efficiency you've got options of efficiency you can choose then this is all you need and all of those things combined including re-piping systems we were re-piping systems way too often because people are often told that uh it's uh it needs to be re-piped we've actually been in analyzed real world not done the calculations and actually you don't need to repipe really ever any of your systems and i honestly don't think and i don't want us to be the only people doing this i'm sure uh there's going to be other bigger companies or different software uh companies out there uh that are going to be shortly following us and good because our number one thing is decarble it's not about a race for us we want others to be involved i think this is the way of doing things now um it is to and we're not trying to take heating engineers out of jobs or anything like that this is to allow them to go and do their best work do the thing that they're they were trained to do um sitting down doing calculate you know a heating engineer spending days doing calculations and orders on the phone is not an efficient way to decarbonize a country you just want them in putting stuff in and um that means their kind of job's better too so um yeah it's it's it's better for everyone all around really it's a more fair deal but then so to get to that just so you might have mentioned this but And your enthusiasm is like, it's incredible.

12:28It's so wonderful. I think they're going to match yours, maybe. Yeah. So I'm just trying to understand the steps that you've gone through. So you've got all this data about houses that you've already converted. So you've put heat pumps in. They've got the hot water tanks. They've got the right radiators. They're staying warm. They're much more efficient than the old gas boiler. I've got a few questions about gas boilers. We'll come back to that in a minute. But you've used that data and you've put that through the AI muncher. I'll tell you exactly what we've taken. So all of our heating engineers, we send out an iPad to.

13:05And the iPad has like a LiDAR technology which scans rooms. So we scan the house and it creates this 3D picture of a house in the computer. and uh i see i'm told you i was as technical as you yeah and uh it we also record what their uh the hardness of the water in the area the the the heat exchangers uh coil size inside their hot water cylinder how much their hot water their their flow rate of their showers all of these parts how many occupants there are um the age of the occupants every little bit of data you put in will help it, give it more information to come out with a more accurate and a more...

13:50Let's put it this way. The less information you give it, the higher tolerance we've got to give it for risk factors. We have to put extra stuff in. The more information we give, the closer you can bring that in. And we guarantee the efficiency anyway. So if you did select 380 % efficiency, which we can come back to if anyone's confused about 380 % efficiency, if we did come out at 375 we would pay to go back and maybe make a radiator a bit bigger or we tune up the flow rate or something like that we have never had to do that we've had actually had this guarantee for three years we've never actually had to do that right um uh and and these systems have been in and running uh we would been doing it in stealth for the last year so our first one went in last november so that's that's now um uh coming up to a year old the first sort of cohort that went through so yeah it's all about going to the home collecting as many data points as possible and the more data points we give it the less it will give you or sell you unnecessarily for your selected efficiency wow that is it i mean it is because it's such a dramatic change in cost you know it's not like if you said well it had to cost 10 grand but we've done all this work and now it's like eight and a half we've saved one and a half i mean that would be impressive yeah it's way more than that i mean that's what yeah that is really kind of shifts the whole needle an enormous amount which because i mean the the thing that's intriguing about it is that in in a similar way to the negative stuff about electric vehicles which i've been very exposed to for far too long and it just washes over me now but there has been a kind of not a kickback but a kind of pushback again oh yeah heat pumps won't it's just the same argument The heat pumps won't work for me.

15:29The technology is not there yet, which is a term that really gets up my nose. Yeah, well, maybe this was the thing we needed because it wasn't there yet for normal people, I wouldn't say. Most people don't have 10, 12 grand sitting there in their bank account. I'm from a very working class, normal background, and I know what it's like. Like, you know, we can't – giving posh people fun toys is not going to decarbonise the country. So we have to – we've got to bring this down to the normal level. And the only way to do that is to beat the existing technology, and that's obviously gas boilers. They're three and a half grand roughly on average to replace.

16:07So now we're below that. Great. And you said – so we're below that upfront cost, and they will say – the heat pump will save you money every single year. so um there's literally no reason to not pick a heat pump now except for maybe the our current waiting time which isn't actually that bad but um i think this is the other part it did because there's there's uh there's less time spent on site installers were having to look for like two week blocks maybe three week blocks which is like oh i can fit you in six months time is that okay right now they're bringing those installs way further forward so this is kind of our next bit we're trying to get on-demand emergency jobs is kind of our next target.

16:45So the actual install process is that much faster then? I mean, that's got to be one of the reasons why it's cheaper. You're installing less stuff. You're not spending an evening designing system. This will automatically order the parts to the door. It kind of got all of that automation folded as well. So everything's like crammed, you know, squeezed down, and it just means they spend less time doing stuff they don't really like doing anyway. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, that is – it is. And also, I mean, the thing you mentioned in your video, you know, that disruption, I mean, that's what makes me anxious now because I've had so many disruptions at home with all the stuff I've put in and now it's like, oh, there's someone coming tomorrow to have a look at the what's it, you know, to go, oh, God.

17:24Yeah. That's a key. But it minimises that then. It's not such a big change in the house. You really – so this is a downside typically, or certainly was a downside is that these heating engineers will come in and they take over your whole house for a week, you know, at least. They're in every room. They're moving around radiators. I mean, you're in every room anyway for a gas boiler because you have to balance the system. But we're not in every room now. We're swapping our radiator. The average radiators to be swapped is one. It's actually 0.8. So it's literally no different. So you're going to be in the boiler, taking out the boiler.

18:02The rest of the work is outside. So, you know, in theory, it could be less than some boiler installations work-wise. Yeah, hence the name, Zero Disrupt. Yeah, but it's worth mentioning, because this is a thing I don't know, and I think we may have discussed this before, but I don't know. It's so long since I had a gas boiler, I don't know how long they last. But what I do know is they do break down and they do go wrong, you know, because I've lived in cold houses where that's happened. So I haven't got a clue what the average life expectancy of a gas boiler is. It's about 12 years. They can last longer if they're looked after and installed well.

18:43That's seldom the case. So the average lifespan is 12 years. The average lifespan of a heat pump, a heat pump's actually simpler than a gas boiler. It's 20 years for a heat pump. Right. So it's literally just better in every way. And it does get to the point where you're trying to sell something, It just sounds like you're on the hard sell, but really it is genuinely a better offer. Yes. I mean, all the people I know who've got them said that that was their biggest first experience was how much less they were paying when they used to pay for gas and how much they pay for electricity now. I mean, it is less.

19:19It was very nice. So this is the kind of important thing that people probably need to understand if they're looking to buy one is it's all about the efficiency. so unless we hit 335 percent efficiency uh and the reason we get over 100 efficiency for anyone that might be confused is that we're not creating heat we're actually just moving heat from outside to inside the house we're moving heat uh using refrigeration technology exactly the same as your fridge in your house um uh so we move the heat from outside to inside one unit of energy if we can make that create 3.35 units of heat that is gas that's parity with a gas boiler at 85 percent efficient an 85 percent efficient boiler which is that's a modern boiler over the year is around 85 percent efficient right they sell them at 92 percent efficient etc that's one point in time no gas boilers are 92 percent efficient they're they're actually 83 to 85 percent efficient when you measure it across the year and do hot water so um if we can get up to 335 great we've got gas parity and that's on the price cap if you go and uh also uh look at the many tariffs available you'll be saving hundreds hundreds a year you'll save hundreds of pounds a year at 335 very easy to achieve with a heat pump because that's literally what it does it multiplies the heat the energy so uh that's our minimum option on our front end you can select 340 is our minimum actually and then there's tariffs you can choose and you can select anywhere up to for 450 sometimes percent and you can choose how much you want to save a year doesn't really make too much sense to go up high because the the amount of equipment extra you have to get installed for the extra high efficiency right doesn't really return in a sensible amount of time but the options are there anyway this is about clarity and so homeowners can really like see what the value is um and we have like a a web uh web page we can go in and have a look at what we estimate the costs might be um yeah this is this is the new paradigm it's actually getting to what homeowners value you're not selling flow temperatures no one cares about that and we're not talking about co2 because unfortunately no one's paying to save that they want a faster car which happens to be electric or they want a nicer heating system which happens to be weather compensated you know we're selling or or to save on fuel um and you know so we're really like getting to the actual point here it does have a market case um and boilers don't i would argue

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22:27Here's a critically important question, because I think this applies to both the automotive industry and the heating industry is, I mean, gas boilers will have improved a huge amount since I was a kid, but have they reached a sort of plateau of efficiency and of longevity, you know, which is the same as you could say with a combustion engine. It's kind of amazing technology. It's been a huge amount of improvement since the Ford Model T, but now it's kind of stuck there. Whereas electric cars, the changes we're seeing in electric cars, in batteries, extraordinary, just freakish. A hundred percent.

23:02So there's 1.3 million boilers sold last year. And they've got so many components in now to get them to these super high efficiencies, which actually only work out 85 % efficient. But it's more and more stuff has gone in and more stuff to go. This is why they don't actually last that long, because they've got so many refinements, their little bits don't break. and and so um but we we only sold uh um 60 000 heat pumps last year in the uk right so um uh with it with with less parts in them so with the economies of scale if you can imagine swapping one for the other a boiler would cost an absolute fortune if it was down at 60 that the only reason it's so cheap is because it's about mass per g if you literally swap those two numbers around it would be even more of a convincing case.

23:54So this is just part of what a transition looks like, I think. It's hard for people to realise how much of a big time and a big change we're in, because when you're in it, it seems like small changes. We are undergoing something huge, and it should be exciting and embracing it. Unfortunately, it's a little bit political as well. So I don't know if people enjoy that or not. I don't enjoy it personally. No, nor me. No, God. It gives a platform there, right? Yeah. But I did think of you when I saw this. So there's a couple of mates of ours who've got quite a big house and they've got, I think, two heat pumps in the garden.

24:31And they look like what I think heat pumps are. It's a box with a round grill in the front and you can see a fan going around inside. 80s grey, yeah. Yeah, and it's grey, exactly. And then we went to this, we did an episode about it, this very large stately home, effectively, You know, a mid-sized, posh, really old house, like 15th century, amazing old place, beautiful. And it's completely solar and heat pumps and all that stuff. But the heat pumps they had, I'd never seen before. These were kind of big, dark boxes. And I stood right next to it, behind a hedge, and there was a thrush singing in the hedge.

25:06And I was going, I can't hear them. Are they on? Are you sure they're on? Yeah, they're on. Yeah, yeah. I mean, unbelievable. I mean, they had a lot of them. They had about 16 of them because they're heating this massive product. Wow. That was a really big installation. I'm glad you've raised that. This is probably an important point for people to realise how different the modern ones are. Right. They are now so quiet. I mean, they can get loud. And when they're loud, they're louder. They can get louder when it's like minus two outside. That's going to be their max loudness. It's still like 50 decibels.

25:40It's not, you would have to walk up to it and, you know, feel the air, et cetera. When it's not minus two, when it's zero degrees, three degrees, you literally do not know it's on. So actually, if you average the sound over the year, it's way, way, way, way quieter than a gas boiler. Right. Because a gas boiler has a tiny flute. It's trying to flow through. It's just playing the flute the whole time, you know. So, yeah, the modern ones, they look better and they sound better. and it's just going to continue evolving. I honestly don't think the technology will improve efficiency much further. I think we're at the max there.

26:19Reficientation technology has actually been around for years. What will happen, I believe, though, this gap, this 3.35 times gap between the electricity cost, or it's four times gap between electricity and gas, the government know that in order to make this, to electrify homes in the UK, they're going to need to shrink that uh and and they're actively working on it and talking about ways they're going to do it so that that's that's basically going to be done it's just how it's not just the uk all countries are doing this yeah uh we have the biggest gap actually so we've got the furthest to go but even the countries and smaller gaps are still working on you know equalizing um uh gas gas and electricity costs um and so when you do do that these things are going going to boil it boilers will be only the ultra wealthy will be able to afford to push carbon dioxide into the air through their gas boiler it's you won't be able to afford to run it literally i mean even if they kept gas gas stable and didn't like inflate it so you're not paying more than you should do why would you pay two two grand a year when you could be spending 500 pound a year on your heating we're using heat from outside we're not buying it from russia yeah and that's what We're buying it from Russia.

27:33We're getting rid of 15 % of it and flushing it down the drain because our gas boilers aren't that efficient. And then we've got our final price. When the sun is outside heating up the atmosphere and we can literally just capture that and put it in there, it's mad to think that we've made this complicated process. I mean, that was one thing you mentioned, which I really recognised it when you had an internal rant about it, is how the government subsidises oil and gas, which no one ever talks about. You know, they're always going about, oh, your wind turbines, they get subsidies and all that stuff.

28:08And you go, yeah, they get 40p to every 10 grand. That is a big, I can't, I wish social media didn't exist. This has really created a thing inside of me. But if it was any good, the government wouldn't be paying for it. Yeah. Great. So we get 500 million for heat pumps a year. That's really, really helpful. that's going to clean the air that you breathe, by the way. It's probably going to save X in NHS, health, whatever. It does seem to be missed that fossil fuels get$17.5 billion every single year to help with exploration, et cetera, tax breaks, blah, blah, blah. If they didn't get that, your gas bill would be – it just wouldn't be feasible for anyone, really.

28:59and so we're already on a non-level playing field now let's also factor in the amount of time that they've had that for so we've been we've been subsidizing fossil fuels for say a hundred years and so we've built up this industry that we span around you know we've got hyper efficient no wonder heat boilers are so quick and cheap to put in the minute we're trying to spin up a new uh industry it's a new heat pumps have been around on time but at this scale it's new yeah um uh with a fraction of the investment um uh there's there's a complaint that it's changed and this is really just people resenting change that's all it is it's actually not about anything practical this is an emotional psychological problem with someone saying i don't want to be told what to do you don't have to be told what to do but if you're sensible you'll say i can spend a lot of money on a thing or i could cheat you know not spend a lot of money on a thing and it should just be that that dictates it But if you're going to do it, make sure you do it fairly and balanced.

29:55Don't say, I don't like this subsidy, but I'm OK to pay this subsidy. Yeah, to pay this huge one. You know, that's not a fair comparison. And it's a blinkered view. Yeah. And it was also, I think, critically important that, you know, the two things that are happening at the moment, one is will we start drilling for more oil and gas in the North Sea, which will have enormous government subsidies? And then the kind of simplistic argument is, well, that will reduce our domestic gas bill. No, it won't. They'll sell it on the open market. They're not going to give it to people in England because they want to be nice.

30:30They'll flog it. Won't make any difference to the gas price whatsoever. Absolutely not. Yeah, I mean, it's the same. And that's the thing. I think that was the one change I think we've seen, which I'm sure you're aware of as well. But we've really seen in the last couple of years is I think most people understand that the price of electricity went up and the price of gas went up. But the reason the price of electricity went up was because of gas. It wasn't because of windmills. You know, that was a really important. Bonkers, isn't it? What people want. They'll believe what they want to believe.

31:06And renewables do bring down the cost of electricity. So it only means people are making more money. and people, they don't want to believe it because they can't see it. And they can't see it because they're hidden from it because the gas sets the price. Heat pumps are a hack around that. Because we get the energy at the other end, your home can benefit from that free energy, that multiplication effect. So, you know, we're on a, I think we're on a, this boulder's now moving. It's starting to freely roll. You did feel it, right. It's building. Yeah. And I think like all of these things, the more heat pumps make sense the more solar panels make sense the more batteries make sense the more heat pumps make sense you've got this sort of you know uh um i i think this kind of things it's done it's that what speed can we push this thing forward now i mean the other aspect that will directly relate to this is the the is the the finally because it's taken years the emergence of actual vehicle to home and vehicle to grid technology that is becoming cheaper and more usable and blah blah blah you know the new nissan leaf is built specifically to for its battery to be used in the home that has got to be the nail in the coffin i think you say these things to people and they're like oh that's a cool concept i think when they start living it and then they start doing it that's when i think the real big shift will be like right we just need to move in we'll be all in then you're right that's going to be the big uh a big bit Yeah, especially being able to leave it parked at home and the feel-good factor of, like, I've just absorbed a load of free energy or helped the grid or whatever, whether you believe in climate change or not, that's indeniable.

32:48Yeah, yeah. No, it is very exciting, and I think it's a harder sell. I mean, I don't want to constantly do comparisons between electric vehicles and heat pumps, but I think it is a harder sell, and I think you've done an incredible job you know because there is a sort of i don't know the psychology of cars the more i've learned about it the more confused i am and the less i understand about it because it's like oh yeah oh hang on oh that's that car's beautiful i go is it oh yeah all right i'm sure it is i don't you know and it's such such an emotional thing isn't it that i'll like the reno 5 as soon as i saw the reno 5 i go oh that's great now then i thought why do i think that's great and not that one over there which is you know but then with heat pumps it's you know it's not you your car can be sexy i suppose some people yeah yeah yeah i mean i don't you can enjoy a car yeah how much do you enjoy your heating and i that i mean it is more comfortable so like but yeah you're trying to help you just fog in the dead halls when you try and tell people yeah because i mean i think i think if you've lived in a house that's really cold you really appreciate heating yeah but you could fix that with with the gas boiler in theory i'm pretty sure what you're saying there i would just like to add as well like this isn't just this isn't me it's our company which is yes cover more people than me but more importantly it's the enthusiasm and the the uh the the love for this industry that our heat geeks up and down the country we've got two thousand going in and they're like putting all all the research they do in the evening behind new values in houses and all this thing and sharing that with the customer and advising them on stuff that's not even to do with them they're just like they love their job so much right they are true eco warriors um uh that's really like what we're trading on in one way is their enthusiasm and they'll be there till the uh um till the last night and bolt is in in the perfect place and that's the part it's a community thing really heat geek is actually a community of super nerds it's heat geek we spend ridiculous time amount of time on social media talking about the nth degree of um uh the hvac uh heating ventilation in your house and how to really find because it's a fascinating topic and it's like endless how much detail you can go into uh and and so that's really what heat geek is actually all about and so this this whole thing that we've made isn't replacing those people this is bolstering them up with an ai uh attachment we're you know making sort of cyborgs type thing um uh uh and i i just want to like i i certainly want this this mentality to stay in our company and i'm sure it will for as long as i'm alive at least is that we never ever want to replace humans we are trying to uh um we're trying to we're trying to lift these up on a pedestal that they should be on uh which is with this why these these guys aren't they're independent engineers we're not employing they deserve to go and you know run their business the way they want their business.

35:53We're passionate about that. This whole transition should not be forgetting the little guy. This should be a great opportunity for small businesses to thrive and grow. It shouldn't be snatched by, you know. And that's no discredit to stuff that Octopus are doing, etc. We wouldn't be here without Octopus. They're incredible. Thank you very much. We're riding the bow wave. But I do, I am passionate about this specific part of making sure small family businesses can survive and thrive. Yeah, exactly. Not just survive, but literally grow. There's a lot of opportunity here and a lot of opportunity for people that may lose their jobs on the AI wave.

36:37Yes. I mean, to go back to the AI part of it, I'd never, as soon as I saw you explain that, I went, oh, my God, of course. I'd never, because, I mean, what gets, again, what gets the attention and gets everybody is the is the ai video you know the kind of fake videos and then and then you know or or people writing essays with you or you know all that stuff and it's kind of i understand why that happens but actually what clearly is happening it's in medical uh you know development of medicines understanding you know really complex biological problems and now this i've never heard of this before but the fact that you can feed all that data in which, you know, human beings, there's no question, there's very skilled human beings would be able to do what the AI has done with that data, but it might have taken them quite a long time.

37:29It would take about a year to do a house probably, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So you're doing something that is very labour intensive, very time consuming in much less time, which means that, because I mean, I think one of the sides of which I'm sure you're aware of, but one of the sides of the fantastic AI revolution is there's a lot of computers using a lot of electricity to do that. And that's something we're beginning to deal with now. So whether you believe in climate change or not, I'm mental that I'd have to say that in 2025. Yes, I know. It doesn't actually matter because if we're going to be part of AI as a country, AI is the next wave, we need more renewables into the grid, which you need more heat pumps installed because we can't be using that gas for our gas boilers we need to use that gas to generate more electricity yeah yeah so it's all the it's got to the point where there's no route left back for for those sort of denial denialists uh it is only gonna economically help us to feed more renewable energy into the grid or use renewables to take less from the grid um so so you're you're right uh that that is a that that is another challenge but definitely i can't i've got enough i'm trying to sell a heat pump so i've already got something big enough on my hands no exactly no you don't you don't have to deal with the ai energy consumption that's not your it's not your but i mean i think is what i'm saying yeah i mean i think what i'm saying what i'm saying is if you're going to use all that electricity to run all those computers let's do something really genuinely useful with that great that's that incredible technology you know which i think you're you're clearly doing and i mean no it's not just that not just you obviously there's other ways of doing it but i'm less thrilled when i see an amazing you know yet another completely manufactured video of you know a lion turning into a pile of dust i don't even care you know whatever you do what you want i don't know but you know that is that is chundering through you know gigawatts of power to do that it's kind of yeah that's a bit questionable um 100 % can you get in your in your video that you where you explain this yeah can you kind of just roughly take me through what how the price can be you were talking about it can be down as low as a pound to install it or how that system works but what is what are the components of that how does that come about well specifically on the price um we are accessing the government grant of seven and a half thousand pounds so for any quotes that do come through that are just literally free they're actually costing seven and a half grand and the government applying for your entire entire installation so uh although we've gone from sort of 10 grand down to to three grand uh and we've we've got old customers come back who've had 19 grand installs from last year they come back to us and they're now down at four like it's just everyone's getting cheaper quotes now right um although it's come down, the bit you pay has come down dramatically, like 70%.

40:30On the actual big scale of things, it's come down, say, 50 % in the price or whatever. It's just the bus grant has cut off the bottom half, and rightly so. Sorry, just explain what the bus grant is. So the bus grant is something homeowners don't have to try and access. if you use an MCS heat pump installer as part of your installation, if you have a gas boiler already, you will receive a seven and a half grand grant or the installer will receive a seven and a half grand grant in order to take that boiler out and put a heat pump in. If you've already got a heat pump already, you can't access the grant.

41:11So it's basically seven and a half grand off a home upgrade, which could improve your EPC, could improve your house value, all that kind of stuff, obviously, to try and drive this and grow this industry. And this industry is on a massive growth trend. So that's what it is. It's written in, we have it till 2029. I don't know who's going to come in after that. And so I don't know how long it's going to be around. So we're encouraging you to make the most of it. Yeah, yeah. Basically, I'm not trying to drive a sale. you know but um no no but i mean then so that then you so it would be possible as a homeowner then so you've got a gas boiler that's about the end of life that i mean that seems to be one of the big driving is when the people i've spoken to our gas boiler was kept conking out we had to guide the guy a guy was coming out all the time to fix it and it was so we decided to put in a heat pump that's i've heard that story many times but at that point then could it could it be done for less than three grand for the homeowner is that is that what you're saying yeah absolutely yeah um uh it depends on what you choose so the the components are um you can have it just outside your your boiler flue uh and if you've got a flower bed there well sorry we're gonna have to have a heat pump and a flower bed but if you would like to move it around the side of the house that's obviously going to cost more we've got to run more pipe right you've got to run yeah these are the so so the base install could be as little as zero uh or three grand or whatever and then you're paying for the extras and if you want to pay for extra efficiency then we're going to swap more radiators and the quote builds up um so so this whole thing was built around some phrases that we've internally got which are seekers people who love technology and they want to go and uh they've already got an ev on and they're researching into heat pumps and they're telling you what flow temperature they want and then switches and what you're talking about is switches a switcher is someone just needs heat and so when uh our heat geeks go out to potentially replace their boiler these heat geeks aren't just installing uh so they might install a gas boiler as well yeah yeah yeah not through us but uh we help the heat pump part they're out repairing the boiler oh that boiler's probably on the blink now you need heat you don't need a new boiler you need heat and so by creating this offer we've got an expensive heat which is your gas boiler which we can do for you know four grand or we've got this two grand option or whatever it is here right and here's all your extras and this is what i have to say exactly how much money you should save over the following years should the tariffs stay the same.