Before you buy
Adding cooling to your Vaillant heat pump
Your Vaillant heat pump can cool your home as well as heat it — but cooling is not simply a setting to switch on. Most UK homes are heated by radiators, and radiators cannot cool. Here is what a cooling upgrade actually involves.
Why radiators heat but can't cool
A radiator warms a room from a hot surface, and warm air rises and circulates naturally. Cooling has to work the other way around — and a radiator is the wrong tool for it. Its surface area is far too small to absorb a useful amount of heat from a room, and a cold radiator surface would simply collect condensation and drip.
Effective cooling needs emitters designed for it. The usual answer is a Fan-Coil Cooling Loop — a closed chilled-water circuit feeding fan-coil units that move air across a chilled coil and catch any condensation in a built-in tray. That is why a cooling upgrade is a change to your heating system — not just a part and a setting.
Quick check
Can my system cool?
Answer three questions for a plain-English idea of what your home would need. This is guidance only — a Vaillant-approved installer gives the definitive answer.
What a cooling upgrade involves
There are three layers to it. The cooling resistor (the part this site sells) puts the heat pump into Authorised Cooling Mode. A Vaillant-approved installer then enables cooling in the heat pump settings. And the heating system itself is adapted — a Fan-Coil Cooling Loop with condensate handling and the right controls. The building-side work to get to that point is what we call a Cooling-Ready Retrofit. The guides below walk through each part.
The cooling upgrade, in detail
The cooling resistor is step one — it authorises your heat pump to cool.