In the interest of not burying the lede, if you need to install a boiler in the next few weeks, months or years, you can do so and enjoy the benefits of efficient, low-cost heat for the lifetime of the boiler.
This is true whether your boiler is on its last legs, whether it has a couple of good years left in it or if it has been freshly installed. With the prospects of a boiler ban by 2035 thoroughly dismissed, there is no need to rip out your boiler.
However, this invites a more interesting question; why do we and other boiler experts get asked so often about a boiler ban that does not exist? What has caused this confusion?
To unpick this, here are some of the reasons where the confusion might have emerged, and what you need to know about the future of your heating system for the next decade at least.
There Might Be A Boiler Ban For New Builds
There was never a requirement to rip out a healthy boiler, with even the most restrictive proposals only banning the purchase of new boilers by 2035.
However, the last vestiges of the proposal might be seen in the Future Homes Standard, set to be finalised by the end of 2025 and come into force by 2027.
This current proposal would remove gas linkages from new homes and have such restrictive carbon emissions requirements that it would effectively rule out the use of all but the most efficient boilers. Instead, the expectation would be that solar heating and heat pumps would be used instead.
Heat pumps are much easier to install in new builds, which reduces some of the costs involved with retrofit installations that the boiler upgrade scheme aims to offset. In general, there has been a shift from bans to clean heat incentives.
This would only affect new builds, however, and even still may change between now and the end of the year.
Earlier Proposals Assumed Hydrogen Would Be Viable
The original vestiges of the proposed phase-out of gas boilers came with the Green Industrial Revolution documents in 2020, five years and four Prime Ministers ago.
This proposal would have started to gradually phase out gas boilers by 2025, but it was delayed until 2035 and later dropped entirely.
However, this radical proposal did not take into account a global health crisis that would bring the world to a standstill, but it also assumed that the bulk of the transition would be undertaken by switching to hydrogen boilers and heat pumps.
Unlike heat pumps, which require entirely new heating systems to be installed, hydrogen boilers
would operate using the same principles as gas boilers. The only difference is that the fuel source to burn would be hydrogen gas, which can be low-carbon if produced through electrolysis.
The assumption when the scheme was put into place was that it would be relatively straightforward to create “hydrogen-ready” gas boilers that could be easily converted to run on hydrogen gas, as well as that an affordable, clean source would be readily available.
It turned out that hydrogen gas was somewhat more volatile than natural gas, which complicated and delayed any potential chance of adoption.
