H2ecO has won the coveted Renewable Heat Installer award from the Energy Efficiency Awards 2023.
This is for the Athelhampton House and Gardens Zero project which involved the design of low carbon heating solutions to provide central heating and hot water for the cottage which is able to be rented by members of the public and the Coach house which contains the reception building, shop, offices and catering facilities for the site, plus the main grade 1* listed manor House.
Many options were considered and modelled including extensive open-loop ground source and water source utilising the river that flows through the property. The final project included 4 ground Source Heatpumps from Kensa which use 600m of ground collector in the meadow and which were connected to the coach house by directional drilling under the river to connect the ground collectors to the heatpumps. Despite these extensive works, there was insufficient land available to provide all the heat required by the entire site so a Daikin Heatpump solution using their High Temperature units was designed and approved by planning.
The final result adds a bank of 10 Daikin units along with a separately located bank of 5 Daikin units. Combined, they service the sites maximum 210kW heat demand and all hot water needs.
The site also has a 125kWp Solar Array and 162kWh of battery storage from Tesla and results from the first year of operation are matching expectations.
The site is being used by Daikin as an example that disproves the myth that heatpumps cannot be used to heat older properties that are not well insulated.
Athelhampton has solid stone 14th century walls and stained glass windows – yet is heated acceptably by heatpumps.
