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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how households maintain domestic equilibria after heat pump retrofitting. Visual ethnography reveals everyday practices of repair, care and tinkering, showing how affect, moral values, and technical performance are circulate in ambivalent, relational infrastructures.

Paper long abstract

Discourse on the energy transition disproportionately focusses on the adoption of green energy technologies, but rarely investigates the everyday work of maintaining a domestic equilibrium once such technologies are introduced. This paper examines the maintenance of domestic energy infrastructure through visual ethnographic fieldwork with households navigating the installation and use of heat pumps in existing homes.

We argue that technological change in households is not a simple substitution of devices, but a process of socio-material reconfiguration that unsettles domestic life. Heat pump retrofitting reshapes household practices, alters sensory experiences through fluctuating heating cycles and new forms of noise, and redefines attachment to the home, turning it into a site of ongoing experimentation or contestation. Maintenance emerges as a relational practice through which households negotiate competing demands, such as care responsibilities, expert authority, and ethical concerns.

Households engage in forms of everyday maintenance which exceed formal notions of repair, including anthropomorphising devices, tinkering with settings and apps, delegating control to experts, or deliberately withdrawing attention. These practices are pragmatic ways of sustaining domestic life under conditions of technical uncertainty, competing responsibilities, and polarized discourses on sustainable energy.

Drawing on Heideggerian distinctions between the ready-to-hand and present-at-hand, the paper traces how heat pumps shift between background infrastructure and matter of concern triggered by destabilization of the domestic equilibrium. By foregrounding retrofitting as an ongoing process of upkeep rather than a linear transition, this paper advances understanding of energy infrastructures as sustained through ambivalent, partial, and often invisible forms of everyday labour.