Graham Hendra: Heat Pump Man

The world of heat pump technology is in the middle of a transition here in the UK. In many countries it is a mature and widely understood technology, installed in millions of homes and treated as routine engineering. The British, as ever, have added their own peculiar spin to what is essentially a simple transfer of energy. Clever engineering, certainly, but still fundamentally simple.

You can see the transition playing out in real time across Reddit threads, Facebook groups and the more excitable corners of LinkedIn. The conversations are febrile. Installers arguing about margins, system design and the rights and wrongs of particular approaches. Long debates about who is doing a good job, who is shouting the loudest and whether anyone in the trade is ever going to get an easier life out of this technology.

Underneath all of the noise sits a much simpler question that keeps resurfacing. How do we make heat pumps easier to install and customers happier living with them?

Graham Hendra has spent a long time thinking about that problem. He is not a man who enjoys unnecessary complication. By his own admission he would rather work three days a week than six, and he would much prefer technology that assists our lives rather than technology that complicates them. His frustration with the sector is that something as straightforward as a heat pump has gradually acquired the reputation of a mysterious craft, discussed as if it requires secret knowledge rather than good engineering and clear thinking.

That irritation has pushed him into action. He has written three books explaining how heat pumps work and how they should be controlled. He has spent years arguing for simpler approaches to system design and for control strategies that remove friction rather than introduce more of it. His view is that the industry does itself no favours by turning heat pumps into a school of dark arts. The technology works best when people understand it.

Those ideas have begun to attract attention well beyond the usual industry circles. One of the largest and most ambitious appliance manufacturers in the world, Haier, has taken notice and decided that Hendra’s thinking about controls and system behaviour is worth listening to.

We were invited to sit down with Graham to talk about the current state of the heat pump sector, the myths that continue to circulate around it and the changes that could make life easier for installers and homeowners alike. Grab a biscuit, pull up a chair and watch the video.