Hey Alfie Review: I Swapped Gas for Electric Hot Water

Last updated: 10 August 2026

By Stiv · Design, technology and personal finance

This Hey Alfie review is based on a real job I ran through the app in July and August 2026: ripping out a dead gas boiler in our East London flat, capping the gas at the meter, and switching the whole place to electric hot water. Two trades, four quote visits, three days of work, roughly £3,000 all in. I pay for the service myself.

This is an opinion piece. Views expressed are the author's own and do not constitute professional advice.

This article contains affiliate or referral links. If you click through and sign up I may earn a commission or referral bonus at no extra cost to you. It does not affect my editorial view.

Cool Factor: 4/5

Service review2026 Edit

The boiler died. So I let an AI find me a gas engineer.

Our boiler packed in three weeks ago, and this Hey Alfie review is what happened next. Rather than post the job on a trade directory, I described it to a chatbot, and a fortnight later I had a capped gas supply, a new unvented cylinder and a folder full of certificates. Mostly, it worked. Not entirely.

I found Hey Alfie the way most people find anything worth using, which is that a friend told me about it. They had used it to track down rising damp specialists after moving to London, and they raved about the guarantee. So when our boiler died, I tried it. Below is the honest version, including the bits that annoyed me.

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The jobGas out, electric hot water inBoiler removed, gas capped at the meter

Total spendAround £3,000Including about £1,000 of appliances I chose

TimelineRoughly three weeksFirst message to final certificate

Trades usedGas engineer and electricianFour quote visits, three working days

My tierGold, billed yearly£33.33 a month, six hours included

Cool Factor4/5 Stone coldVery nearly perfect, but not quite

What is Hey Alfie?

Hey Alfie calls itself an AI home manager. In practice, it works like a chat window that sits between you and a tradesperson. You describe the problem, the AI diagnoses it, and then the platform finds vetted trades, gathers up to three quotes and manages the job through to completion.

It also stores your home paperwork. Warranties, manuals, quotes and certificates all land in one place, which sounds dull until you actually need a gas certificate at short notice.

The company behind it is Hey Alfie UK Limited, incorporated in March 2024 and registered in Covent Garden. So it is young. Its own marketing claims that over 90% of users solve home issues instantly with the AI's advice. My job was firmly in the other 10%, which is exactly why it is worth reviewing.

For the full factual breakdown of tiers, terms and guarantee limits, we keep a separate Hey Alfie service guide. This Hey Alfie review is the opinion half.

Section 01 / The backstory

Why I had given up on trade directories

Here is the part that shapes everything else. I do not trust online reviews for tradespeople. Not any more.

A few years back we used Checkatrade to find builders for the guttering at the back of the flat. They charged us nearly £2,000. Then they damaged the roof and left a leaking pipe behind them. When I went back to the platform about its guarantee, I got nowhere. In my experience the support simply refused to help, and the whole thing became an expensive shambles.

I have tried Rated People too. Same story, broadly. Post a job, get bombarded, then take a punt on a stranger with a five-star average that nobody can verify. Consequently I stopped bothering and just asked friends instead.

So the only reason I opened Hey Alfie at all was a personal recommendation. My friend had used it for rising damp specialists after moving to London, and it went well. That is a slightly awkward thing to admit in a review, obviously. Still, it is the truth.

Section 02 / The job

A dead boiler, and no heating to worry about

Our flat is small, on a wooden floor, and the radiators sat in absurd places. Moving them would have been miserable. So we had already switched the heating to five Mill Invisible panel heaters, sized by room from 600W up to 1500W in the biggest space.

That decision turned out to matter enormously. The place holds heat well, and the heating only really runs for about three months a year. Our worst month was January, at 313.89 kWh according to the Mill app. At my Octopus rate of 25.09p a unit, that works out at roughly £79 for the month. Every other month came in under half of that.

To be clear, electric is not the cheapest way to heat a home. It probably will not be for a while yet. For eight months out of twelve, though, our heating never kicks in at all. So the unit rate matters far less here than it would in a draughtier place.

When the boiler died, therefore, we did not need it for heating at all. We only needed hot water. That reframed the whole job: rip the gas out, put in an electric cylinder, and be done with gas forever.

The Mill panels we use

Ours are the Invisible range, wall mounted, app controlled and near silent. Sizes on Amazon UK: 600W, 1300W and 1500W, or browse the whole Mill store.

You can also buy direct from Mill, which is where the full spec sheets live.

Section 03 / First impressions

The AI triage was the best bit of all

I know nothing about gas fittings. Nothing about electrical regs either. Normally that means either googling badly or ringing someone and feeling stupid.

The AI fixed that immediately. It asked sensible questions, and then it did three things that saved me real money. First, it told me to split the work into two jobs and get separate quotes for gas and electrical. Second, it explained which certifications I should expect from each trade. Third, it gave me the vocabulary to describe what I wanted without pretending to be an expert.

That last point is underrated. A big part of getting ripped off by trades is not knowing what to ask for. Here, I could ask anything at three in the morning without a human sighing at me.

Response time was instant, every time. For the first few days of any Hey Alfie review, the AI is the obvious star.

The AI did not make me feel stupid. That alone was worth more than any five-star average.

Section 04 / Where it wobbled

Then the AI started making a mess

Now the honest part. I originally signed up with a hidden email address, and that quietly broke things.

The result was duplicate accounts, duplicate email threads and duplicate jobs. Because most of the conversation happened over WhatsApp, the AI occasionally attached messages to the wrong job. To be fair, a good chunk of that was my own doing. Even so, the system should cope with it better than it did.

There was a second, more structural problem. Once a job is "locked", meaning you have signed off the scope, the AI hands over to a human. After that, you cannot change the scope yourself. On a simple job that is fine. On a complex two-trade job where I kept learning new things, it meant waiting on a person every time something shifted.

Eventually I told them on WhatsApp that the AI was not helping and was starting to feel patronising. They replied within the hour and switched it off. No arguments, no retention script.

Section 05 / The humans

The handover to humans, and the quotes

Response times followed a clear curve. At the start, waiting on a human took a few days, which was easily the most frustrating stretch of this whole Hey Alfie review. Later, it dropped to same day and often within a couple of hours.

The duplicate account mess needed their IT team to untangle. They did it, and they were gracious about it throughout, which counts for a lot when you are the one who caused the problem.

They also asked whether they could ring me before we locked the quotes in. That call turned out to be the turning point. Ten minutes with someone who understood both halves of the job cleared up more than a week of messages had, and everyone I spoke to was easy to deal with.

On quotes, the platform delivered exactly what it promises. I had two gas engineers and two electricians out to price the work, all from different suppliers. Prices came back reasonable and comparable, and nobody tried to upsell me a boiler I did not want.

Crucially, nobody cold-called me afterwards. Anyone who has posted a job on a lead-generation site will understand why that matters.

Section 06 / The work

Three days, two trades, all the paperwork

The gas day came first. One engineer removed the boiler, capped the gas off entirely at the meter, and disconnected the gas supply to the hob and oven. By law, all gas engineers must be on the Gas Safe Register to touch any of that, and ours was.

Then came two days of electrical work. The new cylinder is an Ariston Pro1 Eco 80L unvented, running at 3kW. Because of that load, it has to be wired directly back to the fuse board rather than plugged in anywhere. The electrician also connected the new oven and fitted a proper isolator switch for the induction hob.

Everything came with the right certification, including Part P notification. Approved Document P is the building regulation covering electrical safety in homes in England, and it dictates which work must be notified. I did not have to chase any of it, and every document landed in the app.

One loose end remains, and it is not Hey Alfie's fault. I am still trying to get a straight answer from Octopus about whether the meter itself needs removing to stop the standing charge. Their blog says yes, their support says no. That is a review for another day, and our Octopus referral offer is there if you are switching supplier anyway.

Section 07 / Membership

Gold membership and the six hours

I subscribed to Gold partway through. Yearly billing works out at £33.33 a month, against £39.99 monthly, so the yearly option saves £79.89.

Gold includes six hours of tradespeople "for use anytime", which Hey Alfie values at up to £600. It also gives 5% credit back on every job booked through the platform, and it lifts the workmanship guarantee from £1,000 to £2,500. Rolled-over balances cap at 24 hours, and there is a minimum one-hour call-out on any booking.

Paying for the year upfront pools that allowance into one block, so I can spend the lot on this job rather than dribbling it out half an hour at a time. That is a good deal on a big job. It is a much thinner deal on a small one.

Worth noting: £600 for six hours implies £100 an hour. Some London trades charge that. Plenty do not. So treat the headline figure as a ceiling, not a promise.

Section 08 / The guarantee

The guarantee is the actual product

I have not claimed on it yet. Nevertheless, it is the single thing that made me try the platform, and it is the thing I would tell a friend about first.

Free accounts get workmanship cover up to £1,000. Gold takes that to £2,500 and Platinum to £5,000. If the work is not up to standard, Hey Alfie arranges and funds the rectification, either with the same trade or a different one.

Compare that with what happened to me on Checkatrade, where the guarantee existed in theory and evaporated in practice. Here the platform is the counterparty, not just an introducer of strangers. That is a meaningful difference.

Read the exclusions though. Claims must go in within three months of completion, and scope changes, wear and tear, damage and anything arranged off-platform all sit outside it. Hey Alfie is an intermediary, not a party to your contract with the tradesperson.

Honest critical observations

So what actually held this back from a perfect score? No Hey Alfie review is worth reading without this bit, so here it is.

The AI does not degrade gracefully. It is excellent at triage and poor at complexity. Once my job stopped being "one thing in one room", it started creating jobs I had not asked for and filing messages against the wrong ones. An AI that recognised its own ceiling and escalated early would have saved me a week.

The locked-scope rule compounds that. Handing scope control entirely to a human is defensible on safety grounds. Yet on a job with two trades and a lot of unknowns, it turns every small change into a queue.

Early human response times were the weakest link. A few days is too long when your hot water is off. It improved sharply, but first impressions matter and mine were shaky.

Finally, the coverage story is muddled. One page on their site says Greater London plus Kent and Surrey. Another says nationwide. Their AI, meanwhile, told me it would find me an electrician in Manchester. That third answer worries me most, because it is the chatbot being agreeable rather than the company committing, and it is exactly the failure mode the rest of this section describes. Outside the M25, that ambiguity is a genuine problem.

Why this matters now

One more bit of context before the numbers, because it explains the timing of this Hey Alfie review. Gas is on the way out of British homes, slowly and unevenly. Meanwhile, boilers keep dying at inconvenient moments, and the decision about what replaces them is getting more complicated rather than less.

That is precisely the moment when bad information costs you thousands. A directory that hands you five strangers and a star rating does not help. Something that explains the job, splits it sensibly and stands behind the workmanship does.

Trust in trade platforms has been eroding for years, and honestly, it deserved to. Hey Alfie's pitch is that managing the job beats listing the trades. On the evidence of my job, that pitch holds up.

Value for money

Here is the number most people open a Hey Alfie review for. The whole conversion came to around £3,000. About £1,000 of that was appliances I actively chose, because I wanted an induction hob and an oven with physical dials rather than touch panels. I could have gone cheaper. But I do not intend to change the hob or the oven ever again, so I bought to last.

So the trade work itself sat near £2,000 for four quote visits and three days of skilled labour across gas and electrical, plus all the certification. For London, that reads fair to me.

The Gold subscription is harder to judge. At £400 a year it only pays for itself if you actually use the hours and book through the platform. On a job this size it clearly does. If you are a light user, the free tier plus the £1,000 guarantee is the sensible starting point. If you would rather have ongoing cover than pay per job, something like Hometree home cover answers a different question.

New users also get £20 off their first job through our £20 referral page, which takes the edge off a first booking.

Practical info

Everything in this Hey Alfie review applies to a London flat in 2026, so check the current terms before you sign up.

Hey Alfie covers more than 30 services. Plumbing, electrical, gas, roofing, air conditioning, gardening and handyman work all feature, and so do painting and decorating, tiling and grouting, carpentry, guttering, drains and appliance installation. Quotes usually arrive within 24 hours, and up to three come back per job.

The free tier costs nothing and includes quotes, guidance and document storage. Gold is £39.99 a month or £33.33 billed yearly. Platinum is £69.99 a month or £58.33 billed yearly, with an hour of trade time a month and a £5,000 guarantee.

You can also try the AI before committing to anything at all. There is a prompt box on Hey Alfie's own site where you can ask it a question without an account, without an email address and without anyone's referral link. So if you want to judge the triage for yourself, start there rather than here.

There is no typed discount code. The £20 offer travels through a referral link only, and both sides get £20 in app credit. Credit cannot be swapped for cash, is non-transferable and expires after two years.

Coverage is the one thing I cannot pin down, and it matters most if you live outside London. Hey Alfie's AI home manager page says it is currently live across Greater London and expanding into nearby counties such as Kent and Surrey. Its services page says nationwide. Meanwhile the AI told me it would find an electrician in Manchester when I asked.

Treat that last one carefully, though. An agreeable chatbot is not the same as a company committing to a coverage area. So get the answer from a human before you pay for anything. My job was in East London, which sits squarely inside the area they name.

The verdict

Cool Factor

★★★★☆

4 out of 5

Hey Alfie did the thing I had stopped believing was possible, which is finding me trades I did not have to worry about. The quotes were fair, the work was properly certified, and the humans were decent when I made their lives difficult.

Overall, a solid 4/5 Stone cold. The AI triage is smart, the guarantee is genuinely reassuring, and the team handled a job that turned out to be far messier than it should have been. It did not quite hit Ice cold because the AI buckled once the job got complex, my duplicate accounts caused chaos that better design would have prevented, and the early human response times were slow enough to hurt. Fix the handover between AI and human, and this becomes a five.

Would I use it again? Yes, and I already plan to, which is the simplest summary this Hey Alfie review can offer. Once I have finished painting the kitchen myself, I am going back to them for a tiler, because tiling is one job I am nowhere near bold enough to attempt. After years of being burned by public review sites, that is the highest compliment I can pay it. If you have a friend you trust, ask them first. If you do not, and you are in London, this is the closest thing I have found to having one.

Ready to try it?

Our Hey Alfie page has the referral link plus the current terms in full.

Get £20 off your first job

Hey Alfie review FAQs

Is Hey Alfie worth it?

For my job, yes. The free tier is worth using on its own because the AI triage and the £1,000 guarantee cost nothing. Better still, you can test the AI on their website first without even making an account. Paid tiers only make sense if you book regularly or have one big job to spend the included hours on.

How much does Hey Alfie cost?

The free tier is £0. Gold is £39.99 a month, or £33.33 a month billed yearly. Platinum is £69.99 a month, or £58.33 billed yearly. You then pay the tradesperson separately for the work itself.

How does Hey Alfie compare to Checkatrade or Rated People?

Those platforms list trades and let you pick. Hey Alfie manages the job instead, gathers the quotes for you and backs the workmanship itself. In my experience that difference is the whole point, although the trade-off is far narrower geographic coverage.

Is there a Hey Alfie discount code?

No typed code exists. The only offer is a referral link, which gives new users £20 off their first job and gives the referrer £20 in credit.

Does Hey Alfie cover my area?

Their own site gives two different answers. One page names Greater London plus Kent and Surrey, while another says nationwide. Their AI separately told me it would find an electrician in Manchester, but a chatbot saying yes is not a coverage guarantee. So confirm with a human before you subscribe.

Is this Hey Alfie review sponsored?

No. I paid for the Gold subscription and the work myself. The page carries a referral link, which is disclosed at the top, and it has not changed a word of my opinion.

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