LondonHomeEnergy is an independent guide to heat pumps, solar panels, air conditioning and insulation for London homeowners and leaseholders. It exists because of one specific gap: the planning rules and grant details that actually decide whether a project is straightforward or complicated are hyper-local, change regularly, and are almost never covered accurately anywhere else.
Most comparison sites in this sector answer the question "what does a heat pump cost?" That's the easy part, and the answer is broadly the same across the country. The harder and more useful question is "what can I actually install at my address, and what will I need permission for?" — and that answer varies street by street across London.
That's what The Borough Ledger is for: a compiled index of conservation area coverage and Article 4 planning directions, checked council by council. It's the part of this site nobody else has bothered to build.
Every borough entry is checked against the relevant council's own published conservation area and Article 4 records — not against third-party planning directories. That decision followed directly from cross-checking: for Hounslow alone, published third-party figures ranged from 27 to 43 conservation areas, against the council's own stated figure of 29. Where a directory conflicts with a council, we use the council's figure. Where we haven't checked a borough's records directly, we say so rather than estimating.
The same applies to Article 4 direction counts, which are widely misreported because the national dataset counts mapped geographic features rather than distinct legal directions. We report named conservation areas and direction types wherever possible instead of raw counts, because a count tells a homeowner almost nothing.
Cost figures across the technology guides are 2026 UK averages drawn from published installer and industry data, presented as ranges rather than as a single figure implying false precision. Grant and scheme details are checked against current government guidance — the Boiler Upgrade Scheme, Smart Export Guarantee, VAT relief rules and the Warm Homes Plan — and revised when terms change. The last full review was August 2026.
Where a claim is genuinely contested or unflattering, the site says so. The insulation guide states plainly that double glazing typically takes 20–40 years to pay back on energy savings alone, because that's what the evidence shows — even though a site optimising purely for conversions would frame it differently. The air conditioning guide is clear that cooling adds to your bill rather than reducing it.
It isn't a substitute for a survey. Every technology guide says the same thing: a heat-loss survey from a certified installer is what tells you whether your specific property is suitable, and no online calculator replaces it. The savings calculator is a starting estimate built on averages, and it says so on the page.
It also isn't planning advice. Article 4 directions can be introduced, revised or revoked — Camden restored solar rights in three conservation areas from June 2026, which is exactly the kind of change that makes older guidance wrong. Always confirm your specific address with the council before commissioning work.
If you find something on this site that's out of date or wrong — particularly a planning detail for a borough you know well — we'd rather hear about it than not. Accuracy is the entire proposition here; a site that gets the Article 4 rules wrong is worse than no site at all.
See how this site is funded for the honest version of how it makes money, and why that doesn't change what's written above.