We’re building tools to help ambitious heat pump installers run their business without all the pain, hassle, and manual process that they have to deal with at the moment. We believe the only way to seriously accelerate the roll out of heat pumps, let alone hit 600,000 a year by 2028, is to put the needs of heating engineers and installation businesses front and centre.
Current state of play
It’s currently pretty hard to run and scale a heat pump business. An average installer works long hours but spends a huge amount of time not doing installations. Instead that time is spent dealing with enquiries that don’t convert, doing manual data collection and processing, and compiling a ton of paperwork. This means that installation businesses frequently struggle with low profit margins after all the wasted time is taken into account – and often lack the time and resource to scale their businesses. Meanwhile potential new engineers are put off from transitioning over to heat pumps. Fixing this is vital if the UK is to make meaningful progress towards decarbonising its 26 million homes.
How Spruce helps
This is why we started Spruce. We’re building tools for installers, based on what engineers and business owners tell us are their biggest problems and frustrations. Our Estimate Tool helps handle enquiries – allowing installers to respond in minutes not days, and separating the serious enquiries from the time-wasters. Our Survey & Design Tool then manages the heat loss survey, system design, and report creation. It means everything can be handled in one, seamless system, eliminating the need for manual data transfers and enabling detailed heat loss and design reports to be sent out on the same day as the survey is done. And we have a lot more in the pipeline that we’ll be bringing out later this year...
Using Spruce means installers can use their skills, experience and expertise where it really counts: providing great customer service, doing high-quality installations, and building their business.
The Spruce team
We’re currently a team of 7, split between London and Bristol. The founding team comes with varied and deep experience from a range of different industries: Jo helped scale data platform Beauhurst as COO; Steph started out working life designing heat pump systems in Canada before building retrofit software at Sero; Nick built much of the property data platform LandTech; and Ilya has launched, built, and sold a number of startups. We’re all united by a strong desire to solve installers’ problems and so make a serious impact on the rollout of heat pumps in the UK.