We bought the site, upon which a poor quality bungalow stood in ?2012? Once we had secured planning permission the site was cleared, and the current building at 33 Bestwall Road, was new in Sept 2014. The house was erected by https://www.hanse-haus.de/en/ (where you can see details of their bespoke prefabricated designs)

Hanse left us with a bare shell and we completed the fitting out and roofing.

The SIPS building features triple glazing throughout, and a depth and quality of insulation that is much better than UK standards. The building is near passive standard.

In addition to benefits inherent in a building of this type, the house featured at the time of completion (April 2015)

1. LED lighting throughout
2. Mechanically Ventilated Heat Recovery
3. Rain water harvest to an underground tank, supplying toilets and washing machine water internally, and an outside tap
4. 25 Solar panels with Enphase micro inverters. These are properly integrated into the roof, not on rails. The micro inverters provide a number of performance and safety advantages over standard string inverters.
5. Heat pump ready heat store tank, and zoned ufh in every room (though at the moment we remain on a gas boiler, this is literally switched off for about 7 months of the year. The ambition is to come off gas, and have the supply disconnected in the next couple of years, but we’d like to be sure we’re not paying for peak rate electricity for space heating in December and January before doing so)
6. A solar diverter to utilise surplus solar electricity by running the heat store’s immersion heaters
7. We also installed a spare cable whilst trenches and suchlike were open suitable to supply a 7KW (in anticipation of future developments)

In 2020 this tech was added to with addition of

1. A Tesla Power Wall 2
2. The purchase of a Mark 1 Nissan LEAF (the choice of a LEAF was deliberate, because of its unique DC charging system)
3. A ‘dumb’ EV charger

The following year the ‘dumb’ charger was replaced with a MyEnergi Zappi smart charger, and the old diverter with a new Eddi solar diverter, so that the diverter and charger could work together not in competition.

And 3 months ago we installed an Indra Bidirectional Car charger. This will allow us to use the LEAF as a back up to the Powerwall. We are waiting for winter to see whether we can leave the gas boiler switched off, even at the coldest times.

For the future, as something of a sceptic about Air Source Heat pumps, and lacking the space for a ground source pump (I like tech with the minimum of moving parts, and stuff that can’t go wrong, -which I’m afraid is not an ASHP) we’re seriously considering adding a Zeb boiler https://www.tepeo.com/ to utilise any remaining surplus solar and off peak electricity to provide enough kilowatts of energy for space heating on the coldest days.

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