There is a difference between somebody searching “heat pump cost” and somebody searching “am I eligible for the boiler upgrade scheme”. The first is research. The second is a homeowner who has already decided they want one and is checking whether they can have it.
That second search is the warmest a homeowner gets before they pick up the phone. It is also the one almost no installer website answers.
What your site probably says now
Some version of “government grants available — contact us to find out more.” It is a dead end. It asks a hesitant person to ring a stranger before they know whether it is worth it. Most will not. They go back to the results page, and the next installer gets the call.
A contact form asks “will you commit?”. A checker says “here is what you would get” — and then asks. One of those converts far better.
Two rule changes most sites have missed
The Boiler Upgrade Scheme now runs to 2030, and since 28 April 2026 a valid EPC is no longer required to apply. That second one matters commercially more than it sounds: around two in five homes in England and Wales have no EPC at all, and every one of those households was previously being told, by websites and by checkers, to sort their insulation out first.
Those households are eligible now. If your site still repeats the old rule, you are turning away work and looking out of date to the homeowners who already know it changed.
What a checker does with that
GrantCheck takes a postcode, resolves the actual property, asks only the two or three questions that change the answer, and gives an indicative figure — £7,500, or £9,000 where the home is off the gas grid and heated by oil or LPG. Then the enquiry lands in your inbox with the property details and the figure the homeowner saw.
- It knows “no” from “don’t know”. Missing information is never quietly treated as a yes, which is the difference between a warm enquiry and a wasted survey.
- The off-gas uplift needs both conditions. Oil heating alone is not enough — it asks about the gas connection separately, so nobody is shown £9,000 who cannot get it.
- It knows where the border is. England and Wales only; Scotland runs its own scheme. Decided by local authority, not by postcode, because CH, SY and HR postcodes straddle it.
Where Google Ads fits
This is the part most installers skip, and it is where the money is.
You can buy an almost perfect click. Somebody in your town, on their phone, typing the exact phrase. The problem is never the click — it is that the click lands on a homepage that says “grants available, contact us”. They searched a specific question and got a brochure, so they go back to Google and try the next installer. You paid either way.
Point the same advert at a checker and the loop closes: the advert promises an answer, the page gives one in about thirty seconds, and the homeowner hands over a name while they are still looking at a real figure. Same budget, same keyword, completely different economics — and you can see exactly which search produced which enquiry.
That is the whole model: paid traffic into your own tool, not into somebody else’s portal.
The bit nobody explains about buying leads
A lead portal does not find you a customer. It runs the advert, catches the homeowner, and then sells that one homeowner to several installers at once. You are not buying a job — you are buying a place in a race, and you are paying for the privilege of being the third person to ring somebody who has already been rung twice.
Look at what actually happened there. The portal owns the advert, the landing page and the relationship. You own a phone number and a stopwatch. That is why the same enquiry gets cheaper for them and dearer for you every year: they are selling the same thing more times.
Generating your own is the same machine, pointed the other way. You run the advert. It lands on your website. The tool answers the question and takes the name. Nobody else gets a copy, because there is nobody else in the chain.
What it is worth to you
Every enquiry it produces came through your own website, so it is yours alone. It arrives pre-qualified, because the homeowner answered the questions before you spent an evening on the phone. And the figure they saw is one you can stand behind at the survey, which is the part that decides whether the job actually happens.
See how GrantCheck works, or book fifteen minutes and we will run it against a real address on your patch.
The grant air-con installers ignore
£2,500 most homeowners have never heard of.
Read →Insulation funding, without the guesswork
Two things homeowners constantly conflate.
Read →Grant figures on this page were checked against gov.uk on 30 August 2026 and are indicative — the binding figure is the one from the official application. Spotted something out of date? Tell us and we will fix it.