Skip to main content
Mark Hall

Mark Hall

Heating engineer and heat pump installer at SMH Gas Specialist in Banbury, Oxfordshire, and guest on UK trade podcasts about installer competency and the gas-to-heat-pump transition.

Sep 22, 2026

7:01
he? Yeah, end of September.
7:02
Yeah, I officially took over the business a couple of years ago anyway, didn't I, on paper, although in later years we've run it together.
7:09
So, yeah, I've got this unusual situation where I've always lived away in Hampshire and the business is up in Oxfordshire.
7:17
So now that dad's going to retire, we haven't got that covenant or that big team.
7:20
I can't manage breakdowns on my own.
7:23
So we or I had to think of a plan for the future, didn't we? Yeah.
7:28
And one is to keep our customers with the level of service they're used to.

11 MINS LATER

18:22
But, you know, heat pumps, why aren't they going in every brand new house?
MarsHOST
3:11
the evenings and, and just a stupid amount of maths.
3:14
Because heat pumps are fussy, getting the maths right is important.
3:18
Um, there's a lot of software now that can help you with that, but it all starts from the heat loss report.
3:22
But the training is a difficult one because let's say our goal was to produce 200,000 really good heat pump engineers, um, so that every job they did, they produced a really good, uh, heat, a heating system and all the, the customers were really happy.
3:41
What would we need to do from a training perspective to do that? It's a challenge [chuckles] because you've gotta say to these guys, "Let's take a month off and do-- go to college for four weeks in a row." Because in reality, that's what you need.
3:57
It's like, you know, some people that need a degree to do a job.
4:01
I'm not saying you need a degree to do a heat loss and fit a heating system.

16 MINS LATER

MarsHOST
19:45
I've never asked this question before, but the, this two to three-day training course that, that you, that you said that installers have to pass, which is a bit of a tick box, uh, exercise, what exactly does that course cover?

We value your privacy

We use cookies to understand how you use our platform and to improve your experience. Click “Accept All” to consent, or “Decline non-essential” to opt out of non-essential cookies. Read our Privacy Policy.