At the end of last month, some of our team attended the Installer Show in Birmingham, to crown the winners of our Refresh-owned awards scheme, the Heating Installer Awards (HIA) 2022. We had a few fun-filled days celebrating this year’s winners, catching up with our sponsors from across the industry and signing up installers for next year’s awards.
The HIA is truly an amazing experience for our team as it gives us the opportunity to network with installers across the country, maintain relationships and grow the awards with our sponsors, develop our event planning skills and exhibit at various trade shows. This all means that the HIA team are often out and about engaging with people across the heating industry, learning from them, and have a laugh too – which is something we have missed over the last couple of years.
The awards also provide a great opportunity to exercise our PR and social media muscles (especially the plumbing influencer world!), create exciting video content and immerse ourselves in an often over-looked, but amazing, talented, and tight-knit community full of installers that deserve recognition for the incredible work they do.
Presenting the awards at Installer Show was a fantastic way to wrap up this year’s campaign, not just to get us out of the office for a few days – but because it gives our team real insight into more than just traditional ‘PR’, with team members enjoying the variation of work including organising exhibition stands, conducting social media campaigns, attending exciting events, meeting people from across the industry, and much more. This year we added a new element to jazz up the awards even more and took the regional winners to Danfoss UK HQ where they received product training, legislation updates, valuable help and advice from manufacturers, and even went a curry and a drink with the installers and sponsors, which provided valuable networking time, but was also incredibly fun! We can’t wait to share what we have in store for next year.
This year, John Cruickshank of Cruickshank Plumbing and Heating in the South East was crowned this year’s national installer, competing against several strong entries from the other installers. John was truly delighted to be recognised as the best Heating Installer of 2022, explaining how much of an honour it was to be standing amongst a group of insanely talented installers. The 2022 awards was John’s first time entering the competition and he found it to be an incredibly enjoying and rewarding experience, whilst also very beneficial to his business – in fact, he has already planned partnerships with manufacturers and organisations within the industry! Many others were also recognised over the week, such as Damon Blakemore of Blakemore Plumbing Heating Renewables receiving the coveted runner-up spot and Alan Dean Macron from Green and Reliable Heating claiming the Most Sustainable Installer title. Apprentices in the industry were not forgotten, with Josh Bentley scooping the Rising Star award for 2022 against some very tough competition.