Soo Chapman and her son Richard kindly welcomed visitors to their home in Southbourne to view the many carbon-saving improvements they’ve made to this large Edwardian house since 2009 – including their brand new Tesla Powerwall.
Anyone with an interest in climate change and energy use will be familiar with entrepreneur Elon Musk and his groundbreaking mega-scale Gigafactory and Tesla Motors companies, aiming to reduce global warming through sustainable energy production and consumption. The Powerwall is the latest innovation, developed to deal with the problem that solar panels only produce power when the sun shines.
The Tesla Powerwall is a domestic-scale lithium ion battery that stores the energy generated by the sun so that it can be used at night or when cloudy.
When the Powerwalls became available in the UK earlier this year, Soo’s son Richard did the research and ordered one (7kWh). It was installed in August at a cost of around £5000.
The key technologies used in Soo’s all-electric house are:
Twenty pv solar panels (12 facing east, 8 facing west, 4.7kW)
Air source heat pump – for heating
Solar iBoost – uses excess energy from the solar panels to turn on the immersion heater for free hot water
A solar thermal panel for hot water
Excellent insulation – All rooms have lowered ceilings and thick insulation.
Extremely energy efficient lighting (room lit with 12 LED bulbs equivalent to one old-fashioned 100W bulb)
Tesla Powerwall
Electric car charging point
SolarEdge panel to monitor and optimise the pv performance
Gravity-fed rainwater harvesting tank (currently in construction phase) for flushing toilets
Forest garden design with fruit trees and low-maintenance veg.
Their electricity supplier is Ecotricity which is 100% from renewable sources and profits are channelled back into building more solar farms and wind turbines.
It will be interesting to see how the Powerwall performs in the long term.
News thanks to Harriet Stewart-Jones – TransitionBH
Comentarios