Our Mission:
To make it easy for UK households to decarbonise.
How?
Taking the world’s most common air-con units and adapting for quick installation.
Bringing low cost heating to our homes
We’re looking for product testers!
A-A or A-W, with guarantee. The main units are tried and true, the prototype is our installation system. Cost depends on your circumstances, but will be cheaper than any competitors you can get a quote from.
If you live in or around Cambridge and want a heat pump, contact us below to have our prototype installed.
Very limited availability.
What is a heat pump?
They are similar to air conditioning, but can also heat your home at lower running costs than electric heaters.
By moving heat instead of trying to create it, heat pumps are more than 100% efficient – normally 300-400% !
An air source heat pump pulls heat from the outside, and moves it into your home, or vice versa for those unbearable heat waves.
A common myth is that they don’t work below freezing- this is false, but their efficiency does drop a little (though still not below 100%)
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Heat pumps are 300-400% efficient depending on variables like outdoor temperature and heating/cooling mode.
Our model uses 1KW of power to produce 3.6KW of heat.
We are working on a detailed efficiency graph to provide you with exact figures.
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When a gas gets quickly compressed (squeezed), it heats up considerably, before becoming a hot liquid.
So this hot liquid is produced outside your home, it’s then pumped into the indoor unit where the heat is blown into your home.
Now the cool liquid is pumped back outside through an expansion valve. This causes it to evaporate and dramatically loose heat.
Now the cold gas is sent to absorb heat from outside, where it becomes a warm gas (~0-20 deg.C.)
Finally the process repeats. For cooling, it is run in reverse
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An A-A system serves a single room, whereas an A-W system either replaces or works with your boiler.
An A-W system has more installation requirements and can’t be put just anywhere unlike an A-A. Additionally, an A-W system can’t provide instant heating or cooling, but are designed to stay on for most of the day. If you currently have an electric boiler, A-W’s are in instant upgrade in terms of running costs, but if you have a gas boiler it might not necessarily be cheaper to run.
Why should I get a heat pump?
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If you have an electric Boiler, a heat pump is instantly 1/3rd the cost to run, and we’d recommend our boiler replacement.
In other circumstances it can be harder to gauge the cost benefit as it depends on your oil/gas prices against your electric prices.
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Heat pumps are great because they can both heat and air condition efficiently.
Our boiler replacement may not be able to air condition without further setup.
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Which one is right for you?
Naturally it depends on your needs and circumstances, with some people opting for both.
A boiler replacement is plumbed in parallel with your boiler, so each can work independently if desired. Heats your whole home using existing infrastructure, at 300-400% efficiency.
An air-to-air unit can be installed anywhere (even in a shed), but serves only a single room. Great for open plan homes or where most of your time is spent in a certain room, as you’re not using energy to heat/cool any other areas of your home. Good for apartments.
You’ll feel the effects of an A-A unit within 10 minutes, but a boiler replacement takes longer to actually raise the temperature of your home - like your current boiler.
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A heat pump is an easy way to reduce your carbon footprint, as it replaces your current fossil fuel burning heating system for an extremely efficient electric system.
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Our current systems use r32, a refrigerant with a substantially lower global warming index compared to other commonly used alternatives.
Additionally you’ve probably heard about AC being bad for the environment. This is at least partly correct as they put more heat into the environment than they remove from your home.
However… this is only true for cooling mode. A heat pump is one of if not the most environmentally friendly way to heat your home, especially if you connect it to solar.
Why is our heat pump cheaper?
We pre-assemble the heat pump in our factory, which greatly reduces installation cost, time, and removes the necessity for the installer to have any qualifications for refrigerants, electrics, or plumbing.
Please note that a plumbing qualification is required to install our boiler replacement.
Our products
All our products are currently a work in progress and subject to change.
Air-to-air heat pump
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Target price range: 0.9-3k, incl. install cost
We aim to start selling these before spring 2026 (ready to cool your house in the summer)
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Heats & cools one space
quick install
250%-400% efficiency
you turn on and off as needed
takes less than 10 min for a noticeable change in room temp
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Spend most of your time at home in one room?
Often turn on your boiler only to leave the house before you feel any difference?
Have an electric boiler?
Desperate for some cool in the summer?
Trying to decarbonize?
If you said yes to 2 or more of those, you would definitely benefit from our A-A heat pump.
Can you can fix your own car and build a large Lego set? If yes, we’re confident you could even install it yourself and save 100+.
Our EZ install technology substantially reduces install time, at the cost of boring a larger hole through your wall (don’t worry, we care about airtightness).
We aim to do this by assembling the units further in a factory, which also results in any keen DIYer being able to install their own heat pump.
Air-to-water heat pump
& boiler replacement
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Target price range: 1.5-5k, incl. install cost
We aim to start selling these before summer 2026 (best time to have work done on your central heating)
The UK government is (at the time of writing) offering a grant to anyone who has an A-W heat pump of a certain standard fitted in their home. Most of our competitors will take most if not all that money in their installation fees, however our main goal (aside from product longevity and function) is to leave you a profit once all is said and done.
We may offer a service to help you claim the grant free with purchase.
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Heats your entire home
uses your existing central heating infrastructure
faster installation than our competitors, but still double that of the A-A system
runs throughout the day
300%-400% efficiency
effectively replaces your boiler
either installed instead of a boiler, or installed in tandem with your existing boiler (why charge you for us to remove your existing boiler when we can just turn it off?)
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Renovating or retrofitting your house?
Have an electric boiler?
Have an old & inefficient boiler?
Want to ease your heating bills?
Trying to decarbonize?
Willing to go to a bit of bother for a government grant?
About us
We are an engineering firm working on reducing the installation cost of air-to-air heat pumps for domestic installations.
We are doing this with small design changes resulting in far less time needed on site.
Our mission is to make heart pumps accessible across the whole of the UK including to private renters.
We hope to also provide air-to-water heat pumps on a similar basis in the future.
Contact us.
admin@cambridgeopenengineering.com