Most Sustainable

Most Sustainable Installer

Name: Liam Barry
Business: Custom Renewables

Please explain, using specific examples, how you are making genuine effort to reduce the environmental impact of your business and improve your sustainable practice?

As a renewable company, we look at being as carbon neutral as possible with all the products we install. This means I mostly install air source heat pumps or ground source heat pumps, but I don’t just look at that as being the perfect solution, we take a fabric first approach to each property to make sure every house can run at a lower kW output, therefore bringing down their monthly energy bills. We also make sure the system design onto the heat-source is suitable for them, making sure it is running at its maximum efficiency along with monitoring kits. We currently have all of our installs on open energy monitoring running at over 350 percent efficiency and one running up at 430 percent SCOP currently proving their efficiency and keeping customers’ bills low. We always aim to make sure all our installs are sustainable and contribute to being environmentally friendly.

How are you helping your customers become more sustainable and reduce their impact on the environment? Please provide at least one example.

The aim is a fabric first approach to bring their heat loss down. This helps with heating bills but also reduces customer’s energy usage. We then look at adding renewable sources as their main heat source with products like ASHP, GSHP, solar thermal and solar PV all combined. This helps the customer reduce bills and again use less energy to heat their homes or hot water reducing the environmental impact and using very high carbon fuels.

Please provide details of a project you are proud of which made use of sustainable products and/or processes – what was the problem for the customer and how did you solve it? What products did you use and why? What was the end result?

Before I arrived, the customer had an oversized Vaillant Ecotec 24kw system boiler fitted onto an unvented cylinder. The customer asked me to install an air source heat pump as they were preparing to be as carbon neutral as possible along with a large solar PV array and solar thermal to top up the domestic hot water. We were aiming to achieve as close as possible to off grid living, charging batteries through solar PV, and charging the domestic hot water 10 month plus a year with solar thermal.

To meet this goal, I installed a 5kw Vaillant aroTHERM plus air source heat pump on a twin coil renewable cylinder with solar thermal integration into the system to boost the hot water through spring-summer and autumn to achieve a higher SCOP. This was accompanied by the use of the solar PV array and battery which is able to power the heat pump in addition to electric usage which will lower energy consumption from the grid.

I also upgraded the system design to allow for pipework to take flow rate of 5kw @ -3 design temperature at a dt5 of 14.2lpm to run a fully open loop on pure weather compensation on a curve of 0.6 which is 40deg @-3. I also did a full heating system upgrade to copper removing all plastic and potential air ingress and upgraded the radiators.

Overall, the customer benefitted from a reduction in energy bills and carbon emissions. This install was also able to create a more comfortable living environment by using weather compensation on an open loop system, creating a balanced and consistent indoor temperature. As a result of this system, the customer has completely removed their need for gas.

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