For most Australians, hot water heat pumps are the most energy-efficient way to heat water.
According to installers we trust, what are the best brands in Australia in 2025?
How Did We Survey Our Installers?
We asked the 594 installers in the SolarQuotes installer network one question:
If installing a system on your own house today, what brand’s hot water heat pumps would you use?
89 installers replied. Here are the results.
Best Hot Water Heat Pumps In Australia: 2025
Best Hot Water Heat Pumps 2025: First place – iStore
My mate Sean’s iStore all-in-one heat pump. It hasn’t missed a beat.
With 29% of the vote, iStore claims the top spot.
iStore has been selling heat pumps in Australia for a decade, with their current generation product (pictured above) hitting the market 6 months ago.
They only sell “all in one” heat pumps using propane refrigerant. Price-wise, they’re firmly midrange.
They have a good heating speed, high efficiency, and quiet operation, and only need a regular 10A electrical socket, which can save $500-$1500 in installation costs if it saves an electrician running a dedicated supply from your switchboard.
Disclosure: iStore is a sister company to solar panel installer Solargain, and many Solargain dealers are SolarQuotes clients.
Best Hot Water Heat Pumps 2025: Second place – Solahart
Solahart’s Atmos heat pump
Taking second place with 19% of the vote is Solahart.
Solahart has been selling old-school solar thermal hot water in Australia for over 70 years. They’ve seen the writing on the wall and recently added heat pumps to their product range with their current generation Atmos series.
I haven’t seen a Solahart heat pump in person yet, so I’ll hold off on a personal verdict until I get more feedback on their reliability. Some of these units are made by Solahart’s sister company, Rheem, which has a, let’s say, patchy track record with reliable heat pumps, so I was surprised to see them perform well in the awards. Hopefully, this means the quality of Rheem’s newer models has finally stepped up a notch.
Disclosure: Solahart has a national dealer network of solar panel installers, and many are also SolarQuotes clients.
Best Hot Water Heat Pumps 2025: Third place – Reclaim Energy
My Reclaim hot water heat pump.
Just behind Solahart, Reclaim Energy took third with 17% of the vote. It is a split-system design with the tank and compressor separate.
I chose one for my home because:
- they use CO2 refrigerant – making them more efficient than heat pumps using other refrigerants
- the split system design is whisper-quiet in operation
- they have a 10-year warranty – compared to 5 years for most others
All of these features come at a cost – you’re looking at north of $6000 fully installed before rebates.
What Do These Heat Pumps Cost?
My hot water heat pump comparison table shows pricing for all the winners, plus heaps of other brands.
To compare the cost of this year’s winners:
- iStore (270L) – $2,800
- Solahart (280L) – $3,500
- Reclaim (315L) – $5,000
These prices don’t include local heat pump rebates or heat pump STCs, which together can take approximately $700-$2000 off.
They also don’t include installation costs. A difficult install – involving a new dedicated drain line, a concrete slab base for the water tank, and a long electrical run back to the switchboard – could add $3,000 or more. An easier install will add closer to $1,000.
Useful Heat Pump Resources
If you are thinking of upgrading your hot water to a heat pump, I spent ages writing this comprehensive dummies guide to hot water heat pumps.
If you want to see how much you can save with hot water rebates:
- Use our Hot Water Heat Pump STC calculator to find the ‘federal’ rebate for your postcode and model
- Then see if you have any extra local hot water rebates listed here.
And if you’re looking to get a heat pump for your home – we now offer up to three quotes for heat pumps from great installers.
About Finn Peacock
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Definitely on my list. Living in one of the coldest parts of Australia, there aren’t any remaining reliability issues in sub-zero temperatures for these? Have seen others go through horrendous experiences with these installs, in our area, though they may have bought crap systems and had bad installers. Also follow-up maintenance, having sdomebody local if needed to do call outs. We use heat pumps to do all the home heating, so big fan of the technology.
Hi Nick,
You need a CO² refrigerant unit for cold climates I believe.
Great, thanks was already looking at Reclaim so that’s another good reason.
Look at the Sanden as well. I got one 2 years ago. It’s on par with the Reclaim one but I found the price after installation and rebates to be better. Could be different now though.
Will do, also near top of my list.
Thanks for the article guys.
Vote for standard reporting of performance.
The number of STCs a unit gets accurately represents the expected energy savings.
Claiming performance at 32 deg and COP6 claiming to be the best available…..
Please!
XXXXXXX’s own website says their unit takes 4hrs to heat 315L from 17-63 degrees in 20 deg ambient. That’s COP 4.4 based on their 850W nominal power Input. Not COP6 it says two paragraphs earlier (fine print at 32deg)
Many heatpumps using R290 of later designs will be at that or better.
An Istore for example gets COP4.82 at 19degC ambient heating a full tank of water from 15-60degC.
We need standard advertising allowable not stuff at 32deg which is unrealistic for most of Australia.
All heatpumps are good heatpumps – article fails to mention heating power / reheat rate which is a significant factor in the expected life. Can’t expect a heatpump running 7 hrs a day is going to last as long as one running 3.5hrs a day.
I work for Istore –
No need to run it in subzero temperatures, heatpump stores energy just like a battery. Charge it during the day when it’s warmer is much more efficient as warmer air carries more energy.
Refrigerant gasses make little difference if the evaporator has turned into a block of ice. That happens anytime the evaporator is below zero and there is Moisture in the air.
There are three sizes of heatpumps
small has 2.0kW heating power
Medium has 2.7kW heating power
Large has 4.0kW heating power
These are rated at 19degC
Add 10DegC gain 25% more performance
Take away 10deg C loose 25% performance
Give or take a couple of percent this is true for all air conditioners, heatpumps, fridges etc.
The choice of refrigerant gasses in our mild climate is irellevant.
People love high performance heatpumps because they still have enough performance in winter. They don’t get their rated performance at 19deg because it’s closer to 10 deg.
If you start with a low powered heatpump in cold conditions its a really low powered heatpump and may not be able to get the job done during daylight hours when it’s warm and it has its best chance.
If you buy a high powered heatpump it will typically heat a cold tank in winter in 4 hrs which you can run in the middle of the day, this will deliver about 400L of shower temp water which is enough for 4 normal people with room to spare.
If you need more take it off the timers or exclude peak periods or run two schedules.
Disclaimer – I work for Istore
Thanks, and yes a very good point, I’d be doing most hot water heating in daylight hours.
Thanks for a great information post. I have a stainless steel tank installed some 15 years ago with roof solar water panels in the Sydney metro region. i could only get 12 years out of a enamel steel tanks so went stainless.
I fear if i installed a heat pump the whole system would need replacement after 12 years and you would have to start from scratch with no gov. rebates etc. So for me i prefer the stainless option with off peak heating.
I checked the iStore info sheet and there is no tank material info so i assume all the tanks are enamel steel. I do note that some standard tank manufacturers have a premium enamel tank but i have no experience with the life of these but the warranty is longer. They state “External wrap around ALL COPPER heating coil and dual anodes for superior system longevity” but only a 5 year tank warranty.
You have spent a lot of time pulling all this info together, many thanks.
FYI Istores has been using the same tank manufacturer for its IHeat solar thermal and Istore Heatpumps almost 14 years and aside from a couple of manufacturing defects that caused a couple of tank failures prematurely they haven’t had any issues.
My mum’s Vulcan gas VE tank lasted 28years with no maintenance in 28 years.
Thanks – useful information. After rebates an iStore would still be about $3000 installed, perhaps a bit less due to easy install. And I need two. Compared to the cost of resistive units – about $1000 each and low installation cost, it is a big gap. I have a 9kw solar system well situated and in a sunny location and I will most likely install another system and purchase an EV down the track. The resistive units would be on a timer system to heat during the day.
In this situation it doesn’t seem to make much sense to go with a heat pump based system. I am not a large user of hot water, or electricity for that matter.
Also, given that the heat pump system is much the same as airconditioning technology and the latter are very reliable these days, why have heat pumps had such a poor reputation for reliability? BTW, a 10 year warranty seems a good idea in these circumstances.
I’m a bit further down the road in Melbourne and with 3 EVs and 10 heatpumps I agree they are super reliable. They cool my food, heat and cool my house and heat my water. With 27kW on the roof I would need to buy an additional 2000kWh a year to feed a resistive electric HWS.
Running an all electric house without a heatpump HWS in winter is like telling someone they can heat their house with an Oil heater – you can buy why would you when an airconditioner does it for a fraction of the energy.
It would be great to see a comparison of brands based on quality, warranty, global warning potential refrigerant, efficiency etc.
To me those all in one units are not the best. Are they more difficult to repair them a split system design?
Maintenance and repair costs are a big factor. Also some brands provide stainless steel tanks and a decent warranty so it is difficult to compare apples v apples
I agree and comparing performance should be done on STCs they get not the best performance it ever gets cherry picked for the brochure. There are 700,000 heatpumps installed in Australia and the vast majority will still be chugging away saving their owners hundreds or even thousands a year on their energy bills.
I have worked for Istore almost 3 years and the number of repairs to refrigeration parts I can count on one hand, it’s exceptionally rare and with 10 years experience, we’ve worked out the kinks a long time ago.
Hi,
currently designing a house. Wondering with the Reclaim, can the tank be installed in the roof space? The compressor would be wall mounted, close.
Not sure why the aquatech heatpumps didnt make the cut… Must be what installers can sell.
X8 or X6 is all the rage, personally got an X6 myself.
Do your own research I guess.
While the differing gases used for heat pumps vary the efficiency, it would be good to see how they compare to each other in a typical household in say Adelaide, and Canberra and Brisbane, as to their energy use firstly, then what this equates to if we allocate 30c per kwh in running costs,… and also what the financial cost is if we cannot get paid for export and use our own solar electricity, which is almost worthless on FIT, or utterly worthless if export is curtailed during the day (as some new installs are finding).
With the decreasing value of FIT now, why don’t we bang on plenty of the cheap PV, run a cheap resistive HWS around midday with energy surpluses, get the added benefit of less purchased electricity in the peak times early and late in the day due to the extra pv we can justify due to the savings on purchase cost, rather than buy the less reliable, noisy, heat pump HWS.
Lets face it, if the sunshine powered electricity has no value to export then we can run our load shift hot water at no cost.
Why pay more for less reliable heat pumps of any brand?
It looks to me as fi Solahart has ‘badge engineered’ the Rheem AmbiHeat unit.
Rheem is good at engineering but not so hot at marketing and sales whereas Solarhart is.
Interesting info on Rheem below.
https://www.austehc.unimelb.edu.au/tia/871.html
Heat pumps are a great investment for sure.
Worth reiterating to people that the location of the install is critical to ensuring best performance and not having a neighbour issue from the noise. The latter is often mentioned on the web and in install guides.
My neighbour installed the noisy iStore right next to my house (to re-use the old plumbing) and ended up having to move it due to greatly exceeding the EPA regulations regarding noise.
In this circumstance he would have been better off installing a split system so that the noisy compressor unit was remote from my property.
I have the Reclaim from about 3 years ago (before the current Panasonic heat pump unit) and apart from minor vibration issue associated with the wall mount bracket and a failed controller card, it has worked well.
The Aquatech RAPID/X6 seems to be getting some attention and good reviews at https://www.productreview.com.au/listings/aquatech-rapidx6, so will be interesting to see if it continues to look good after a couple of years.
Worth noting that you need clearances around both the tank (anode, connections) and the heat pump units (air flow and electrical) – check the manuals.