Australia’s Clean Energy Regulator recorded 159,848 hot water heat pump installations in 2023, nearly double the 80,895 installed the year before. In Victoria alone, more than 200,000 systems have gone in through the state’s rebate scheme, a 500% jump in demand according to Solar Victoria. Numbers like that look like a clean energy success story. They’re also exactly the conditions under which electrical safety in heat pump installation tends to slip down the priority list.

When subsidy speed outpaces scrutiny

Grant schemes are designed to move fast. That’s the point of them. But speed and installation rigour don’t always travel together, and Australia’s current heat pump boom is a useful case study in what happens when they part ways.

Reclaim Energy’s managing director, Chris Taylor, has described a wave of “rebate chasers” entering the market: operators with no background in heating or hot water, drawn in purely by subsidy volume. He estimates roughly 90% of units now sold in Australia are effectively faux heat pumps, models built around an electric backup element that quietly does most of the work while still qualifying for a rebate meant for genuine heat pump efficiency.

The regulatory response has already started. Solar Victoria now audits a share of installations under its rebate scheme, and its own findings include non-compliant or faulty switchboard wiring, unsafe termination points on pressure relief valves, and inadequate insulation against freezing. NSW’s pricing regulator has separately documented compliance certificates signed by someone other than the installer, alongside units that were simply the wrong size for the site.

None of this is really a heat pump problem. It’s an installation problem that heat pumps happen to be exposing at scale. And it’s not confined to Australia. The UK’s own heat pump grant schemes have moved through a similar arc: a slow start, a push to scale up installer numbers quickly to hit targets, and the same underlying tension between speed and scrutiny that shows up wherever subsidy volume and installer capacity grow at different rates. The Australian data is simply further along and better documented, which makes it a useful early-warning read for anywhere else running a comparable scheme.

The unit gets the scrutiny; the circuit doesn’t

Here’s where it gets relevant for anyone specifying or overseeing residential retrofits. A typical residential heat pump and air conditioning system draws meaningfully more current than the appliance it’s replacing, particularly where a whole-home or ducted system goes into a property with an older switchboard. The equipment itself is the part everyone checks: efficiency rating, output, brand, whether it’s on the approved product list for the scheme in question.

The electrical side of the install is a different story. As the Victorian Building Authority’s chief noted when discussing the sector’s rapid growth, heat pump installations aren’t a like-for-like swap. Many need a new circuit, and often a new switchboard, which means an electrician’s sign-off alongside the installer’s. That’s a second trade involved, which means a second place for a rushed job to skip a step.

It’s a gap that doesn’t show up in the headline numbers. Installed capacity looks fine. Rebate uptake looks fine. Whether the circuit feeding that unit was actually assessed and tested for the new load is a separate question, and it’s the one that tends to get asked only after something’s gone wrong.

Electrical safety in heat pump installation isn’t optional

This is the part of the install that should be treated as a hard requirement rather than best practice: confirming the circuit can safely carry the new load, and that a proper RCD test has been carried out and recorded once it does. An RCD (residual current device) is the component that cuts power if current starts leaking somewhere it shouldn’t, and it’s the difference between a fault tripping safely and a fault becoming a hazard.

This isn’t a theoretical risk attached to a niche technology. RACE for 2030’s research into home retrofits at scale found that upgrades combining insulation, efficient appliances and heat pumps could cut a typical Australian home’s energy bill by up to $1,600 a year and reduce annual emissions by close to six tonnes per property. That’s a genuine change in how a home draws and uses power, not a cosmetic swap, and the report’s authors were explicit that scaling this kind of retrofit needs independent technical guidance and proper industry accreditation alongside the appliance rollout itself.

Put simply: if the retrofit is significant enough to reshape a household’s energy use, it’s significant enough to warrant checking the wiring that carries it.

What developers and specifiers should actually be asking for

None of this requires reinventing the installation process. It requires treating three things as non-negotiable line items rather than assumptions:

• A load calculation before the unit goes in, not a retrospective check if something trips. This is a five-minute job for a competent electrician and it’s the single easiest step to skip when a schedule is tight.
• RCD testing signed off as a discrete, documented step, separate from the general “installation complete” certificate. If the paperwork bundles electrical safety into a single generic sign-off, there’s no record of whether the RCD was actually tested or just assumed to be fine because the unit powered on.
• Installer and electrician accreditation confirmed, particularly on any job funded through a grant or rebate scheme, where the incentive to move fast is built into the programme itself. A scheme that only checks the appliance against an approved product list, and never checks who did the electrical work, is checking the wrong half of the job.

None of these add meaningful cost or time to a well-run installation. They add cost only to the ones that were cutting corners already, which is rather the point.

Australia’s own policy direction backs this up. The government’s updated Trajectory for Low Energy Buildings, released in 2025, extended its “fabric first” approach from new builds into the existing housing stock, explicitly linking building performance targets to how those upgrades get delivered on the ground, not just what gets installed. Compliance isn’t a side issue to that trajectory. It’s the mechanism that determines whether the upgrades actually deliver what the modelling promises.

The fix here isn’t a heavier inspection regime bolted on after installation. It’s making the electrical check part of the specification from day one, the same way load capacity and unit output already are.