Heat Pumps have a marketing problem

 There's been a lot of enthusiasm for Heat Pumps, but I think they have a marketing problem. Here's why.

What even is a heat pump?

For an ordinary person, the term Heat Pump can mean a few different things, not limited to:

• an air-conditioner (they're just heat pumps, after all);
• a device that blows warm air to heat spaces;
• a device that heats water for
• uses in your house (eg shower);
• radiators that heat spaces.

When I hear people talk about heat pumps, they might use this broad term but refer to just blowing warm air. Or they might be exclusively talking about units that heat water. There are also units that do both. 

This ambiguity causes confusion and slows down adoption for the technology.

Is it new and unreliable?

Most consumers haven't heard the term Heat Pump before. Given that it'll be promoted as an energy efficiency technology, people will worry that it is new technology, and my be ineffective and unreliable. I've heard environmentalists dismiss conservative minded folks, but they make up roughly half the population and probably more than half the consumption of energy, and they can be skeptic about new technologies. Actually, every modern air conditioner is a heat pump (most even heat and cool, but all are heat pumps). So heat pumps - at least the air varieties - have been around at mass scale for a long time.

People already have it

There's often a lot of talk about getting people to replace appliances in their houses. Governments might even offer subsidies for removing gas boilers and putting in a heat pump. In actual fact, people just need to use their existing air-conditioner in winter to heat their house. Most people don't know that the 'reverse cycle' (ie heating) on their air-conditioner is cheaper and more efficient than other forms of heating. Rather than spending lots of money to install new appliances, it'd be better to convince the people who already have a heat pump to use it.

Renaming is one solution

Renaming heat pumps could solve a few of these problems. If we called air heat pumps 'reverse air-conditioning' and gave water heat pumps another name, it might solve a few problems. It ties heat pumps to a familiar, popular technology : air-conditioning (even if we know air-conditioning might lead to more CO₂ emissions, we still love to use it on a hot day!). By using different terms for air and for water, it would clarify when we're talking about heat pumps for air and when for water. And people would automatically know that they've already got a heat pump - it's just using the heating function on their air-conditioning unit!

Conclusion

 Heat pumps are a great technology that can be used to heat air and water in an efficient manner. Calling them heat pumps is problematic for consumers. We risk not making the best use of this technology just because it's not marketed corrected. One solution would be to come up with better consumer-friendly names.