The accidental environmentalists

Barnett & Hearne: ground source

It’s hard to live off-grid, disconnected from mains electricity, gas and water, in a small, densely populated country like the UK. That’s why off-grid living in this country has hitherto been limited to travellers, hippies, dedicated greens, and unsociable eccentrics.
But finally it seems that the appeal of the life off-grid is going mainstream as increasing numbers of perfectly conventional people choose to live sustainable lives unfettered by connected amenities.
A retirement project
One such couple is retired teacher Anthony Barnett and his wife, Beatrice Hearne a US born retired marketing executive, who have created an off-grid ready home on their 30 acre small-holding some miles outside Exeter in south west England.
They have a ground source heat pump which supplies heating and hot water, a wind turbine which powers the heat pump and provides electricity for lighting. And they have their own water supply which could generate hydro-power and fill their water tanks if they ever need it to. Although they export power to the grid and use piped water, they could be completely independent, almost at the flick of a switch.
So it’s surprising to learn that it was never their intention to live off-grid.

“We had a large house outside London, I was coming up to retirement age and really we were looking to sell the house and buy a hands-on renovation project with some land attached to keep a few animals and grown some food, to supplement my pension,” says Barnett.
After looking in Dorset, they searched in Devon and three years ago found a dilapidated 1920s farmhouse for sale, complete with enough land to support animals and a kitchen garden.
Ground source “a pragmatic choice”
“Although it had mains services, it was extremely run down. It needed a new roof, insulation, windows, wiring, plumbing and heating. There was a defunct Aga in the kitchen, a rusting oil tank to supply the central heating, an oil fired boiler and some old radiators,” says Barnett.
After thoroughly insulating the roof the walls and the floors and installing double glazed windows, they could have restored the oil-fired central heating system. But with their income limited by the size of Barnett’s pension and with oil prices so volatile, that didn’t seem like a sensible idea.
With no mains gas, a ground source heat pump for domestic heating and hot water was simply a pragmatic choice. They called in quotes from four different suppliers and in the end selected a 2.6kw pump from Iceberg Energy.
“The one advantage we had was lots of space, so instead of having to drill deep, we could lay the piping for the heat pump in shallow trenches just below spade depth,” says Barnett.
Digging two 60 metre trenches and installing them cost them £12,000.It would have been more but they kept the price down by doing much of the manual labour themselves. “The pump runs for two to five hours a day which is enough because the house is super-insulated,” says Hearne.
Wind because it was there
This is a key point with ground-source energy, which generally needs one unit of electricty to produce 3 or 4 units of heat. “You have to be super insulated plus plus, to make it work financially,” says Hearne. If the house hadn’t been in such poor condition originally, they wouldn’t have been able to afford to give it such a thorough energy saving make-over and perhaps ground source wouldn’t have been a viable option.
It would be another year or so before they started installing the wind turbine. Again the spur to action was pragmatic rather than ideological. “We live on top of a hill with lots of wind. We chose to install a turbine really because it was feasible and it would help support our retirement,” says Barnett.
To their pleasure and relief the local planning authority didn’t object to the 15 metre high structure, which jokes Barnett, being grey blends in perfectly with the English sky line.
It cost £25,000 to install, less a £2,500 grant from the government. Again the couple kept costs down by doing some of the work themselves  –they dug foundations and laid their own cables.
The heat pump consumes between 9 and 12 units a day. But the turbine has generated around 9,000 units in the past twelve months or so, roughly a quarter of which have been exported to the grid. The couple receive about 15 pence per unit generated and of course heat their home for virtually nothing.
They do draw on some power from the grid because the wind doesn’t always blow. But overall Barnett estimates that in return for a substantial investment of around £40,000 the couple save as much as £3000 a year heating their home and in addition they receive a small income of perhaps one thousand pounds.
10 year payback
At the current rate they estimate their payback period to be between ten and twelve years. It might have been a lot shorter. Current government proposals for feed in tariffs suggest that 5kw wind generators of the size belonging to Barnett should receive 23 pence per unit supplied to the grid. Unfortunately  laments Hearne, that is only for new installations. Her fear is that under the new proposals existing microgeneration equipment may only receive a reduced payment of 9 pence per unit.
Looking back they think that perhaps installing hydro power would have been a better choice than the wind turbine. ” Nonetheless, they wouldn’t change what they have done.“ The turbine hums a bit and is noisier than we thought it would be. The animals don’t mind it although the neighbouring farmer complains a bit.,” says Hearne.
“But we’ve made serious strides into self sufficiency. We have our own power we grow a lot of our own fruit and vegetables and we produce our own meat –duck, chicken, geese and lamb. This life style is not for everybody. But we love it.”

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