Family live the good life by taking home off-grid
The boss of a renewable energy company has used his knowhow to save his family £6,000 a year by going off-grid.
David Jones, managing director of Hafod Renewables, has equipped his family’s home with an array of 16 solar panels – two of them on the roof of his garden shed – as well as an air-source heat pump in the back garden.
Mr Jones and his partner Jen Hay have a zero-carbon footprint – and even their cars are powered by electricity.
Altogether, the family’s energysaving measures mean they enjoy an annual saving of more than £6,000 a year.
Mr Jones said: “It’s like having a lottery win every year. It pays for our holidays.”
The couple get all their heat and power from renewable sources, much of it generated at their detached home in the Vale of Clwyd village of Trefnant.
Inside, there is a wall-mounted battery which is charged up either when the house is empty during the day or at night when renewablegenerated electricity is cheapest.
The energy sources also warm the house through an underfloor heating system which stores energy in the 2cm-thick resin screed which covers the entire ground floor.
Outside a charging point tops up the batteries of their electric cars – his Tesla Model X, a two-ton, gullwing-doored four-wheel-drive SUV with a 200-mile range which does 0-60 in 4.8 seconds, and Jen’s Mitsubishi Outlander estate, which can easily manage local trips on its 33-mile battery range.
Mr Jones said: “This was a conventionally-powered home which cost about £1,200 to heat when we bought it, and I was driving a conventional car which was costing me about £4,000 a year, and Jen’s car cost us another £1,500 in fuel.
“I did the maths and it made sense to go off-grid – and the numbers will look even better in about seven years when the solar panels, the battery and the air-source heating is paid for.
“Then we will have the rest of the 20-year lifetime of the systems to enjoy pretty much free green living and travelling.”
Mr Jones designed the project himself and it was installed by Hafod Renewables.
He has carefully costed the savings he has made and the family’s heating, hot water and electricity have more than halved from £1,350 to £650 – but the biggest difference is in the cost of motoring, where they used to spend over £5,000 and now just £800.
He said: “The change to renewables means that we no longer burn any carbon at home and instead we have a clean, efficient and safe lowtemperature heating system.
“And because we are a single-fuel household means we now have a smart home.
“Everything is controlled from one app on my phone, from charging the car to heating the hot water, and the house itself has four zones which I can adjust individually wherever I am.
“And if we have a heatwave, we can even run the air source in reverse to send chilled water through the pipes to cool things down.”
Mr Jones has also gained from the grants system for renewables and his bank balance stands to receive a Renewable Heat Incentive of £650 per year for seven years, a solar payment of £270 annually for 20 years, £500 for his home charging point and a £7,000 electric vehicle plug-in grant.
There’s also the potential for an extra £300 per year when battery storage legislation changes, enabling the couple to sell electricity back to the national grid when demand is high.
It all adds up to total grants of up to £18,000.
It has also boosted their home’s energy efficiency band by two grades and added an estimated £20,000 to its value.
Mr Jones reckons that over 10 years he stands to make a profit of more than £40,000.
Moreover, the expertise he has gained in making his dream a reality will also benefit Hafod Renewables and help the business offer bespoke systems like the one he has designed for his own family.
Hafod Renewables – which was founded in Denbigh in 2010 by Mr Jones and his father Richard – now employs nine staff and has become a key player in the installation of non-solar systems such as air and ground-source heating and biomass.
In those seven years the company has fitted more than 10,000 solar panels.
Most of their clients have been domestic solar systems, but as well as almost 100 farms, they have also installed solar power at the new Holywell “super-school”, various businesses including one of Wales’ biggest boatyards, and a rugby club, in addition to providing biomass boilers and air and ground-source heating systems.