Works With Hive programme now reaches one third of the UK air-source heat pump market as the collaboration between two industry heavyweights moves from trial to full long-term partnership
In a move that signals a significant maturation of the UK’s smart heating sector, eco-tech company Hive has announced a full commercial partnership with Daikin through its Works With Hive programme, converting what began as a carefully managed integration trial into a broad, long-term strategic alliance. The announcement, made this week, positions Hive’s smart home energy platform as a dominant force in the low-carbon heating space, and places Daikin, one of the UK’s most recognised air-source heat pump manufacturers, firmly at the centre of the connected home revolution.
With the addition of Daikin, Works With Hive now connects to approximately 33% of the UK air-source heat pump market, giving more households access to seamless, smart control of low-carbon heating systems. For an industry that has long grappled with the challenge of making heat pump technology genuinely accessible and user-friendly to the mass market, this represents a major step forward.
From Trial to Full Partnership: A Relationship Built on Proven Results
The Hive and Daikin collaboration did not emerge overnight. The announcement builds on the successful trial between Hive and Daikin initiated in 2024 to integrate air-source heat pumps with Hive’s home energy management technology. Through the Works With Hive programme, the collaboration now moves into a broader, long-term partnership.
That deliberate, phased approach reflects the seriousness with which both organisations have treated the technical and commercial requirements of true system interoperability. Rather than rushing an integration to market, the two companies invested time in validating performance, refining the user experience, and ensuring that the end product could reliably deliver on its promises across the diverse range of UK home environments.
The collaboration sees Daikin Altherma 3 heat pumps integrated with Hive energy management technology to provide customers with greater visibility and control of their heating system including allowing homeowners to personalise heating schedules, track spending and set budgets, whilst also optimising their heat pump for use when electricity is cheaper and greener because there is low demand on the grid.
For HVACR professionals, the technical underpinning of this integration is significant. With the launch of Daikin’s new API, partnering with Hive became a natural next step, making it possible to pass real-time operational data between the heat pump and Hive’s energy management platform. This API-driven architecture is far more robust than legacy control integrations and opens the door to genuinely intelligent, dynamic system management rather than simple scheduling.
What the Partnership Delivers: Three Stakeholders, Three Benefits
For Homeowners: Simplicity, Visibility and Savings
The consumer value proposition of this partnership is compelling and well-timed. Despite strong government incentives including the Boiler Upgrade Scheme, heat pump adoption in the UK has continued to face headwinds around perceived complexity and running cost anxiety. The Hive-Daikin integration directly targets both concerns.
The partnership allows Daikin systems to function within Hive’s wider energy ecosystem, which includes access to specialised incentives like the Heat Power tariff an offering that provides users with access to half-price electricity daily, a feature that is only possible when smart controls and hardware communicate effectively. For the consumer, this means the technical complexity of heat pump optimisation is handled by the software, resulting in lower bills and a reduced carbon footprint without requiring manual adjustments.
For homeowners, it means a simpler and more connected experience with the ability to monitor and manage their heating and bills through the Hive app and access bespoke tariffs for their eco-tech, including Heat Power, which offers half-price electricity every day.
Tom Pakenham, Commercial Director of Hive, articulated the partnership’s broader vision clearly. “The future of low-carbon heating isn’t just about installing a heat pump it’s about making sure it works brilliantly within the wider home energy system. By expanding compatibility, we’re moving the industry beyond standalone technologies towards genuinely connected homes, where heating, tariffs and smart controls work together to deliver savings and simplicity for customers.”
For Installers: Clarity, Confidence and Commercial Opportunity
For the UK’s heating and cooling installer community, the Works With Hive programme expansion brings immediate practical benefits. Installers have long faced customer questions about compatibility between heat pump hardware and smart control systems questions that, if unanswered, can delay purchasing decisions or lead to suboptimal equipment choices.
For installers, the expanded Works With Hive programme provides clarity and reassurance around compatibility with leading ASHP brands. Knowing that a Daikin heat pump installation will integrate cleanly and reliably with the Hive ecosystem removes a layer of uncertainty from the sales and specification process, and gives engineers a stronger, more holistic proposition to present to homeowners who are already familiar with the Hive brand through existing thermostat or smart plug ownership.
This matters commercially. Homeowners who already use Hive products are a warm audience for heat pump upgrades. The ability to tell a customer that their new Daikin ASHP will appear natively within the same app they already use daily for their heating schedule and energy monitoring is a genuinely powerful selling tool.
For the Industry: Interoperability as the New Standard
Perhaps the most significant dimension of this announcement is what it signals for the wider UK heat pump ecosystem. As heat pump adoption continues to grow across the UK, interoperability between manufacturers and smart home platforms will play a critical role in supporting the transition to low-carbon heating. The partnership gives customers greater choice and confidence when selecting a heat pump that is compatible with Hive’s smart ecosystem.
The industry has too often been characterised by proprietary silos, where manufacturers develop their own companion apps and control systems that do not communicate with the broader smart home environment. That model may have been acceptable in the early years of heat pump adoption, but it is increasingly untenable as consumers expect their home energy devices heat pumps, solar panels, battery storage, EV chargers to function as a cohesive, intelligently managed system.
Daikin’s API Strategy: A Turning Point in Manufacturer Openness
One of the most technically noteworthy aspects of this announcement is what it reveals about Daikin’s evolving product and platform strategy. With the launch of its new API, Daikin’s integration with the Hive platform makes it easier for households to choose how to control their heating while helping systems run efficiently and deliver the performance customers expect.
The development of an open, documented API by Daikin UK represents a meaningful philosophical shift for a manufacturer historically associated with tightly controlled proprietary ecosystems. By publishing an API that allows qualified third-party platforms like Hive to communicate directly with its heat pump hardware, Daikin is placing interoperability at the heart of its UK product strategy and effectively signalling to the installer and specifier community that connectivity is now a standard feature, not an optional extra.
Pieter Devloo, Key Account Manager for National Utilities at Daikin UK, confirmed the strategic logic: “With the launch of our new API, partnering with Hive was a natural next step. By integrating Daikin heat pumps with the Hive platform, we’re making it easier for households to choose how to control their heating while helping systems run efficiently and deliver the performance customers expect.”
The Works With Hive Ecosystem: Building Critical Mass
Daikin is not joining an empty programme. Daikin joins a growing group of eco-tech innovators including EO, Fox ESS, GivEnergy, myenergi, Samsung and Sunsynk. The Works With Hive network now spans electric vehicle charging, solar generation, battery storage, and heat pump technology creating the infrastructure for a genuinely integrated home energy management platform.
The programme’s ambitions are clearly articulated and on an aggressive timeline. Works With Hive remains on track to support 80% of net-zero home technology devices by the end of 2026, with more partnerships underway across the full spectrum of eco-tech devices including EV, solar and battery systems. Throughout the year, Hive will continue to add trusted eco-tech brands and simplify integration for manufacturers and customers alike.
Reaching 80% compatibility with net-zero home technology devices within the calendar year would represent a transformative achievement effectively making Hive the de facto operating system for the low-carbon home in the UK. For manufacturers considering whether to develop their own proprietary smart control ecosystem or to partner with an established platform, the growing weight of the Works With Hive network makes the calculus increasingly straightforward.
Context: Daikin’s Broader UK Net-Zero Commitment
This partnership does not exist in isolation. Daikin UK has been systematically building its presence across the UK’s low-carbon heating transition on multiple fronts simultaneously. In July 2023, Daikin UK joined forces with Quantum Group to create bespoke training facilities at 150 further education colleges across the UK to enable more heat pump engineers to be trained. More recently, the firm announced plans to upskill 50 heating and plumbing tutors at nine colleges in Greater Manchester, enabling them to train the next generation of engineers in the installation of low-carbon heating.
This commitment to the workforce pipeline complements the Hive partnership perfectly. There is little value in expanding smart control compatibility if there are insufficient qualified engineers to install and commission the underlying heat pump systems. Daikin’s investment in training infrastructure suggests a company thinking about the entire value chain from installation quality through to intelligent long-term operation — rather than simply selling hardware.
Daikin has been a global leader in climate control for over 100 years, delivering high-performance cooling, heating, ventilation, and refrigeration solutions. Its innovative technologies improve indoor air quality and comfort while supporting a more sustainable future. Daikin is driving the UK’s transition to green energy with low-carbon heat pumps and a whole-life approach to building decarbonisation.
Industry Analysis: Why This Matters Beyond the Headlines
For HVACR professionals, the significance of this partnership extends well beyond the immediate commercial details. It reflects several converging trends that are reshaping the UK heating and cooling industry.
First, the integration of heat pump hardware with smart tariff infrastructure particularly the Heat Power half-price electricity offering represents the early stages of demand-side flexibility becoming a real consumer product. As the UK grid incorporates more variable renewable generation, the ability to shift heat pump operation to periods of low-demand, low-cost, low-carbon electricity becomes increasingly valuable both to the individual homeowner and to grid stability management. Smart controls that can execute this optimisation automatically, without requiring manual intervention from the homeowner, are a critical enabler.
Second, the announcement reinforces the growing importance of data in the heat pump value chain. When a Daikin heat pump communicates with the Hive platform via API, it generates a continuous stream of operational data run times, flow temperatures, energy consumption, coefficient of performance readings that can be used not only by the homeowner for bill management but potentially by installers for remote diagnostics and performance optimisation. This data layer is increasingly where competitive differentiation in the heating sector will be won and lost.
Third, and perhaps most fundamentally, the partnership reflects a broader industry consensus that the standalone heat pump proposition a box on the wall that replaces a boiler and requires its own separate app and control interface is insufficient to drive mass-market adoption. The collaboration signifies a transition from standalone hardware to a genuinely connected home environment. Heat pumps must become part of the fabric of the connected home, not an outlier requiring specialist knowledge to operate effectively.