Boiler Upgrade Scheme

£5,000 - Biomass boilers
£7,500 - Air source heat pumps

The Boiler Upgrade Scheme is the government grant for low carbon heating which replaced the RHI (Renewable Heat Incentive). The scheme launched in April 2022 and pays an upfront grant as opposed to a payment spread over 7 years.
This will make the scheme more accessible than the RHI.

The voucher is paid to the installer - giving an added incentive for doing a good job because they plan to put the voucher on hold if there's a problem.

The scheme aims to be supporting nearly three times the number of installations compared to the RHI. So we go from something like 11,000-12,0000 installations a year to 30,000. Currently the scheme is delivering around half of the planned installations, but perhaps that is to be expected in its first year

Biomass will be concentrated on existing houses in rural areas off the gas grid.

Biomass is not supported if any one of the following apply:

Selfbuild homes DO however qualify for a grant for a heat pump.

This means a lot less homes will be eligible for grant support for biomass. In practice these types of homes are already the typical homes that our Firepower network of installers install into.


It's first come first served
The vouchers are on a first-come-first-served basis with a budget set each quarter.
Once that budget is reached they stop issuing vouchers.
Once they reopen the window they then have to consider the applications already submitted. 


Some insulation upgrades are required first
The EPC report for the house has to either not recommend loft or cavity wall insulation
OR
The owner commits to carrying out those measures.
OR
There's a good reason why that's not possible - for example a property's listed status stops that happening.

This is a good move because insulation upgrades reduce overall demand - which is a year-on-year saving for the homeowner, and of course fuel and electricity production do still have an environmental impact so anything that can be done to reduce that consumption is a good thing. 

Air source heat pumps installations are set to increase
Air source heat pumps are going to make up the majority of supported installations and can be installed at any property that meets the insulation criteria (and is not a new-build, but can be a self-build).

Installer and product be MCS
The installer and appliance must be MCS registered (or equivalent). This is a good move in our opinion - the previous scheme, the Green Homes Grant, had gone down the route of using Trustmark which seemed curious to us seeing as MCS is already a tried and well-tested scheme - so we are pleased to see them at the centre of the scheme again. 

Being MCS registered is not just a tickbox exercise - it's the best going way of ensuring the quality of the installation design and the installation itself, as well as the quality of the product.  

Update: The Klover Smart 80 and Smart 120 boilers have currently been removed from the grant eligibility list whilst they are reviewed. For the moment they are not eligible for the BUS grant, but we hope that this situation will shortly be clarified.