How a postcode becomes a verdict, and what happens next.

Most heat pump checkers ask thirty or forty questions about your home before they get to an answer. They start from nothing, so they have to.

There's a better starting point. Most homes in England and Wales have an Energy Performance Certificate on a public government register. The register holds about 28 million records, and each certificate covers wall construction, insulation, glazing, current heating system, floor area, and the energy rating. That's most of what a heat pump suitability check needs.

So we start there. We pull your home's EPC record live each time you run a check, and we only ask the things the register can't tell us. Five questions. The check takes about two minutes.

About one home in five doesn't have an EPC yet. Usually that's a newer build, or a property that hasn't been sold or rented in a while. If yours is one of them, we ask the same questions in a longer form. The principle is the same: we never ask you something that's already on file.

You enter a postcode. We show you the addresses on that postcode, you pick yours, and we silently fetch your home's EPC record from the government API. That takes a few seconds, and asks you nothing.

What we get back is structured, not free text. Six fields the assessor filled in for your address:

Wall construction

Solid, cavity, or timber-framed

Insulation

Loft, walls, and floors — what's been added

Glazing

Single, double, or triple

Heating system

Boiler type, fuel, and approximate age

Floor area

In square metres

Energy rating

A (best) through G (worst)

Your last assessor wrote all of this down. The register is open data; you can search yours yourself at gov.uk.

These six fields answer a lot of the suitability question on their own. A solid-wall Victorian terrace with single glazing is a different case from a 1990s detached on cavity walls, and the EPC tells us which you have.

There are five things the EPC register can't answer about your home. We ask you each of them.

1. 01

   Whether you own the property.

   The £7,500 BUS grant requires owner-occupiers; tenants aren't eligible.

2. 02

   Whether there is outdoor space for a unit.

   An air-source heat pump needs roughly a square metre of clear wall or garden space.

3. 03

   What you currently heat with.

   Oil, LPG, and electric heating change the financial case more than gas does.

4. 04

   Whether you have a hot water cylinder, or a combi boiler.

   Combi homes need a new cylinder fitted, which is a meaningful extra cost.

5. 05

   Whether the property is listed or in a conservation area.

   Planning restrictions can rule out an external unit on the front of the house.

That's it. We don't ask about your daily routine or how warm you like the kitchen. The maths doesn't need that.

EPCs can be ten years old. People upgrade their homes between assessments. You may have replaced the boiler, added cavity wall insulation, swapped the radiators, fitted secondary glazing, or changed nothing at all. The register won't know.

So before we calculate anything, we show you every fact we've inferred about your home, set out plainly, and let you correct any of them. If your loft was uninsulated on the EPC and you've since insulated it, you say so. If the heating system listed is wrong, you fix it. The verdict only ever uses the version of the data you've confirmed.

This step is short. Most homeowners change one or two things and move on, and the EPC was right for the rest. Some realise their home has changed enough since the last assessment that it warrants a fresh one. That's a useful outcome on its own.

At the end of the check you get a single page made for your address. We call it your HeatPass.

The page tells you four things:

• The verdict for your address. Ready for a heat pump now, ready with specific work first, or not ready yet.
• The estimated install cost once the £7,500 BUS grant has come off, given as a range rather than a single number, because the spread between detached, semi, and terraced is real.
• The estimated annual saving on running costs against your current heating, calculated on a current UK tariff rather than a manufacturer lab figure.
• What (if anything) would need to happen before a heat pump made sense, and roughly what each of those steps would cost.

The page isn't static. You switch between a handful of named scenarios and pick a different electricity tariff, and the numbers update live as you do. There's a working preview on the landing page if you want to try the controls against a sample home first.

You come back to your HeatPass via a private link we send to your email. The data and the verdict are yours. If you want to print it or share it with a partner, the page exports to PDF.

Every check resolves into one of three answers. We use plain words because the answer matters more than the marketing.

We chose 'Not Yet' rather than 'Fail' on purpose. A bad fit today is often a good fit in two or three years, once insulation, glazing, or radiator work is done. The Improvement Plan exists for that reason. Nobody is sent to an installer for a home that isn't ready.

The next step depends on which of the three answers you got.

If you've come from another quote site, you may be used to filling in your details and getting calls from three or four installers within the hour. That isn't how this works. We hold your details until you've asked for the introduction, and only one installer ever hears from us. The full picture of what we do with your details is on trust and privacy.