Air Source Heat Pump vs Oil Boiler and LPG: Running Costs and the Switch Across the High Peak, Greater Manchester, Sheffield and Leeds

What a Litre of Oil or LPG Buys You

Suppliers sell oil and LPG by the litre, and your electricity bill counts kWh, so you need both in the same unit before you compare them. Nottingham Energy Partnership publishes a monthly fuel cost table, and its October 2026 edition uses 9.78 kWh for a litre of kerosene and 6.78 kWh for a litre of LPG. Divide your price per litre by that figure and you have the cost of a kWh of fuel.

Heating oil prices this autumn

Three published figures cover this autumn, and they sit about 26p a litre apart:

Derbyshire sits in the East Midlands, so the Nottingham Energy Partnership figure is the nearest published match for a delivery to New Mills, Chinley or the Hope Valley. Order size and the distance from the depot move any quote up or down from there.

LPG prices

We found no free national average for bulk LPG published this autumn. Sutherland Tables sells its figures to subscribers, and the October 2026 Nottingham Energy Partnership table leaves its LPG line blank. Your supplier’s last invoice holds the number that counts, and the break-even table further down turns it into an answer.

If your contract carries a yearly tank or standing charge, add it to the LPG side of the sum. Switch to a heat pump and that charge ends with the deliveries.

The Heat Pump Side of the Sum

Ofgem’s price cap for 1 October to 31 December 2026 sets electricity at 26.32p per kWh, as a Great Britain average for direct debit customers (Ofgem, Energy price cap unit rates and standing charges, checked 13 October 2026). A heat pump turns each kWh of electricity into several kWh of heat. Averaged across a whole heating season, that ratio is the SCOP, the seasonal coefficient of performance.

Divide 26.32p by the SCOP and you get the price of a kWh of heat:

We design our systems to a target SCOP of 3.5 to 4.0 where the house allows it, and write the figure your design reaches into your quote. Radiator size and flow temperature decide where in that range a house lands, which our guide to heat pump costs to install and run works through in detail.

Ofgem’s page also confirms there is no VAT on electricity from 1 October 2026 to 31 March 2027. If 5% VAT returns in April 2027 at today’s cap, the unit price becomes 27.64p and each heat figure above rises by 5%.

For a house on mains gas the comparison runs against 7.97p per kWh of gas, and the break-even sits at a SCOP of 3.3. Oil and LPG homes face a different sum. Oil at this autumn’s prices costs more per kWh than gas, and the LPG figure depends on the price in your contract.

Air Source Heat Pump vs Oil Boiler, Worked Through

Ofgem’s typical medium household uses 9,500 kWh of gas a year (Ofgem, Review of typical domestic consumption values: decision, 27 May 2026). Treat that as the heat the house needs and run it through each fuel. The oil boiler counts as 100% efficient here, which flatters it: Nottingham Energy Partnership assumes 90% for a real one.

At the September average, a heat pump at SCOP 3.5 comes in £205.20 a year below the oil boiler. At the East Midlands October figure the gap grows to £460.86. Put Nottingham Energy Partnership’s 90% boiler efficiency back in and oil heat costs 10.76p and 13.75p per kWh at those two prices, so the gaps widen again.

The table leaves standing charges out, and they make no difference here. An oil house has no gas standing charge to drop, and the electricity standing charge stays the same whether or not a heat pump arrives.

The oil price where the sums cross

Above the figure on your design’s row, the heat pump costs less to run. Below it, oil does.

LPG Boiler Replacement: The Break-Even Price Per Litre

A like-for-like LPG boiler replacement keeps the tank, the contract and the deliveries. A heat pump removes all three, so the running-cost question comes down to the price per litre you pay today. Using 6.78 kWh a litre and an LPG boiler treated as perfect:

If your invoice shows a price above the line for your design, the heat pump makes each kWh of heat for less than your LPG boiler does. Add any yearly tank charge on top, and the gap widens.

Last Year’s Oil Price, and Why the Sums Move

Oil prices can move a long way in a year. Which? notes that September 2026’s average sat nearly 40p a litre above September 2025’s. At last year’s price, oil came in under the bottom row of the oil table, so an oil boiler would have cost less to run than even a SCOP 4.0 heat pump.

A heat pump ties your heating to the price cap, which Ofgem resets every three months. Oil and LPG tie it to the price on the day you order, and in a cheap year oil can still come out ahead. The heat pump side of the sum depends on the design hitting its SCOP winter after winter, so the radiator sizing and the commissioning set your bills for the life of the system.

Your own house moves the numbers too. A solid stone farmhouse outside Peak Forest and a cavity-walled bungalow in Chapel-en-le-Frith can need different amounts of heat. Each line in the tables scales with that figure, which is why the survey replaces Ofgem’s 9,500 kWh with a room-by-room heat loss for your house.

The £9,000 Grant for Oil and LPG Homes

On grants paid between April and June 2026, a quarter of air source heat pump jobs came to more than £15,627 before the grant (DESNZ, Boiler Upgrade Scheme statistics, August 2026 release, published 24 September 2026). An eligible oil or LPG home at that figure would pay £6,627 once the £9,000 comes off.

The same GOV.UK page rules out a grant for a hybrid system, such as a boiler kept alongside the heat pump. For the grant, the old oil or LPG boiler has to go.

Houses off the gas grid, like those in Edale and parts of the Hope Valley, and the oil and LPG houses around Chinley, are the homes that extra £1,500 is for. Grant claims run through MCS certification and ours is in progress, so ask at the survey and you get the current position.

Taking Out the Oil Tank, or Ending the LPG Contract

An oil tank

Nottinghamshire County Council’s guidance says an OFTEC technician, or another technician with the right qualifications, should decommission an oil tank, and warns householders against doing it themselves. BoilerJuice sets out the usual sequence in its tank removal guide:

Time your last delivery with the switch in mind. A tank run low before the heat pump goes in leaves less oil to deal with, and you keep heating until the day the new system takes over.

An LPG tank

On a typical bulk LPG contract, your supplier owns the tank and supplies the gas, and an exclusive contract can run for up to two years (GOV.UK, Advice on switching bulk LPG supplier). Read your contract for the notice period and what it says about collecting the tank. Give notice so the supply runs until our engineers have commissioned the heat pump, and the tank leaves after that.

What Changes in the House

The switch from oil or LPG touches four places: the outside wall, the boiler space, the radiators and the hot water. We put each one in the written design before you agree to anything, so you know what the house looks like afterwards.

Outside

Outside, the unit stands on a ground base or a wall bracket, with a pipe route through the wall and its own electrical supply. The unit in our photos sits on a galvanised bracket against an 18th-century stone wall. Its position decides how it sounds to you and the neighbours, and whether planning rules apply. Inside the National Park, in villages such as Edale and Castleton, the Peak District National Park Authority handles planning, and we check the rules for your house inside the design. Our guide to heat pump noise, siting and planning covers the detail.

The oil tank or LPG tank then leaves the garden, and the space it took comes back to you.

On the day and after

The install takes between one week and one month, depending on the size of the house and the system. At commissioning we set the flow temperatures and prove them against the design numbers, register the warranty in your name and explain the controls. After that, a yearly heat pump service keeps the system running at the temperatures we designed it for.

The fear in old stone houses tends to sound like “I’m just worried we won’t be warm enough with stone walls.” Nesta surveyed more than 2,500 heat pump owners, and 83% of those with one fitted in a home built before 1900 were as satisfied or more satisfied than with their old heating (Nesta, Heat pumps: a user survey, May 2023). Fraser’s 18th-century end terrace, which we designed and fitted, now holds 19°C all year round.

Oil and LPG Homes From Edale to Leeds

Off-gas homes cluster where the gas main stops, and round us that means Edale and parts of the Hope Valley, east of New Mills. Edale has no mains gas at all. In a Hope Valley Climate Action survey of Edale, half the homes that answered heat with oil and 16% with LPG (Hope Valley Climate Action, Edale Energy, read 6 October 2026). Parts of the Hope Valley beyond Edale sit off the main as well, and we survey Castleton, Hope, Bradwell, Bamford and Hathersage from the same base.

Around Chinley, the 2021 Census counted 7.4% of households on oil and 2.9% on bottled gas, against 1.8% and 0.8% across High Peak as a whole. Hayfield runs the other way: 81.3% of its households heat with mains gas alone and 1.3% with oil. Those oil homes get the same survey as anywhere else, and so do houses in Peak Forest, Buxton and the villages towards Chapel-en-le-Frith.

Our engineers work from New Mills, and our heat pump installation surveys reach across Greater Manchester and out to Sheffield and Leeds. The survey, the room-by-room design and the running-cost sums follow one method wherever the house sits, built from your own oil or LPG price.

What the Survey Puts on Paper

We don’t publish a heat pump price. The heat loss, the radiators and the outdoor work set it, and our lead engineer hasn’t measured your rooms yet. The survey ends with a written design and a fixed quote, and the invoice matches the quote. The design shows:

• Each room’s heat loss, measured on the day by our lead engineer
• The unit sized from those losses, the outdoor spot and each radiator we enlarge
• Your oil or LPG price per litre set against the price cap in force on the day we write it, worked line by line
• A fitting window fixed before work starts, from one week to one month depending on the house and the system
• Our 2-year workmanship guarantee, alongside the manufacturer’s warranty

If the sums say a heat pump would cost you more to run than your oil or LPG boiler, the design tells you so before you commit any money.