Most UK housing stock is poor quality, old and draughty. Pre-req of switching is fixing that. Then, when you've got a nice hermetically sealed house, you need to solve fresh air, which is another cost. Labour is extremely expensive in the UK and tradespeople are poor quality and swindlers (sorry, it's true 95% of the time).
And most people don't have £10k+ to drop on upgrades
We're not used to needing aircon, so the whole concept is a bit foreign
Electricity is expensive (0.31 EUR/kWh)
Plus, we've been burned by governments pushing "green" things:
- They scammed us with cavity wall insulation, which has caused some serious structural and expensive issues. It was inappropriate for many houses and a ton of conmen popped-up to take government money with no fucks given
- Diesel was sold as 'green'
- They had a scheme pushing loft insulation but the installers often just threw rolls of insulation into the loft and ran way (not even kidding)
Basically, multiple governments have created just about the /worst/ possible history and conditions to get people on board with heat pumps
I have a very small, draughty house and spend ~800 EUR a year on gas (heating + hot water + hob). Not ideal but I'm still running on the gas boiler that came with the house 10 years ago that's only had ~300 EUR of maintenance spent on it. The house gets hot, I can have boiling hot showers whenever I want. If anything goes, wrong, I can all any of 30 people to come fix it
They're not skeptical, it's just that no one wants to pay $10k to have a $2k unit installed, and new entrants who want to offer anything other than what the entrenched services have to offer have to be abused and hazed for 4 years near minimum wage changing out $5 capacitors for $1000 (to their company, not them) before they can get a trade license, and after that they have to go through an onerous contracting paperwork to open up a business. So we don't get new businesses popping up offering mini split installation.
End result is most of the units that get installed in the US are probably DIYing off-paper and then shutting the fuck up. I live in a place with no inspections for owner-builder and that was the only way I was able to get away with it, and even then I had to pass an EPA 608 license to handle the refrigerants since I did not want to get fined a bazillion dollars if someone found out.
